“Does everything just fall off the face of the fucking earth?” Amy wants to know.

Peter refuses to ponder the implications of such a question and instead watches as she reaches under the couch, groping, her frayed cutoffs riding up on her every time she moves. She curses again, and Peter thinks to remind her about language but decides that would only be wise if Sophie weren’t in the kitchen, screaming, her gums worn raw. Exasperated, Amy reaches deeper, looking as though she’s being eaten by the cushions and ribbed fabric. He kneels down beside her and gropes under the sofa, too. “What are we looking for, anyway?”

“Sophie’s pacifier, Peter. I already said. Didn’t you hear?”

“Doesn’t she have more than one?”

“That’s not the point,” Amy says, still intent on the task before her. “The point is I can’t find it and this is the third thing I’ve lost today, and now I feel fairly cranky, like I’m incompetent or something. Do you know what I mean? I have to find the crummy pacifier. I’m hoping it’ll set the world straight.”

Peter reaches farther and ignores the early August light. He wishes that he and Amy could be outside on such a day as this, passing time in pleasant ways—a trip to the zoo, or a leisurely lunch. He wishes she’d say, Forget it, we’re incompetent, yes, but let’s just get out. His hand brushes against Amy’s—the smooth line of thumb, the rough cuticle. He apologizes, though he doesn’t know why, really. He finds a toy mouse and thinks again of how, two weeks ago, when he came home from helping his father-in-law repair his shingled roof, Amy told him that Lear had gotten lost, escaped out the front door when she’d gone to retrieve the mail. Though Peter left cat food and milk on the front step in the following days, the food remained uneaten and the milk turned into a sour graveyard for gnats, their minuscule wings spread, their lifeless bodies clinging to the sides of the bowl. He felt such abject guilt. He imagined that the cat might have been hit by a car, or be stuck up in some tree. Lear’s image haunted Peter as he composed a particularly brutal poem about accidental death.

Amy curses under her breath. “Finally,” she says, pulling out the pacifier. She wipes dirt from it. “I knew it was under here. Sophie was playing on the couch today.” She walks to the kitchen and beneath their child’s sobs Peter hears a blast of water from the faucet. He sits on the floor, resolving himself to the tension he can’t break of late, the lingering silences and tentative looks. In bed at night, Amy tucks Sophie between them, letting her sleep while she reads and Peter wrestles with another failed poem, one he plans to enter into a contest sponsored by the local college. He hopes Amy might address his sullenness, his own lack of conversation that often matches hers. He even hopes she might uncover his affair, which he wrote about in his third sestina of a planned sequence of twelve. He hopes the poem might afford them an occasion to air their grievances openly. Then, if they are lucky enough, they might emerge on the other side of their marriage, still intact. But Amy only views his work casually, informing Peter that his poetry always seems to be an act of verbal masturbation.

In fact it seems that all his hopes of late have been dashed, that he has made the wrong choices. Even at school his students seem bored with him and his anecdotes. As he gazes from face to face, he realizes that he’s failed them, and that they know this all too well. He wants fresh faces. He wants to erase the board, walk out of the classroom, and forget.

In the kitchen, he finds Amy atop a stepladder, stenciling lacy borders of ivy around the window frames—and once again he feels choked up and weedy. “Why so much ivy?” he asked, when she started this hobby. He told her it was becoming a bit ridiculous, that they didn’t live in a jungle, after all, but she responded, not unkindly, “I need something for me. You have the library, your poems, and I have Sophie and my stencils.”

He cannot argue with this now.

Age has caught him. His affair catches him as it becomes increasingly complicated and when Eva’s emotions become finely limned. When he and Eva lie together in his van after sex, her stare often grows too intense, her need overbearing—sweetly simple, in a way—and, in that moment, he is frightened and ashamed. And how bizarre that, despite knowing all this, he still continues to see Eva, still continues to sneak out when he can, or call, yearning for a break in the day. He cannot reconcile the contradictions he feels in his heart. He doesn’t understand, really, why people—himself included—risk so much only to be reminded of what matters most—to somehow feel love press more urgently. Everything, absolutely everything, has taken on a quiet, conspiratorial air.

Amy leans back slightly and regards the wavy outline, the veined pattern of leaf. Peter looks for his keys.

“Where are you going?”

“Library.”

“Another library excursion? What is that, twice this week? You must be a genius, with all you read.”

He ignores this. “I might also look for Lear.”

Amy positions a small brush on the container of paint. “We should talk about Lear.”

“I already know you think the cat poses a health hazard,” he says. He searches the junk drawer, which is stuffed beyond reasonable capacity with birthday cards, packets of lavender, tomato seeds for the garden Amy wanted but failed to start in spring, and, inexplicably, a pack of razors. He looks up. “Where are my keys?”

Amy descends the ladder and sits down at the kitchen table, next to the playpen. She offers Sophie a small rubber toy. “How should I know? They’re your keys.”

Peter doesn’t answer. Already he’s thinking about the phone call he’s made, the proposed meeting, the frenzied tangle of skin that is to come, along with the afterthoughts, the sweet longing for so much—how pronounced it all is, after he risks.

“Lear is gone, Peter.”

“I know that. That’s why I’m looking for him. And my keys. Yes, to answer your question. Apparently everything in this house falls off the face of the goddamn earth.”

Amy becomes quiet. She looks down at her toes, wiggles them, and looks up again. “Lear—I took him to the shelter.”

“I checked the shelter, and what do you mean, you took him?”

“The one in Jersey. I drove him out to Jersey and dropped him off.”

Peter shakes his head, unwilling to embrace the slow realization that comes to him. “You told me that Lear got out,” he begins, almost tentatively. “You said he ran under the bushes …”

“I already know what I said. I’m not an idiot.” Her tone is short. “The cat wasn’t getting enough from either of us. It’s better this way.”

Peter can’t help but think of Lear fated to a cage, sentenced to an early demise by lethal injection. He remembers better days—the cat just a kitten, Amy and Peter making the wide, rugged journey across the states, their vision for the future optimistic and wonderfully bright— the two of them holding hands, music playing on the radio. “No,” he says, his voice flat. “It’s better for you.”

“I’m not in the mood to fight,” she says, though it’s clear to him she is.

Peter grows silent. He slams the drawer shut and opens another, which causes Sophie to cry more.

“Don’t be bitter,” she says.

But he is suddenly very bitter. He finds his keys tucked in the bread drawer, behind the Stroehmann’s. Under them, there’s a scrap of paper, the handwriting recognizable and thickly looped, but still not matching the name or number. He picks it up, thinking of what to say to recuse himself. He crumples the paper before tossing it into the trash.

“Why do that?” Amy asks. “What’s so upsetting?”

“It’s junk,” he says. “Nothing is upsetting.”

“No,” she says. “That’s not junk, that’s the name of a girl who stopped by the other week. She asked for you, by the way.”

“Did she?” he asks too casually. “And what did she want?”

“She said she wanted a job babysitting. But I’m just not sure. I don’t know how we could trust a young girl with our baby, with our house. Just exactly how well do you know her?”

What is he to say? The plain truth and absolute lies are both bad in equal measure, his reasons for lying in the first place mercurial at best. He studies Amy, her thin lips, her questioning expression. “She’s a girl from class,” he says finally.

“That makes sense.”

“It’s not like that,” he tells her. “Look, she’s got a crush. Frankly, she’s got a lot of problems.”

“What kind of problems?” Amy waits.

“I don’t know—domestic things, the usual stuff. She’s looking for someone—for something—to cling to. It’s nothing at all, nothing I’ve done.”

“You blame a girl?”

“I don’t blame anyone,” he says, gripping his keys tighter. “You asked. I’m just saying.”

There is silence, then, between them, too long, too pronounced.

Amy gets up and takes her paintbrush in hand. “Go,” she says finally waving her hand. She smacks the brush against the wall. “I need to think about things. I need to be alone. You can take Sophie with you. You’re not the only one who needs a break.”

Expectant, hopeful, Eva waits in the lot next to an elder-care facility that is situated away from the main roads and nestled behind a pond that geese frequent in the summer months. In the distance she sees a figure in white—a hospital attendant—shoo the honking geese from the road. She watches as the geese flap their wings violently and move into water littered with down and feathers. She plays with the fan vents on her driver’s panel. She unsticks and sticks the masking tape that holds the radio knob in place. When she tires of that, she goes through the junk on the floor—a few fashion magazines, a receipt from the grocery store, a bag of half-eaten potato chips. She wonders if she misheard Peter when he told her the time to meet. She looks at her watch again, realizing it is an awful activity to engage in, the mea suring of time—and only a minute has passed since she last looked, anyway.

If she could convince herself that it didn’t matter, that Peter was just like so many boys she’s known, she might turn the key again and leave him to find an empty lot and no one waiting for him at all. She might go and find Greg instead, whom she was to meet today before the phone sounded and her plans immediately changed. She might, if she didn’t care, leave Peter to his regret, to the knowledge that, by making her wait all the time, he risks losing her.

Within the hour, a few drops of rain spot the macadam, and then a crack of thunder sounds. She tilts her head, taking in the line of trees. The breezes whirl and lift the leaves, whipping them into ner vous motion. Eva cracks the window, grateful for the thunder, surprised by how much she missed its occasional forcefulness and grumble, its seeming accusations. Drops of rain slide down her window in erratic patterns; she listens to the thudding sound on the hood. There is a sudden damp chill, the smell of earth made moist again, mud and grass.

How she desires Peter now, wants him to be near. How she wishes to slide into his van, gather him in her arms and feel his tongue in her mouth, his hands on her skin. How she wishes to shut everything out but him and the rain. To her growing relief, Peter has not mentioned her visit to his house that day. It is just as well, Eva decides. She herself began to regret the action almost immediately, the possibility of Peter finding out about her ill-planned, impulsive scheme. She cannot even inhabit the memory of that day without wincing at her own actions and behavior. The first time she and Peter were together, after that day he chastised her for calling and they spent considerable time arguing before he told her that if she ever did that again—if she ever called— everything between them would be over. But he said nothing of her visit, nothing at all, and so she assumed Peter’s wife must have discarded the scrap of paper, or perhaps lost it amid the activity of the day.

After the argument Peter was slow to rouse and Eva found she had to coax him, gently, as she might a boy, weaning him from his anger until he relented, towering over her, his legs pressing hers then pushing them apart, all while his teeth pulled at her skin. When sex was over, they lay quietly, the rug scratchy under Eva’s bare back, Peter’s pale arms around her, her hip touching his. She rested her chin on his chest and went on about her mother’s return and he listened, stroking her hair as she recounted everything about that day, up to the point where she left to find him.

“Have you forgiven her?” he asked, his own anger by that point entirely exhausted. He ran his hand down her neck, then along the line of her bare shoulder and breast.

“Not yet,” Eva whispered. Eva moved from him then and concentrated on the worn books Peter didn’t bother to return to the library. She sat up, naked, Indian-style, the smell of them mingling between her legs. She picked up a book and paged through it absently.

“Hey,” Peter said to her. “Come back here.”

“Will you be there when I need you to be?”

He looked up toward the ceiling and waited. “When I can,” he said, finally, but it sounded to Eva like an untruth, and for as much as she didn’t wish to hear hesitation, it seemed to lie under his words.

“Thanks a lot,” she said.

“We’re not married.”

“Well, obviously.” Eva rolled her eyes.

“Come here,” he said again.

She looked at him—naked, his lean legs and stomach, his limp penis curled against thick hair. She would take any moment she could get, she decided. She convinced herself that whatever they had—however fleeting each encounter—she would cherish. And she did come back to Peter then. He touched her forehead, pressing it lightly with his thumb, and she settled down against him again. She closed her eyes.

The attendant is gone. The geese, too, have vanished in the now almost blinding downpour. The cool air teases her skin. Perhaps it is the weather that’s kept him, the fog-ridden windows, the surely congested roads. She will never know about Peter’s day, how he dreaded facing Amy again, how, once in his van, Sophie pitched a tantrum, how her screams reverberated in Peter’s brain. She will never know how, at the SPCA in New Jersey, he described his cat to the attendant. She will never know that as he passed the cages, Sophie writhed and struggled and Peter blamed Eva for everything. She will never know any of this.

Instead, Eva plans what she will say, already coming up with the friendly complaints she will level—the amount of time wasted, her curls that have tightened and frizzed after she spent so much time primping. She’ll tease him, telling him that he only thinks of her as a diversion—a bit of fun—then she’ll wait for him to reassure her that it isn’t like that, that she’s got it all wrong and she knows it. She sits idly for another hour, until the rain turns into a faint drizzle and the last remaining drops of rain slide slowly down her window in drippy waves. She breathes and waits just one more moment—one moment longer, and then a few more—before turning the key and heading back home.