9

Alice spots the dog first.

She mentions to Edward that she noticed this furry little dog sitting quietly between the twin painted brick pillars of the cemetery. “I thought about stopping.” Alice Parmalee pulls a can of tuna out of the carrier bag, studies it for a moment. “I sort of wish I had. I hope he doesn’t get hit by a car.”

Edward grunts, shakes his newspaper in half, peers at her over his glasses. “Best not to approach strange dogs. He’ll go home.”

“I don’t think he had a collar.” Alice doesn’t know why she says this; the dog has a thick ruff, which certainly would obscure any collar. “He was just sitting there, like he was waiting.”

“He probably was. Maybe his owners were tourists looking for ancestors.” Ed slides his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose, the box scores regaining his full attention.

Alice finishes emptying the green cloth grocery sacks, lining her cupboards with the same cans of peas, corn, and Campbell’s Chunky soup, the same boxes of cereal that she replenishes every few weeks from the Big Y. For the most part, she shops at Potter’s General Store—150 years and still going strong—which offers basics like milk and bread, eggs if she wants to make omelettes for dinner, as well as things Ed calls “gourmet,” although she buys nothing more exotic than guacamole. Anything with a pretty label and Ed scoffs that she’s paying for packaging.

Alice can no longer raise any enthusiasm for cooking. Edward is happy with “plain fare,” and it isn’t any fun to have a new recipe consumed with the same unappreciative haste as a meal of hot dogs and beans. Alice doesn’t mind, not really. It’s easier, in some respects, not to have to think about meals, not to have to care.

Once upon a time, she imagined that in her middle years she’d take up tai chi or go back to college and finish her degree. That was when she thought her life would travel along a smoother road. She also expected to have children while still in her twenties. She never expected that it would take a miracle to have the one child in her fortieth year. She certainly never expected that, as hard as it was to get her, it would be so easy to lose her.

When Stacy was born, the folks at the plant chipped in and bought Ed and Alice a video camera. Ed got quite adept at using it, and for years they filmed every significant moment of Stacy’s life, from crawling to tap dancing; from T-ball to her first day of high school. She was used to it, although as she got older she tended toward foolish faces and rude gestures whenever Ed fired up the recorder. They almost never watched those videos, not then, and certainly not now. Then, they were too busy raising her; now it is out of the question.

Stored in sleeves, labeled carefully with years and events, the rows of boxes remain untouched. A video collection of Anastasia Marie Parmalee’s life. They could have her back at any point in her short life, relive the moments preserved on VHS tape, but they never open the glass doors of the breakfront, never do more than run a dust cloth over the labels. Neither Ed nor Alice can allow the emotion that lives just beneath the surface to get out. They dealt with it then, and opening the doors now would only serve to start the process over again. They aren’t like the other families they met at grief counseling, scrapbooks and albums opened and reopened so many times that the bindings were worn; grief-stricken parents making you look at the faces of lost children, acting like those children weren’t lost, but just out of sight. Talking about their children, as if whatever tragedy had taken them was merely a part of growing up—cancer, car wrecks. Iraq.

Ed and Alice closed the doors and kept the evidence of Stacy’s short, active life inside that cupboard. They never speak of what might have been, nor of what is past.

Alice keeps busy with her little cutting garden, her yoga classes, and her part-time job at the library. She fills her days up with housework and chores enough for any woman. Who has time for anything more?

*   *   *

The dog had looked so forlorn. Maybe forlorn wasn’t the right word. The way it looked at her car as she drove slowly out of the cemetery, ears pricked in her direction, and then lowered, as if, well, as if it was disappointed. Maybe after dinner she’ll go see if it’s still hanging around the cemetery. Besides, she should check on the russet and gold chrysanthemums she planted earlier today to see if they need a little more water.