“This’ll be fine.”
“Okay. Let’s open it.”
They soon had cardboard and paper spread and blowing across the grass and black pieces of metal all over the blanket.
“Problem,” he said. “Requires assembly. Insufficient tools, wrong kind of intelligence. Can’t accomplish.”
“New plan needed,” she offered.
“No need legs, no need dome-thing. Use, uh…”
“Round bottom thing…”
“…big fire bowl, and stiff shiny wire thing, uh…”
“Grate!”
“Yes, grate. Cook on ground, like the grandfathers of my people. Bend knees…squat…ouch…”
“You look like a great grandfather.”
“Old man build fire. Old woman…”
“Get more stuff.”
In the kitchen again she discovered her chest hurt. “I don’t think I’ve run in 20 years,” she told herself, laughing. She found three large steaks in the freezer. She put them on the harvest table, which was tilted now, but still a table. She gathered things they might want — a long roasting fork, a pile of dish towels, a block of cheese, her two best bottles of wine, chocolates, a corkscrew, a carving board, knives, wine glasses, a dictionary, a vase of flowers, a broken china teacup and her pocketbook. She gathered the corners of the tablecloth to form a sack and got the load outside. She dragged it to the maple.
“You never know what you’ll need,” she explained, spreading it all open.
“You forgot the monkey wrench!”
As the logs burned down to coals, the rumbling grew louder. They felt their hilltop shake. Between thunders they heard the cries of animals. The sky was a pandemonium of ripping cloud and shrieking, dizzy birds.
“This was my grandmother’s,” she said. “My aunt gave it to me last year. It’s the only piece of her whole china set to survive that fire, when my mother was little.” She fished two half-tickets out of her pocketbook. “I thought I’d lost these once. My pocketbook was stolen, with two hundred dollars in it, and all my cards. But these were the only thing I cared about. Even the police didn’t find them inside. Do you remember what they’re from?”
“Of course I remember.”
“Of course you do.”
They finished the first bottle and started the second. He set the steaks to cooking.
“I never forgave you for cheating on me,” she said. “In a way I deserved it. I was a bitch, plain and simple.”
“I was a bastard, plainer and simpler. You should have been harder on me. I should have given you the house.”
“The happiest times I ever had were in this house. When we first moved in.”
“A thousand times I’ve thought of you on that ladder, hanging the birdhouse, the whole yard in bloom.”
“I didn’t love you enough. I admired you and thought you were kind and sexy and I was proud to have you, but the only person I loved was me, Ed. And I didn’t even love me that much.”
“I loved work. I loved reporting. I loved chasing stories, working late, the bylines, the feeling I was writing history. What a grandiose pile of crap. At least you did something beautiful. You’re the artist in this family.”
“You never wrote one sentence without integrity.”
There was too much to say. They did their best to say the most important things. Then the second bottle was empty.