My Dearest Friend Read Free

land—so much grass to mow!
    Setting the cup down on the back stoop, she crossed the yard to the wooden shed that stood near the garden, leaning toward the house as if it missed it. As she pulled the doors open, she noted from the squeaks and drag that they needed new hinges. The whole shed needed painting as much as the house. Inside, the concrete floor seemed in good condition, not cracked, but covered with general crud bequeathed to her by the former owners: leaves, dust, seeds, manure, bits of paper, small objects rusted past recognition, bits of rubber, dented empty oil cans, and what had once, not so long ago, been a mouse.
    An old hand lawn mower was also inside, and, delighted to discover it, Daphne eagerly pulled it out from where it was entangled with rakes, spades, and shovels in various states of dilapidation. Taking hold of the splintering handle, she pushed it; it shrieked and caught and would not move. She turned it around and pushed it the other way. It shrieked again, caught, then something gave, and as she pushed it, it whirrednoisily around as if it had remembered what it was meant for. Daphne made three swaths across the yard, the mower clattering along merrily, before she looked down to see that it was doing absolutely no good at all. The heavy grass was only bent. The blades were too dull, she supposed.
    She sagged a moment, balancing her weight against the little old mower, waiting for the despair to pass. It was at times like this, when some slight thing thwarted her, that she most strongly felt the need to give up. It was at times like this that she could feel how her entire life, all her talent and potential and hard work, her devotion and perseverance and courage, had brought her only to this: loneliness so deep, tribulations so dense, like the sea of grass around her, that she could never fight her way out. And the things she counted on, hoped for as objects of assistance, like this mower, failed her every time. She sighed, rolled it across the yard, and put it back in the shed. She grabbed up her cup of champagne and headed for the front of the house.
    The view was less demanding here. No unworked garden to chide her vision, no sagging shed. She sank down on the top step and tried to clear her mind, to observe. Light was fading from the sky, colors deepening. Birds were calling out and flicking through the trees. Daphne relaxed, leaned back against the screen door, stretched out her legs. Really, it was very nice here, like living in the middle of a Pissarro. Life imitated art, and the leaves on all the slender or thick-trunked trees were like so many millions of dots, silver-green, blue-green, jade and chartreuse.
    Shadows shifted across the grass like ghosts, then vanished, absorbed into the gray late-evening light. Behind her, her house was dark, and this seemed somehow to make it loom bigger, to take on size and density. In a minute she would go in, turn on the radio, turn on the lights, live in the present. In a minute.
    For now she sat staring. As darkness became complete, the individual trees of the forest were blotted out, one by one, until she saw the edge of her property as all of a piece, one dim and motionless mass. Now if she walked toward the woods, the trees as she came closer would take on life, silhouettes, individuality. Just as in her mind, when she walked deep into memory, the people she had loved and lost and let fade came clear, presented themselves to her in the flesh with their old alluring charm and smiles and voices, and the clarity of their margins, the expressions on their faces, and what they had meant to her, and meant to her still, could pierce her like a hook. For they were inside her, after all, a black mass of significance that she carried everywhere, unlike the forestaround her, outside her, which she could always escape, if only by closing her eyes.
    Cynthia. Joe. David. Laura. And Hudson too, though she saw him still, saw him every day. All gone from her now,