Precautions

Ruth does the room on Mondays.

She opens the window first, because a room needs air even when no one is breathing in it. From the window she can see the pear tree, bare already, and the nest in the fork of it. Robins, in the summer. She watched them come and go. Now it's just grass and mud and twigs, the size of two cupped hands.

Then the sheets. She strips the bed and puts on the other set, the blue ones, though the white ones were clean. She tucks the corners the way Walt's mother taught her, tight enough to bounce a dime.

The planes hang from the ceiling on fishing line. A Spitfire. A Mustang. Something with two tails she has never known the name of. She takes them down one at a time, wipes them with a cloth and hangs them back. The Mustang turns slowly when she lets go. She waits for it to stop.

On the desk there is a pencil cup, a slide rule and a photograph of Richard at eleven, holding up a pickerel. His letter jacket hangs on the back of the door. It wouldn't fit him now. It wouldn't have fit him at twenty.

When she leaves, she knocks on the doorframe. Twice, with the middle knuckle. Then she closes the door.

Walt's coat is on the hook by the front door. She moves it to get to her own and puts it back.

In the kitchen she cuts two slices from the loaf and turns the loaf so it sits right side up. A loaf on its back is bad luck. Her mother said so, and her mother's mother. She doesn't think about it. Her hands do it.

She eats standing at the counter and looks out at the yard. The feeder is empty. She'll fill it later. The radio says rain coming in from New York.

In the afternoon she looks for the scissors and finds them in the second drawer of the bureau, under the cards. The cards are in a shoebox, rubber-banded by year. Happy birthday Ma. Happy birthday Ma, love R. One from 1955 has a kitten on the front and Joan's handwriting under his, round and careful. Ruth reads them all. She puts the rubber bands back in the right order.

The scissors are for a piece in the paper about a man in Boston who keeps bees on the roof of a hotel in Back Bay. Richard lives in Boston. She cuts it out and puts it in the envelope on the hall table with the others.

On Wednesday she goes to the A&P.

A boy is mopping up a broken jar by the pickles and the whole store smells of vinegar. She is in the coffee aisle when she sees Dot Haskell at the far end, reading the back of a can. Dot has had her hair done in a poodle cut, which makes her look like her own sister, the one who married the dentist and moved to Albany and never once came back for the Fourth.

They played canasta on Thursdays, the four of them, for twenty-two years. At Dot's, because Dot had the big table. Then Earl.

Ruth had dreamt about water. That was all. Black water, and Earl standing in it up to his knees, looking down for something. She told Dot on the Thursday because it seemed wrong not to. Dot laughed. Earl laughed. The Tuesday after, he went down to the cellar for a bottle of rye and his heart stopped on the stairs.

He was sixty-eight. His heart had been bad since the war. People said that at the funeral, to each other, as if it settled something. Dot didn't say anything to Ruth at the funeral. Nobody said much. The Thursdays stopped, or they went on somewhere Ruth wasn't told about.

The cellar was dry. Ruth knows that. She has thought about it a great deal.

She goes round by the other aisle and gets her coffee there.

The girl at the register is new. She is young, with her collar turned up and gum in her cheek.

"Stamps, ma'am?"

"No," Ruth says.

She used to save them. She doesn't know where the books went.

Richard calls on Sunday at six, when the rates go down. He always calls at six.

"Ma."

"There you are."

She asks about work and he says it's busy, it's always busy, they've got him on the Kendall Square job now. She asks if he's sleeping. She asks about the tires on the Ford, whether he had them looked at like he said.

"It's fine, Ma."

"You said it was pulling."

"I said it was pulling a little. In the rain."

She tells him about the bees. She tells him Dot had her hair done. He says hm, and she can hear a radio, and Joan saying something in another room.

"We were thinking," he says. "The nineteenth. We could drive out for the day. Joan too."

Ruth stands. She doesn't know why. She is standing in the front room with the receiver.

"I'll make a pot roast," she says.

"Don't go to any trouble."

"It's no trouble."

After, she sits with her hand on the telephone for a while. Then she goes upstairs and takes the blue sheets off the bed and puts the white ones on. The bed is narrow. They'll manage. They're young.

That night she lies awake and thinks the blue would have been better.

On the nineteenth she is up at five.

The roast has been in since early. She peels potatoes and puts them in cold water. She sets the table in the front room with the good china and then takes one of the good plates away again, because Walt's place would make three and three looks wrong. She sets it back. She takes it away.

It's a gray morning, still, the kind that doesn't lift. She fills the feeder at last.

At ten past nine something hits the kitchen window.

It's a small sound, like a knuckle. She goes out in her slippers. A sparrow lies on the flagstones below the glass. Its eye is half open. When she picks it up it's warm, and she can feel something going inside it very fast. Its heart, or hers. Then only hers.

She stands on the back step holding it.

She knows what her mother would say. A bird at the window is one thing. A bird that dies in your hand is something else.

She goes in and asks the operator for Boston. Four rings.

"Ma? We're just loading the car."

"Is it foggy down there?"

"What? No."

"There's fog here."

There isn't, quite. There is the gray.

"Ma."

"I don't know," she says. "Something's not right. I can't say. Please."

He doesn't say anything. In the background Joan asks something, and he puts his hand over the mouthpiece, and Ruth hears his voice but not the words.

"Okay," he says. "Okay, Ma. Another weekend."

He doesn't sound angry. He sounds, she thinks afterwards, almost light.

She buries the sparrow by the hedge with a soup spoon. There is a smudge on the window where it hit, a little gray down stuck in it, and she doesn't wipe it off for a week. The roast has gone dry in the oven. She eats a plate of it at the kitchen table with too much gravy and puts the rest up in jars.

In the paper the next morning there is a pile-up on the Turnpike near Sturbridge. Fog. Eleven cars. Two people taken to the hospital in Worcester. There is a photograph: cars bent into each other on the wet road, a truck turned sideways, a man in a policeman's cap with his hands on his hips. A little before eleven, it says.

She works it out. If they left at half past nine. If they stopped for gas. If Richard drove the way he drives.

She works it out again.

She doesn't call him. She sits at the kitchen table with the paper folded open until the coffee is cold.

Another weekend turns out to be a month, because of Joan's sister's birthday, and then something at the office.

The night before, she has the dream.

It's the cellar stairs, going down into black water. Richard is at the bottom, in it up to his knees, in his good suit, looking down for something he's dropped. She calls to him and he doesn't look up.

She wakes at ten past three and lies there until it's light enough to call.

"Ma. Come on."

"I had the dream," she says.

That's all she says. She hears him breathe. He knows which dream. He was home that summer.

"Fine," he says. "Fine."

The call is short.

Two Sundays later, at six, he mentions the car. He says it in passing. It was in the shop for the inspection sticker, and the man said the front tires were thinner than he'd like. Nothing urgent. Something to think about before winter.

"The tires," Ruth says.

"Before winter, Ma. He said before winter."

"I told you it was pulling."

"Well," he says. And then he tells her about the Kendall Square job.

She doesn't argue. She knows what she heard.

In the first week of December there is a nor'easter. All night the wind comes at the house, and the storm windows rattle in their frames, and somewhere down the road a shutter bangs and bangs until it stops. In the morning there are branches all over the yard, and the nest.

It's lying in the wet grass, whole. She picks it up. It weighs almost nothing. There is a piece of blue yarn woven into it, and a feather, and some gray hairs she recognizes from the brush she shakes out over the hedge.

She carries a kitchen chair out to the pear tree and stands on it. She can see the fork where the nest was. She reaches. She can't reach. She stands on her toes on the kitchen chair, in the wind, with the nest held up in one hand, until she understands that she is going to fall.

She gets down. She takes the nest upstairs and puts it on Richard's desk, next to the pickerel.

He says they'll come at Christmas. Christmas Day, after Joan's people on Christmas Eve.

She buys a small tree from the lot by the firehouse and carries it home with the top of it against her cheek. She puts it in the front room where Walt liked it. She hangs the glass birds on it, the ones from his mother.

On the twenty-third she comes down in the morning and the loaf is on its back.

She stands in the kitchen doorway in her housecoat and looks at it. The breadboard, the knife, the loaf lying on its rounded top with the cut end facing her.

She doesn't remember doing it. She always turns it. Her hands always turn it.

She lives alone.

She stands there for a long time. She thinks maybe she did it herself, last night, tired. She thinks maybe she's getting old. She thinks a great many things, and none of them turns the bread over.

She calls him at eight.

"Richard," she says. "I know. I know how it sounds."

"Okay, Ma," he says.

She waits for the rest. There isn't any.

"Merry Christmas," he says.

"Merry Christmas."

The week after, a card comes with a snapshot tucked inside. A long table with a white cloth and candles, and people she doesn't know. Joan's father is carving, and from the look of it he doesn't know how. Joan is laughing with her hand on someone's shoulder. Richard is at the end, half out of the frame. He's wearing a paper hat.

She holds it close to the lamp. It doesn't get any bigger.

In January he calls every other Sunday. In February, once.

She calls him instead. Some nights it rings and rings. Some nights Joan answers and says he's just stepped out, she'll tell him Ruth called. Joan says Ruth the way you'd read a name off a list.

So she writes. She tells the letters about the weather. She tells them the A&P is putting on an addition and you can't find anything. She tells them Dot's hair has grown out a little. She tells them to drive carefully.

She mails the envelope of clippings. The bees, a walking tour of the Freedom Trail, a recipe for icebox cake. She writes thought you'd like these on a card and doesn't sign it, because he'll know.

He doesn't mention it.

One Sunday the telephone rings at six and she's there before the second ring, and it's a man asking for Lorraine. She tells him there's no Lorraine here. He says he's sorry, he must have the wrong number, and he sounds sorry, and for a moment neither of them hangs up.

Some Sundays she thinks about calling, and then she thinks: if he isn't answering, there may be a reason. There may be something she can't see. You don't push against a thing like that. Her mother always said you don't push.

In April there is a Monday that is perfect.

The sky is high and clean. The wind is out of the north and it's cold in the shade but warm against the glass. Ruth does the room. She opens the window and the air comes in smelling of cut grass, and of somebody burning leaves they should have burned in the fall. She wipes around the nest on the desk without lifting it.

Outside, a pair of robins are carrying dry grass across the lawn. She watches them a while before she understands they aren't going to the pear tree. They're building in the Mahoneys' maple, over the fence. The fork in the pear tree stays empty.

She goes downstairs.

The telephone sits on the hall table. In the kitchen the loaf is on the breadboard, the right way up, the way she left it.

She stands at the counter and looks at it.

Then she puts her hand on it, and leaves it there.