Leaving Home: Short Pieces Read Free

were tsunamis sweeping entire countries out to sea; there were Eskimo women with breast milk full of mercury; there were wars being fought that had been started for the wrong reasons. All over this world impossible things were happening, that never should have.

    Abe realized he would play I-Spy for a thousand years, if he could.

    The next day, when Abe left for work, Sarah cleaned. Not just a cursory vacuum and floor-mop, mind you, but toilets scrubbed by hand and radiator registers being dusted and the washing of the walls. She went into her drawers and bagged all the sweaters that did not fit, and the new pile of pants that ended above her ankles. She got rid of the travel coffee mugs and gravy boats and cherry pitters she never used, weeding through the kitchen drawers. She organized Abe’s clothes by color grouping; she threw out all the medicine bottles past their expiration date. She wiped down the shelves of the refrigerator and tossed the capers and the mustard and the horseradish that hadn’t been used except for that one recipe months ago.

    She began to organize the closets in the house – the front one, with the winter coats still in hibernation and the boots tossed like gauntlets into a Rubbermaid bin on the floor – and then the hall closet with its piles of snowy towels and heady potpourri. It was in that one that she found herself reaching to the rear of the top shelf – the hiding spot she’d never been able to reach herself without a struggle, before, and that therefore became her cache of Christmas gifts bought and saved all year for her daughter. One by one, Sarah pulled out a remote control robot, an art set to make flower fairies, a dress-up kit – treasures she’d found in January or March or May and had known, in that instant, that her daughter would love. She stood immobile for a long moment, holding this bounty in her elongated arms, paralyzed by the most concrete evidence she’d found yet that her daughter was Not. Coming. Home.

    Sarah sat down in the middle of the hall. She opened up the plastic shrink-wrapped robot, installed its batteries, and sent him careening into the bathroom. She opened the dress-up kit and wrapped a pink boa around her own neck; peered into the tiny heart-shaped mirror to apply the fuchsia lipstick and glittery blue eyeshadow, a whore’s version of happiness.

    When the phone rang, she ran into the bedroom to pick up an extension. “How are you doing?” Abe asked.

    “Fine,” Sarah said. In the bedroom mirror, she could still see the clown-red cheeks, the garish mouth. “I’m fine.”

    She hung up the phone and went into the kitchen for a large black trash bag, big enough to hold a yard’s worth of leaves, or a closet full of the future. She scooped all the unused toys for her daughter into the trash bag and carried it over her shoulder out to the garage. Because it was not Trash Day, Sarah drove all the way to the municipal dump, where she let the attendant punch her ticket once for the privilege of hauling the sack over the ravine’s edge. She waited, until this bag full of what she lost nestled itself between other bags stuffed with the things people actually chose to give away.

    Pharmacists live in minutiae, which is why Abe had learned a whole system of measurement in college that most educated folks don’t even know exists. Ask anyone who has ever filled the innards of a tiny gelatin capsule with a drug, and they will know that twenty grains equals one scruple. Three scruples equal one dram apothecaries. Eight drams apothecaries equal one ounce apothecaries, which equals four hundred eighty grains, or twenty-four scruples.

    Abe was trying to count the twenty-four scruples, but they had nothing to do with the pills he had spilled before him on the little rubber mat from Pfizer, a freebee he’d gotten at some conference in Santa Fe. It was funny – a scruple, by itself, was a misgiving; make it plural and it suddenly was a set of principles, of