Evensong E-Book

Stewart O'Nan

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 362

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026

Beschreibung

'Always, [O'Nan] is a master at quotidian details, a master at human emotion. Always, he writes with a huge and generous heart. Evensong is tender and funny, poignant and true. The novel is a little miracle' Boston Globe The Humpty Dumpty Club is distraught when their powerhouse leader, Joan Hargrove, takes a bad fall down the stairs, knocking her out of commission. Now, as well as running errands and shepherding those less able to their doctors' appointments, they have to pick up the slack. Between navigating their own relationships and aging bodies and attending choir practice, these invisible yet indomitable women help where they can. Weaving together the perspectives of the four cardinal members as they tend to those in need, Stewart O'Nan has fashioned a rich and moving novel that celebrates our capacity for patience and care. Vivid, warm and often wryly funny, Evensong reminds us that life is made up of moments both climactic and quotidian, and we weather those moments with the people we choose to keep close.

Leseprobe

EVENSONG

Also by Stewart O’Nan

FICTION

Ocean State

Henry, Himself

City of Secrets

West of Sunset

The Odds

Emily, Alone

Songs for the Missing

Last Night at the Lobster

The Good Wife

The Night Country

Wish You Were Here

Everyday People

A Prayer for the Dying

A World Away

The Speed Queen

The Names of the Dead

Snow Angels

In the Walled City

NONFICTION

Faithful (with Stephen King)

The Circus Fire

The Vietnam Reader (editor)

On Writers and Writing by John Gardner (editor)

SCREENPLAY

Poe

EVENSONG

STEWART O’NAN

First published in the United States of America in 2025 by Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

First published in Great Britain in 2026 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Copyright © Stewart O’Nan, 2025

The moral right of Stewart O’Nan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 80471 112 5

E-book ISBN 978 1 80471 113 2

Printed in Great Britain

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For the real HDs of Pittsburgh, and everywhere

Oh the mystery of it all—life, death and the passing of time.

Barbara Pym

Time passes.

Virginia Woolf

EVENSONG

The Humpty Dumpty Club

It was their nightmare, right there in the name, a shattering fall not from the battlements of a castle but headlong down a flight of stairs, Joan Hargrove, their wise, organized leader, queen of the highlighter and color-coded file folder, bringing her accounting skills to bear on the club’s every move. They’d never had another president.

Thursday she hadn’t shown up for bridge at Emily’s—no surprise. They all knew she’d been battling a stubborn summer cold she’d brought back from Chautauqua. Susie had just run her over some butternut squash bisque from the Co-op, and Joan had seemed fine, a little tired, still in her bathrobe and slippers, carrying around a box of tissues. Why she decided to take her trash down to the garage that night was a mystery none of them could fathom, though both Kitzi and Emily were just as fastidious. City of Pittsburgh pickup wasn’t until Monday, and if the kitchen can was full, she could have asked Susie. She’d lain there through the morning, her tabby Oscar mewling, confused.

“That’s why you should always have your phone on you,” Kitzi said, breaking trump.

“You can’t always,” said Emily, who thought them a bother.

“That’s why I have my Star Alert,” Arlene said, fishing the plastic pendant with its red panic button out of her blouse. She had low blood pressure, a condition she brought up constantly, though it had been years since she’d had an episode. It was one reason she’d joined the club: so she wouldn’t have to rely on her sister-in-law Emily as much. Having spent the entirety of her adult life happily free of attachments, the idea of women banding together to support one another appealed to her. She and Kitzi had been charter members, along with a dozen others from their church choir, most gone now; she’d recruited Emily after Henry died, using bridge as a sweetener. The two of them couldn’t stand each other yet were inseparable. Here come the Maxwell sisters, friends joked, and it was true, over the years they’d come to resemble each other, an observation Emily, once a beauty, resented.

“Plus, slippers on stairs?” Kitzi said. “That’s a dangerous combination.”

“I called her that morning to see if she needed anything,” Susie said. “I thought she was sleeping.”

They imagined the phone ringing upstairs in the spotless condo, Joan broken and helpless at the bottom, the cat sniffing at the garbage strewn everywhere.

“I should have gone over.”

“No,” the rest of them protested.

At sixty-three, Susie was the baby of the group, an active member of the choir they’d long aged out of, freshly adopted after a late divorce. A fledgling pescatarian and tireless recycler, she worried about the ozone and the oceans and the Ukrainian refugees, nurturing a perpetual state of angst the other three, being of a more sanguine generation, blamed on her youth. Her ex-husband had been a lawyer for US Steel, stonewalling the unions and the EPA. Now that she was single, she was trying to undo the damage one noble cause at a time.

“How were you supposed to know?” Emily said.

“Accidents happen,” Kitzi said, leading with the ace. They were going to make their four hearts easily; if Arlene had signaled that she had the king, they could have bid five, but Arlene’s game, like her hearing, wasn’t as sharp as it used to be. She miscounted and dropped easy tricks, bid timidly and then let Kitzi play the hand, content to be the dummy.

To their collective shame, a male neighbor on his morning constitutional had discovered Joan, investigating the open garage door, a harbinger of chaos in her gated community. She’d broken an arm and a leg yet survived.

“It’s amazing how things happen, isn’t it?” Susie said. “It’s kind of a miracle, really.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Emily said. The leg was a bad compound fracture, a contraption of stainless steel rods jutting from her cast. Joan was Pitt, class of ’55, two years behind her. Her orthopedist at Shadyside said she was looking at seven months of physical therapy, which Emily—shocked by Joan’s scabbed and swollen face—took to mean she’d never walk again. She’d have to move to assisted living, Emily’s deepest fear, though scores of former members swore by Longwood. When Emily visited, which wasn’t often, it was clean and pleasant enough, if not the Valhalla her friends from Calvary and the University Club claimed. Half of the East End was there, burning through their children’s inheritance. When her son Kenny mentioned the possibility, she scoffed, saying she could never afford it, a deflection even he didn’t fully believe.

“I’m going to go see her after practice,” Susie said.

“Weren’t you just there last night?” asked Kitzi, who’d only been once so far, busy with Martin and her election board duties. “Plus you’re taking care of Oscar.”

“Oscar’s a sweetie,” Susie said.

“I can go tomorrow during the day,” Arlene volunteered.

“Oh, we have so many people going tomorrow,” Kitzi said. Under Joan, the club had flourished, and there was a steady stream of current and former HDs paying tribute, their cards and flowers crowding the windowsill.

Kitzi flushed out the ten, then laid down her hand. The last tricks were all hers.

“You could have made the baby slam,” Emily said.

“I wasn’t sure about the king.”

“When is Darcy leaving?” Arlene asked, meaning Joan’s daughter, an econ professor who’d flown in from Austin and needed to be back for the start of fall semester. They all thought she should stay longer, though, as Joan herself pointed out through a haze of painkillers, while she was in the hospital there was nothing anyone could really do for her.

“Not till Sunday,” Susie said.

“I can do Monday,” Arlene said. “I’ve got nothing going on.”

“That’s fine,” Kitzi said, making a note.

“Tomorrow I’m taking Francine to the podiatrist,” Emily said. “What else is on the docket?”

Kitzi had sent them all the September wish list as soon as she could get into Joan’s email, yet they still looked to her as if she were in charge. She didn’t expect Arlene or Susie to take the reins, but she’d thought Emily, with her definite opinions about everything, might share the burden of connecting the needful and the willing, if only out of pride. Now it seemed she’d inherited the job by default.

“Someone needs to pick up Peggy Follansbee’s prescriptions at Giant Eagle.”

“When does she need them by?” Arlene asked.

“It just says pickup tomorrow.”

“Is that the Squirrel Hill Jyggle,” Emily asked unhelpfully, “or the one in Edgewood?”

“I’m guessing Squirrel Hill.”

“It could be the Market District in Oakland,” Susie said. “Peggy just moved into Webster Hall.”

“Do you have her number?” Kitzi asked.

“Roberta would. I can call her.”

“It’s fine,” Kitzi said. “I’m sure Joan has it somewhere.”

“It might be new.”

“I can do it if I know where,” Arlene said.

“I’ll figure it out,” Kitzi said.

It was three, they were finished. Emily told them to leave the dishes, but they dutifully marched their cups and saucers into the kitchen, where she tried to push the leftover sugar-free sugar cookies no one liked on them. It was a ritual, Kitzi finally relenting, saying she’d take a couple for Martin, and Emily stuffing a Ziploc bag.

As they gathered in the front hall, from her bedroom upstairs came a single warning bark from Angus. Outside the day was balmy, the Oldhams’ honey locust rippling in the breeze. Susie had somehow convinced them to carpool in her tiny hybrid, since they were coming from the same direction, which Emily thought was smart, especially given how Arlene drove. She checked the mailbox—not yet—then waved them away before heading back inside.

Alone again, with the house quiet around her, she thought not of Joan in her hospital gown but of Henry, the IVs taped to the bruised crook of his arm, how he’d asked her to take care of Arlene and not give up on their daughter Margaret, demands that even now seemed unfair, if not impossible. What would she ask, and of whom—God? There was no one else left.

Angus barked, and she frowned, trying to hold on to the thought, unhappy as it was. She needed to do the dishes and figure out dinner.

“All right, Mr. Doofus,” she said, climbing the stairs. “I’m coming to save you.”

Oscar the Grouch

Sunday afternoon Susie waited until Darcy was gone to go over to Joan’s. She’d offered to drive her to the airport, but Darcy said she’d just Uber and thanked her for everything she’d done—sincerely, Susie thought, yet beneath her gratitude she could sense the same apprehension she’d felt radiating from her all week. Who are you, and what are you doing in my mother’s house?

A daughter herself, Susie understood that kind of primal jealousy but thought Darcy’s radar was off. Susie and Joan had never been close. She wasn’t some usurper brazenly insinuating herself into the will, she just happened to live a few blocks away, within walking distance of Calvary. By rights, looking after the apartment should have fallen to Kitzi, Joan’s oldest friend and second, but Kitzi was in Squirrel Hill and had her hands full, between her husband and running the club. It was more convenient for Susie to check on things, and did Darcy really want to clean up her mother’s blood?

Joan lived behind the church in Shadyside Village, an enclave of luxury town houses segregated from East Liberty by a high brick wall, while Susie was directly across Walnut Street in the Kenmawr, a once exclusive prewar building that Emily and Arlene lampooned, pronouncing the name with a haughty Brahmin accent as if it were still full of cosmopolitan couples of their generation and not aging shut-ins and sullen Chinese CMU students who vanished at the end of the semester, leaving behind piles of Ikea furniture by the dumpsters. She and Joan were both transplants, finally downsizing from much larger digs after their children had scattered and, in her case, for the most part happily, her husband.

Before she’d gotten to know Joan, she visited Shadyside Village once a year, at Christmas, caroling with the children’s choir. Now she made the walk every day, the sagging brick foursquares chopped into apartments and cars with out-of-state plates parked bumper to bumper and cracked recycling bins and spray-painted garbage cans giving way, once she’d checked in at the security booth, to a cloistered island of calm. Inside, the roads were all soothing circles, white concrete rather than blacktop, mailboxes standing between the sidewalk and the curb like the suburbs. The condos were unadorned, sided an identical dark chocolate brown, each with its own brass coach light, stubby driveway and garage. There was no parking. The grass, the bushes, even the trees were uniform, evenly spaced, the only concession to the chaos of city life the bright red fire hydrants.

Today, as always, the place was strangely depopulated, though she could hear the rumble of traffic on Penn Avenue beyond the wall. She’d sung at both services that morning and her back was hurting her. Knowing that she had to drive over to see Joan later, she’d taken a gummy rather than a Vicodin, which made the make-believe world even more unreal. Who would want to live in a place like this? The question was moot—even with the generous settlement from Richard she could never afford it—yet she still imagined coming home and the garage door opening, welcoming her the way it had all those years in their rambling Colonial out in Fox Chapel. This was the placid life she’d left behind for the Kenmawr; it was too late to ask for it back. As she followed the curve of the road, a Porsche SUV with tinted windows approached, slowing for a speed hump. She waved, defiant, feeling like a trespasser, sure that somewhere someone was watching her on camera.

Joan’s punch code was her birthday, which Susie thought she ought to change. She’d have to work on her. The door rolled up to reveal her old Forester gathering dust, the wheeled garbage bin against the far wall reminding her that tonight was garbage night. She lifted the lid: empty. It wasn’t a competition—it was silly, really—and yet she was pleased that Darcy had forgotten, if she’d ever known.

It had been a week and the stairwell still smelled of blood and Renuzit. She’d scrubbed the carpet until only the faintest outline remained. She wasn’t superstitious but kept to the wall, sidestepping where Joan had lain, marveling, as she pulled herself up by the handrail, at how far she’d fallen. In a month Joan was going to be eighty-nine. It really was a miracle, despite what Emily might say.

At the top she cracked the door an inch and peeked through in case Oscar tried to make a break. Joan painted him as an escape artist, though so far he’d been skittery, holing up under the bed in the guest room until she put his food down. The hall was empty and gray, the kitchen, the living room.

“Hey, buddy,” she said. “It’s just me.”

She was too polite to ever say it out loud, but Oscar was actually kind of a jerk. Her first day in the house, he’d arched his back and hissed at her, baring his fangs, then left a black nubbin of a turd in the middle of Joan’s bed as a protest. “I know,” she told him, “you want Mommy, but Mommy isn’t here. You’ve got me.” She understood he was traumatized and that she was a stranger, but did he have to spill his water and scatter his kibble all over the kitchen floor? Most of the time he hid. When he did break cover he kept his distance, sitting and staring at her from the hallway like a demon out of a Stephen King movie. She tried to sweet talk him and he wheeled and stalked away with his tail in the air. He reminded her of Richard, expecting her to do everything for him, then ignoring her.

When he didn’t come, she picked up his empty bowl and knocked it on the counter a few times before filling it and setting it back on the mat.

“Oscar!” She shook the box like a maraca. “Come on, bud, come get your kibbles.”

Sometimes it took him a while, and she stood at the sink, filling the watering can, trying to lure him with kissing noises.

As she suspected, Darcy hadn’t watered the plants. Susie did them clockwise, starting with the African violets on the windowsill, droplets beading like mercury on the parched dirt. She tended to drown her own and tried to be sparing.

In the guest room she set the can on the floor and knelt down to look under the bed, prepared to find Oscar glaring back at her, but there was just dust.

“You are tricksy,” she said, and pushed herself upright. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

He’d show himself when he was ready—maybe slip in behind her when she was doing the ivy in the guest bathroom—but when she went to refill the can, he wasn’t there.

She shook the box. “Let’s go, Oscar Mayer, dinnertime.”

She waited, listened. The windows were double-paned, insulating them, like the heavy drapes and wall-to-wall carpet, from the greater world. At her place, day and night, she could hear buses, sirens, church bells. Here there was nothing but an unbroken whine of quiet like a ringing in her ears. She closed her eyes and might have been drifting in space.

“You’re going to make me look for you, aren’t you?”

Her back hurt, and, feeling absurd, she set the can in the sink, went into the living room and got down on all fours, lifting the dust ruffle to peek under the sofa. She clambered to her feet again, grimacing and rubbing her hip. Later she’d take a Vicodin to sleep, a habit she knew was bad for her, if not outright dangerous, but otherwise she’d be up all night listening to the bells count the hours.

“I give up,” she said. “Olly olly in come free.”

In Joan’s room she closed the door behind her so he couldn’t escape.

“Where are you?”

Maybe the balcony. It adjoined the neighbors’. Darcy could have locked him out by mistake, but he wasn’t there either.

He wasn’t under the desk in Joan’s office or in her little laundry closet. She was running out of possibilities and imagined how she’d tell her. It was Darcy’s fault, but she’d be the one who’d have to break the news. Or not. She could find him. She could at least try. When she first started watching Oscar, she’d text Joan pictures of him eating or just being cute. She’d find a good one and put it on a flyer and go around posting them on phone poles—except Shadyside Village didn’t have phone poles. They probably had a bylaw against flyers anyway. She’d have to go door-to-door, admitting her guilt. How late was Staples open?

She was checking the linen closet at the end of the hall when the doorbell rang, a single long trill. She stopped, caught, as if she shouldn’t be there. She debated not answering it. Maybe they’d go away.

The bell rang.

It might be a delivery, more flowers or something she had to sign for, but she hadn’t heard a truck. It was Sunday. The silence made her acutely aware—as she was in the laundry room of the Kenmawr or the elevators at night—that she was alone.

The bell rang again.

“All right, all right, hold your horses.”

She used the garage door because it was more public, in case she needed witnesses. As it rolled up, before she could even see who’d rung the bell, Oscar sauntered in, twitching his hips as he passed, totally ignoring her.

The man the door ultimately revealed was older than Joan. Hunched over a cane, he wore a dove-gray fedora and baggy navy suit, his hand a mottled mass of veins and age spots sporting a gold Masonic ring. At first glance she thought he was blind because his glasses were black and oversized, enclosed on the sides like welders’ goggles to keep out the light. His cheeks and mouth were sunken, his lips wet and trembling.

“Lose something?” he asked.

“Yes, thank you. Where did you find him?”

“He’s always catting around here, like me. He sounded hungry. How is your mother doing? We’re all thinking about her, she’s such a dear soul.”

He thought she was Darcy, and while they looked nothing alike, in a way she was flattered. It seemed easier not to explain. What mattered was that Oscar was back.

“She’s resting,” she said.

“I hope she feels better soon.”

“Thank you, I’ll let her know.”

“You tell her Gloria and Bill say hello.”

“I will,” she said, and thanked him again, making sure Oscar was in before closing the door. Gloria and Bill say hello. What a character, she thought, out wandering the neighborhood in his Sunday best.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s get you fed already.”

Oscar stopped to sniff the carpet at the foot of the stairs.

“Git!” she said, chasing him up.

She took a picture of him at his bowl for Joan—proof of life. He ate contentedly, as if nothing had happened, like Richard after one of their couples therapy sessions, his appetite a goad. Why did she let him upset her? Joan had warned her—it was just his nature, it had nothing to do with her, the same as Richard. Finishing the watering, she thought there were people who cared and people who didn’t, and that she was glad she was the first kind, even if it sometimes meant losing sleep.

Oscar was done and licking his paws.

“Was that good? Yeah, I bet.”

Without a glance, he slunk down the hall to the guest room.

“Okay. See ya.”

The light outside was fading. She raked his litter box and did the garbage, rinsed the plastic Chinese takeout containers Darcy had left in the fridge and filled his water bowl before closing everything up and rolling the bin to the curb.

Bill must have finished his walk and gone home to Gloria, because the Village was empty again, only the security guard glued to his cell phone. On Walnut a group of students was throwing a backyard barbecue, the smell of charcoal sharpening her appetite. The day was over, and though Oscar had given her a scare, in the end it had been a success. She’d sung twice and gotten outside and taken care of Joan’s place and met a new and interesting person, and there was still tonight’s visit to look forward to, and the promise of a Vicodin at bedtime, the merciful release of sleep. Walking home with the bells of Calvary and Sacred Heart mingling above the trees, she was pleased with all she’d gotten done for a Sunday, but back in the Kenmawr, eating her leftover baba ghanoush alone, she fell into a dispiriting gloom that lingered as she gathered her things into her bag and drove to the hospital, thinking, once again, as she passed the fancy new high-rise condos on Centre, how excited she’d been to rearrange her life and how mysterious it was that it had taken this shape.

She had to wait in the hall, and then when the nurse opened the door for her, Joan had a tube attached to her nose.

It was oxygen. They were afraid she might have a collapsed lung. She shrugged as if it were just one more thing. “Did Darcy get off all right?”

Susie thought she could have called. “I guess so. She was gone by the time I got there.”

“How’s my baby doing?”

“Good,” she said, but, looking at her, drawn and pale on her pillow with a tube clipped to her nose, she couldn’t lie. “He got out. I don’t know what happened.”

Joan laughed and choked on a cough. “I told you, he’s like Houdini.”

“One of your neighbors brought him back. Bill.”

“How is he?”

“He seemed fine. He and Gloria say hi.”

“You know he was the one who found me. Probably saved my life.”

“No,” Susie said, trying to picture it.

“Did I get a package from Zappos?”

“I didn’t see one.”

She’d ordered some new sneakers to help with her PT. “It could be behind the hose thingy on the side of the garage,” she said, and Susie marveled at how easily she’d absolved her—no matter that it was Darcy’s fault. Susie told her how Bill had mistaken her for Darcy, and they shared another laugh. They talked about how Kitzi was holding up and what next week looked like for the club. Even drugged, Joan knew every detail of the schedule, as if, like God, she were planning all of their lives from a distance. How did you become so strong? Susie wanted ask, but just listened, following along, and even after Joan said she was tired and closed her eyes, she sat there watching her breathe, staying well past the end of visiting hours, until one of the nurses poked her head in and said she looked like she could use some rest too.

The Little Red Hen

“Who wants Jean and Gene?” Kitzi asked the room. “Hands.”

No one volunteered. It was their big September bridge club, with over twenty members, longtime HDs driving in from Churchill and Mt. Lebanon to show support for Joan. Kitzi had brought up their old card tables from the basement, gently declining Martin’s offer to fetch them. He was just trying to be helpful. Even on his best days the stairs were too much for him, robbing him of breath, making his heart monitor go off. He was safely holed up in the den with the door closed, watching one of his survival shows.

She scanned the room like an auctioneer. It would almost be a joke if it weren’t so sad. “Someone, anyone.”

They avoided her eyes, only partly out of shame. Emily stirred her coffee. Arlene wound her wristwatch. Susie tapped her phone.

Jean and Gene were hoarders. They were a lovely couple otherwise—both of them accomplished pianists and former professors of music at Chatham—but venturing into their home wasn’t for the squeamish. Buried somewhere beneath the strata of magazines, grocery bags and junk mail, supposedly, were twin Steinway baby grands, their harps warped and unplayable now. They also had cats, no one knew how many, since none of them was spayed. Gene had lost a leg to diabetes, and due to her eyesight Jean no longer drove. Normally, Joan acted as their go-between—as Kitzi acted as Martin’s—delivering their monthly prescriptions and news of the world, since no one else would.

Standing there, stonewalled by the entire club, Kitzi was very aware that she wasn’t Joan. She’d made a mistake leaving Jean and Gene for last, and with a twinge of frustration, as if time had run out, she snapped Joan’s notebook closed, thanked them all for coming and adjourned the meeting.

“I can go,” Susie offered in the basement as they were putting away the tables, but it was too late.

“It’s fine,” Kitzi said. “I mean, they’re right nearby.”

While she and Martin had lived in Squirrel Hill for decades, she’d never met Jean and Gene, though she recalled seeing them play once at Chatham, maybe in the ’80s, when Emily and Henry and a number of their friends subscribed to the music department’s concert series. Gene wore a tuxedo and Jean a black lace mantilla over a flowing floor-length gown, a gardenia behind one ear. She was English, close to six feet and willowy, her body an object of open envy among the women. He was Russian and short—a little person, they’d call him now. His real name was Yevgeny, and he had a great black mane of hair and muttonchops, like a rock star. Their pianos faced each other, their curves perfectly fitted together, yin and yang. At the keyboards they emanated calm, solemnly nodding as they traded phrases, interlacing melodies as the tempo and volume gradually built and clashed and spilled, chords crashing bombastically—and still they maintained a formal reserve, at most swaying, their faces betraying little as they bashed away. It may have been Liszt, she couldn’t remember, but she’d thought then how romantic it must be to be connected by their passion for music. She and Martin shared so little, total opposites from the beginning. Even when he was healthy she had to drag him to anything other than a ball game. To have a second, infinitely rich language to speak to each other seemed fantastically thrilling.

She chose midafternoon to go over because that was when Martin had his nap. She made sure he had everything he needed and then called to let them know she was coming. As the phone rang and rang, she imagined Jean sidling her way through the piles, the phone, like the pianos, buried under mounds of sodden garbage. She expected the answering machine to kick in, but it never did. After a few minutes she tried again. When no one answered, she told herself it wasn’t unusual. Jean could be hard of hearing or on the john, a predicament she knew too well.

To pick up their prescriptions, she needed their dates of birth, and located them in the rear of Joan’s notebook, as well as their Medicare plans, both regular and supplemental. The facing pages were set up like spreadsheets. Primary care physicians, allergies, loyalty cards for Giant Eagle and CVS and Walgreens—the amount of information Joan had was staggering. Out of curiosity, Kitzi looked up herself and Martin, listed along with everyone they knew, like the church directory. Martin’s entry was similar to Jean and Gene’s, but after hers, in the righthand margin, like a prisoner marking the days, some in black ink and some in blue, Joan had logged a tally of fourteen.

Frowning, she scanned down the page and found another cluster next to Emily’s entry: ten.

Susie had two, Arlene three. No one else had more than five.

What did they mean, and why was she flattered that she had the most, as if helping others were a competition?

She took the notebook with her to the CVS on Wilkins, where she waited while the girl behind the counter gave a masked Asian woman a Covid booster, something she’d been meaning to do herself. They were so slow. For years the corner had been home to Merge Motors. When the CVS had first been built, Kitzi thought she’d like having one so close, but the lot was too small. Parking was awful, the aisles were narrow, and there were black gum spots on the carpet. No one seemed to be in charge, or care, and today she was glad to escape with Jean and Gene’s pills.

Between the two of them they had eleven prescriptions. Both had one for oxycodone, making Kitzi wonder how Jean managed. It was hard enough taking care of someone when you were dead sober.

She was sitting at the light at Negley when Martin messaged her: Low sodium soy sauce.

“No,” she said, and swiped him away.

She slowed for the turn into Chatham, waiting for the line of traffic to pass. On her right, farther up, inescapable, rose Tree of Life, still cordoned off four years after the massacre, the chain-link fence decorated with inspirational posters drawn by local schoolchildren. Love Conquers All. Together We Stand. Squirrel Hill was probably the safest neighborhood in Pittsburgh. All it took was one gun nut to take that away from them, and each time she drove by she hated him for making her reconsider—if only briefly—the death penalty.

The line broke and she left Tree of Life behind, following Woodland Road as it wound through a leafy glen worthy of Fox Chapel down to the hidden green bowl of Chatham’s campus. The semester was young, and students basked on the long hill where children sledded in winter. The steel barons had sent their daughters to Chatham, and while the new coed university unironically embraced the legacy of its most famous alumna, Rachel Carson, it retained a bucolic nineteenth-century air, with its white-steepled chapel and red brick Federalist halls and Ionic-columned mansions converted into department offices. Like Chautauqua, it was a world Kitzi loved for its timelessness, as if, at least here, the past was not completely gone.

Jean and Gene’s house sat halfway up the slope of the bowl opposite the college, a moody carpenter’s Gothic tucked into the shadows beneath a stand of old chestnuts. Buckeyes crunched under her tires as she climbed the drive. The garage, a carriage house with a rooster weathervane topping a louvered cupola, was closed. She grabbed the bag from the passenger seat, not bothering to lock the car. On the porch steps rested several folded newspapers sheathed in plastic. As she came closer, she could see they were waterlogged, though it hadn’t rained in weeks. On the front door hung a tortuous twig wreath in the shape of a heart. Lace curtains prevented her from peering inside, though she could hear, faintly, turning her head and leaning in, a slow progression of notes like a child practicing scales.

She rang the bell and the music stopped.

She waited, expecting footsteps. The music started again, faltered, stopped.

She rang again and stepped back, ready to show Jean the bag, her reason for interrupting her lesson.

Again, the phrase like a question, ending on a wrong note.

“Hello?” she called. “Jean?” She tried the knob but it was locked.

The music started.

She was sure Jean had heard her, and pressed the bell again, holding it down so that it trilled. When she relented, the music had stopped.

She thought she could hear papers rustling and the knock of something wooden. Then nothing. Behind her, down the hill, a motorbike razzed by. When it had passed, she could hear someone coming. Through the curtain she could see a gaunt shadow approach and then stop, its head bent as if to listen.

“Who is it?” The woman’s voice was high and fey, a plummy British soprano that made her picture Glenda the Good Witch.

“It’s Kitzi—from the Humpty Dumpty Club? Sorry to interrupt. I have your prescriptions.”

“Who are you again?”

“Kitzi, from the Humpty Dumpties.”

Still she wouldn’t open the door. “Joan typically brings us our things.”

“I know. She couldn’t make it.”

Again, silence, though the shadow never moved. “Thank you, Kitzi. Just leave them, please.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Everything’s fine. That’s kind of you to ask.”

“You have some newspapers here too.”

“Thank you, I’m aware.”

She sounded reasonable enough, understandably leery of someone she didn’t know. Kitzi didn’t think she should leave without seeing her and Gene. At the same time, being new, she couldn’t invoke anything close to Joan’s authority.

“Joan’s in the hospital,” she tried. “She had a bad fall but she’s doing better now.”

“I’m so sorry. Please give her our best.”

“I will,” Kitzi said. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“We’re fine, thank you.”

“If there’s anything you need, I’ll give you my number. I’ll write it on the bag.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

She wrote it anyway. “I’ll just set it here.”

Inside, a cat meowed as if asking to be let out. The shadow stooped to pick it up and, before Kitzi could say anything, vanished back into the house, leaving the blank white curtain.

“Nice to meet you,” Kitzi called after her, but there was no answer. Too late, she realized she shouldn’t leave the oxycodone out there where anyone could take it, but the time to make that point to Jean had passed. The music started again, the same tentative phrase ending in failure, and rather than ring the bell, Kitzi retreated.

Was Jean ashamed of someone she didn’t know seeing the condition of the house? Besides the papers, there was no hint of the disorder within, the exterior a kind of mask. There was no reason Kitzi should feel insulted, yet, leaving pastoral Chatham behind for Tree of Life and the present, the rejection nagged at her like a job half done. It was only when she got back home and looked in on Martin sleeping peacefully in his defibrillator vest and boxers that she understood she did the same thing, holding the greater world at bay.

She called Joan and got Arlene.

“How’s it going with Jean and Gene?” Arlene asked.

“Strange. Is Joan awake?”

She was.

“Does she let you inside?” Kitzi asked Joan.

“She does. It took some time. I try to visit with Gene and see what’s in their fridge. I worry that they don’t eat.”

“Can you call them? They didn’t pick up for me.”

“I’m pretty sure they don’t use the phone anymore. I can write you a note.”

“Will that work?”

Joan was afraid they’d gotten too used to her during Covid. It was an important lesson going forward, making sure to rotate personnel—and again Kitzi felt the weight of expectation on her. Today, especially, she wanted to protest. Instead, she thanked her.

The phone gave a muffled clunk as Joan handed it to Arlene.

“Do you want me to try?” Arlene asked.

While Kitzi had managed her visit poorly, she gave Arlene even less chance of success. It wasn’t just pride. As much as she struggled with the idea—and the prospect of all the extra work—she had to accept that Joan had made the right choice.

“No,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

Studies from Life

At Allegheny, back in the early ’50s, as a requirement for her bachelor’s in education, Arlene had had to take an art class. Her Sigma sisters warned her off of pottery (too dull) and sculpture (too hard), recommending instead an easy A called Studies from Life offered by an actual French artist who was rumored to throw beatnik parties out at their old farmhouse during which other art department faculty drank absinthe and smoked reefer and writhed to voodoo-like jazz. To Arlene, Professor Aragon merely seemed French—remote and stoic, almost disinterested, as if their work was unworthy of him, wandering the studio from easel to easel, mumbling cryptic off-the-cuff critiques (“Blue, blue, blue, blue, blue!”) and then retreating to an open window to nurse a Gitane he’d left burning on the ledge.

“Everything is too nice,” he once said of a landscape of hers, which, being an absolute beginner, she cherished as a compliment.

Studies from Life became her favorite class; she didn’t care about the A. They worked on musculature, using live models, which she found strange and exciting. Often she stayed afterward, trying to get the tiniest element right. Professor Aragon noticed.

“You like to paint,” he said, seeming concerned.

“Yes, very much.”

“You think painting is fun.”

“I do.”

“Painting is not fun. You paint, you find out.”

She seized on this imperative not simply as encouragement but a method of understanding the world. Painting was a way of slowing down and seeing, a way of contemplating the essence of things—a flower, a thumb, a pear, a bowl—and though she’d never sold any of her work, only given select pieces to friends, the time she spent composing was one of the great rewards of her life.

This morning she was working not from life but one of Kenny’s photographs of the family cottage at Chautauqua the last summer before Emily had sold it, an act of treason for which Arlene believed she’d forgiven her after twenty years. Rather than a painful reminder of their shared loss, her picture, like Kenny’s, was supposed to be a fount of happy memories. The original was going to be Emily’s Christmas present; everyone else would get a print.

She was roughing in the panels of the screen porch when the phone rang, and, as was her habit, she let the answering machine pick up.

“Don’t forget,” Kitzi said, “you’re taking Barbara Parrish to the eye doctor at eleven.”

The shock of it stopped her in mid-stroke. Was that today? It was impossible, and she hurried into the kitchen, palette and brush still in hand, to check her calendar.

“Oh, poop,” she said.

It was ten after ten already. She had just enough time to clean up, sign Barbara out of the Holmes Residence and make it over there, and then one lane of the Highland Park Bridge was closed and they ended up being late. Barbara was having cataract surgery next month. She wore black glasses and needed to be guided up the front steps and into the foyer like a blind person.

“Thank you,” she kept saying, holding Arlene’s elbow.

“Taking a right here,” Arlene said. “Your other right. There we are.”

Because they were late, they had to wait extra, giving Arlene a chance to wonder how many of the other patients enduring the nonstop babble of cable news couldn’t see the TV. Going blind was one of her oldest fears; she’d imagined it happening to her since she’d first read about Helen Keller. Once, years ago, when her class had gone on a field trip to Penn’s Cave, the guide had led them down to a secluded tomb of a chamber and had the children blow out their candles one by one until only his remained.

“You’ve probably never seen total darkness before,” he said, “so get ready.” He pursed his lips, his breath bending the flame, and then everything disappeared.

A student whimpered and fingers gripped her arm.

“Now close your eyes,” the guide said. “What do you see?”

“Like a red light,” one of the boys said.

“Now open them.”

She couldn’t—and waited till the guide finally flicked his lighter, the flame so bright she had to raise a hand to block it.

She imagined death was like that, an endless, suffocating night. Even now, sitting in the well-lighted office, just the possibility set off a flutter of panic, yet Barbara never complained. She sat upright and alert, listening to the news, every so often cocking her head to catch a stray conversation. When the nurse called her name and asked if she wanted Arlene to come back with her, she waved dismissively and said she’d be fine.