An Unlikely Grace "Even the Most Undeserving of Us Sometimes Find Extraordinary Love"

By Kim Thompson

As Esther Flores prepares to settle into a serene middle age, she’s abruptly beset by boredom, a condition with which Esther has never dealt well. Max, Esther’s husband, demands Esther overcome her downtime more productively than she has in the past for the sake of both their sanities. While Esther contemplates the issue, she is bombarded by a slew of troubled relatives and decides that managing other’s disastrous lives is precisely the activity she needs to fill her time creatively.

Certain of her imminent sainthood, Esther moves her elderly, brilliant, professor father into her home when he begins to demonstrate symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. Esther’s decadent, hedonistic, but always charming and happy older brother, Howie, suddenly develops mid-life misery, which Esther decides will only be made right by finding a wife, although Esther is determined she must do the choosing, as Howie is too dumb to marry correctly. Esther also decides she must commandeer Lizzie, her beloved teenaged niece, before Lizzie veers into wildness and ruin if left in the hands of Lizzie’s moronic father and simple-headed stepmother.

These are only a few of the lives Esther entertains herself managing, but it is when Max is diagnosed with a severe and perhaps terminal illness, that Esther—for the first time in her life—is called upon to truly think and behave as an adult, a challenge to which Esther is the first to admit she is not likely to rise.

Esther tries to handle Max’s illness as she has always handled the unpleasant, but despite her expertise in the art of self-medication, her finely honed denial skills, a dark and macabre sense of humor, and her amazing ability to create her own reality, the truth insists on slapping Esther silly when she least expects the blows.

Max will not be managed nor manipulated. He will, Esther discovers, live and die only as he believes right. It is through the choices Max makes in living his life that Esther begins to understand the notion that grace is possible for even the unlikeliest of us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brighton Publishing LLC
• Release date: Jun 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781621833192

Kim Thompson

I live in Englewood, Colorado with my husband, Rocky Dennis and our sixteen year old daughter, Joey. I have two adult children, as well as two grown step children, and a handful of grandchildren. We own a flooring installation business, but try to keep that aspect of our lives as small as possible, as there are so many things we would prefer to be doing. My husband and I enjoy collecting art, and as my taste is eclectic, one will find African Masks hanging next to Native American Ceremonial Headdresses. I’m certain my children hope I sell all of it before I die.I wrote An Unlikely Grace as a sequel to Full Gospel Bar and Grill. The characters, Esther and Max, married at the end of the Full Gospel Bar and Grill, and I liked them both so much, I wanted to write more about them. At the precise moment I was considering it, my husband was diagnosed with a pancreatic tumor. After enduring weeks of hell, it was determined that he did not have a tumor after all, and I wanted to write about the cavalier way the medical profession treats people. I also wanted to write about people who, according to our society’s standards, have everything it takes to be happy, and yet are miserable, and most of it is their own doing.My greatest hobby, I think, is my fellow man. I find people infinitely interesting, and much to my family’s chagrin, will talk to a phone pole. Fortunately for me, most people don’t mind discussing themselves.

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An Unlikely Grace

Even the Most Undeserving of Us Sometimes Find Extraordinary Love

Kim Thompson

Brighton Publishing LLC

435 N. Harris Drive

Mesa, AZ 85203

www.BrightonPublishing.com

Copyright © 2015

ISBN 13: 978-1-62183-319-2

Smashwords Edition

Ebook

Cover design: Tom Rodriguez

All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. The characters in this book are fictitious and the creation of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Chapter One

It was the middle of December and just after two in the morning when I woke and missed the comforting lull of Max snoring lightly beside me. A sound sleeper, Max was not given to nocturnal wandering; thus it was natural that his absence would spark a gentle wifely concern.

Where the hell is your father? I demanded of my black lab, Ariel. Ariel had been with me since she was a puppy, long enough to know from my tone and facial expressions that the question was not a casual one. I rose from bed, took my crutch from where it leaned against the wall, and hobbled down the hallway, squinting as I looked into the darkness of the empty bathroom and several bedrooms as I passed them.

When I reached the landing at the top of the stairs, I heard my beloved Ariel lurching along behind me, her breathing labored, her gait as stiff and awkward as my own.

What a lovely pair of catastrophes we are, I remarked to her. We pressed ahead, Ariel and me, the image of graceful elegance. Looking like two drunken hippos , we wobbled down the stairs and across the foyer, performing a memorable pas de deux of The Old Lady Shuffle Ballet. While we limped and struggled, cracked and creaked, I thought of my seventy-five-year-old mother, Eloise. Eloise would have been jogging energetically down the stairs wearing a pencil slim-skirted business suit, silk stockings, and pumps with three-inch heels and knocking out of the way anyone who did not move quickly enough to suit her. Eloise Kellerman did not become an obscenely rich and powerful real estate magnate by concerning herself with good manners or with any of the accepted social conventions, come to think of it. Eloise was a force not unlike an earthquake; those too close were often rocked to dusty rubble, and the aftershocks of an encounter with her were felt hundreds of miles away.

If Eloise had not selected real estate robbery as her chosen field of endeavor, she could have become a super star killer in the Roller Derby, I suggested to Ariel as I imagined my statuesque mother impeccably uniformed and elegantly coiffed as she gracefully glided around the rink on roller skates, kicking ass and taking names. Ariel sat and cocked her head to one side, as though she couldn’t quite envision the scene.

Oh, come on, I said, slightly exasperated, use your imagination; the stretch is not so great.

Ariel and I made our way through the library, the parlor, and finally into the dark, icy kitchen. I could not imagine Max idling away the minutes outside in the freezing cold night air; but even so, I opened the kitchen door just enough to see if he was at his thinking spot: a huge stump in the side yard upon which Max liked to sit, smoke, and consider life and its many intricacies and complications.

Max was not sitting on the stump, and I was becoming mildly annoyed. His cherished 1970 black Ford pickup was parked in the driveway in front of our house, so I supposed Max was out walking the property. Since I was not certain, and it had not theretofore been Max’s habit to go for a stroll at two in the morning, I could not simply dismiss the matter, hop back in bed, and resume sleep. After more than a decade of marriage, Max knew full well his absence would cause me considerable distress. And I knew that he knew; consequently, I was more than a little perturbed with him for being so incredibly effing selfish. There was no doubt that Max’s standing with me would be improved greatly if he were found injured or wandering around in a fit of diminished capacity, rather than contentedly hiking about the mountainside, a thoughtless jerk enjoying nature and excellent health.

I considered calling Max on his cell phone, but I knew it would aggravate him tremendously. He would feel he was being chased after, as though he were a small child who slipped out of the house the moment his mother glanced in another direction. You see, Max and I were so in tune with one another, so perfectly in sync, that we could each conduct both sides of our arguments without the participation of the other. I found it a great time and energy saver, not to mention all the hurt feelings we were spared. It was one thing to imagine one’s spouse would say an infuriating thing; it was quite another to actually hear the offending statement spat out in anger.

The cell phone in itself was a touchy issue. Max had never been one to report in. But after enduring five years of frustration and worry wondering where the hell Max had got himself off to, I bought a cell phone for him. Delighted with my rapier-sharp wit, I referred to the new phone as Max’s leash. Max, who usually had an easily tweaked and self-deprecating sense of humor, took umbrage, became angry and stone-faced, and refused to carry the cell phone that day or ever, no matter how many life and death scenarios I created that only a cell phone could avert.

Not graciously, perhaps, but definitely, I accepted defeat. After the cell phone sat in a drawer for two years collecting dust and leaking battery acid, or whatever it is abandoned cell phones do, Max announced one night during a fabulous meal of spanakopita, asparagus, and hearts of romaine salad topped with Greek olives, feta cheese, and balsamic vinegar dressing, that he wanted to have his cell phone activated.

Max gave the number only to me and to Elmo Upchurch, manager of Archimedes, Max’s tattoo parlor, as Elmo and I knew better than to bother Max with anything frivolous. Max did not have an emotion regarding technology or telephones; he simply did not believe that any man should have to be available all the time, not even to his treasured wife.

Shortly thereafter, while making pointless and boring small talk with Elizabeth, one of my two sisters, I divulged that Max suddenly wanted to carry the cell phone. Elizabeth mentioned it to her twin, Victoria, who then speed-Skyped me so that I could see her best, nastiest smirk when she advised me that if Max suddenly needed a cell phone, the only reasonable explanation was that he had a chippie on the side. I expected that sort of tasteless remark from Victoria. Born the bitchier of the twins, Victoria was ecstatic every chance she got to annihilate me, emotionally or otherwise.

Elizabeth was no saint, either. While she lacked Victoria’s natural viciousness and never deliberately hurt my feelings, Elizabeth usually managed to hurt them anyway. She was devoid of tact, had an innately critical and judgmental nature fueled by her charismatic Christian leanings, and never harbored an unexpressed thought. When Elizabeth began a sentence with the phrase, No offense, Esther, but… I braced myself to be greatly offended indeed.

I have, and have always had, the wildly frustrating habit of allowing a tale to grow larger than is prudent, so in returning to the point, let me say that for whatever reason, Max began carrying a cell phone regularly some three years before the night he disappeared. I wanted to call him that night. I knew he would never imagine I was calling because I suspected he was with a chippie, but I doubted seriously that Max would consider his middle-of-the-night foray an emergency, and therefore would have resented the call. I considered fabricating a crisis to lure him home, but Max would have hated all the more any dishonest effort to manipulate him into doing that which he was not already inclined to do on his own.

Max spent, in both long and short blocks of time, the better part of seventeen years in prison from the time he was eighteen until he was forty-one, all stemming from one assault on a creepy man who molested and harassed his younger cousin. The only thing Max had ever asked me to understand unequivocally was that his freedom to come and go as he pleased with no interference from me was vital for his peace of mind.

In the first months of our marriage, I was so enamored with Max, I would have agreed to dance Salome’s dance of the seven veils barefoot on hot coals every night of the week if Max had asked it of me. I still adored Max after ten years, but I was no longer quite as addled by love and not nearly as thrilled to preserve and protect at all costs Max’s sense of liberty. In fact, it was all maddeningly irritating; and that night especially, I considered Max’s principles regarding his precious freedom to be a profound pain in my ass.

Snow started falling, and Max was still out meandering the countryside. At first, tiny, sporadic crystals began to float past the windows, but it soon began to snow in earnest. Large, pointed flakes blew in swirls, making it impossible to see a foot in front of one’s face. Winter in Alta, Colorado, was nothing to scoff at. But walking about became particularly precarious when it was windy and snowing heavily. Located high in the Rocky Mountains, above ten thousand feet, Alta is a remote little village, and Murphy Hill is even more isolated as it is situated twelve miles outside of Alta in one direction and twenty-five miles from Broken Ridge in the other. My house was built in 1878 on ten acres atop Murphy Hill, and the only road to it is a dead end that serves the half-a-dozen houses at the bottom of Murphy Hill and my house at the top. Peak County allegedly maintains the road, but if Max had not graded it every spring and fall and cleared it after every snowstorm, we would have likely died of starvation and then petrified before we were discovered.

Max was born in Colorado and had lived in Alta for many years. He was well acquainted with the schizophrenic unpredictability of Colorado weather. Even so, it had suddenly turned wretchedly cold that night, eerily dark, snowy, and windy—blizzard conditions in which a man could find himself lost with a minimum of difficulty regardless of his experience with the weather and terrain. Tragedy struck all the time in Peak County: arms and legs would be found sticking out of the melting snow and stiff limbs belonging to dead bodies were discovered every spring by unsuspecting hikers. I must admit that the dead bodies usually belonged to affluent fools up from Denver who watched one National Geographic program and then imagined themselves adventurers on a par with Ernest Shackleton. They came to master the fourteeners, those ignorant and ill-prepared dolts. And those without dumb luck fell off the mountain or froze to death or suffocated under two-million-ton avalanches one second after yelling, Hey, dude! Toss me the schnapps!

When Max had not returned by 3:00 a.m., I climbed the stairs into the cupola that sat on top of the third floor of the house. My grandfather Paddy’s telescope and binoculars were still where they had been for fifty years, so I peered first through the binoculars and then, seeking greater distance and latitude, through the telescope as I searched for Max along the creek, through the trees, and along the path that twisted down and around Murphy Hill to the road below.

By 4:00 a.m., I was distraught to the point that I deemed self-medication necessary, and at fifty years of age, I knew precisely where that point lay, so my dilly-dallying was not about when to medicate but about what and how much of it to use to accomplish the job. I vacillated between wine and Xanax and then briefly considered a combination of both, an option I quickly discarded as overkill. I opted for a glass of well-chilled Chablis; a glass of wine would calm my nerves, I reasoned, but would not render me blotto for the rest of the day, a condition that did not delight Max.

To say the least. One would think that a person with Max’s history of addiction might be somewhat tolerant of another person’s need to manage stress with the judicious use of drugs and alcohol; but like so many of the reformed and semireformed, Max could be neurotic on the subject.

Ariel and I limped and lumbered our way back down three flights of stairs from the cupola to the kitchen where I poured myself an enormous glass of wine. I’d purchased the set of four wine glasses at a thrift store on the Front Range and thought them beautiful and unique. Max said that the glasses were not beautiful and unique, but simply huge; anything that held thirty-two liquid ounces was not a wineglass, but a bucket on a stem. And he chastised me for the sin of gluttony every time I used one of them.

I gulped my wine and started a fire in the wood stove in the kitchen. The Chablis afforded me no real sense of relief, so I was forced to immediately pour and guzzle another glass. The second glass did not calm me either, but instead fueled my fears and exacerbated my anxiety. I started a second fire in the parlor’s fireplace and huddled in the corner of the sofa, wrapped in one of my grandmother Maeve’s hand-crocheted afghans and tried, to no avail, to soothe my frazzled nerves.

First I imagined Max had tripped over a fallen tree limb and was lying on the ground, freezing to death with the jagged edge of a shattered bone visible through his torn blue jeans and the ripped flesh of his thigh. In my mind’s eye, Max was barely alive; and as he drew his last breath, he weakly swung a useless branch in a vain effort to fight off howling, starving, snarling wolves.

My eyes filled with tears, and I choked on the knot in my throat as I envisioned the bumbling and inept Peak County sheriff’s deputy, Roscoe Jones, finally stumbling onto Max where he lay on the ground, his slimy intestines dragged out of his shredded belly by the wolves’ powerful jaws and then strewn all around to be nibbled by foxes, squirrels, and bobcats.

By then I was sobbing hysterically. I wiped the tears and snot on my nightgown, and Ariel glared at me with disgust, obviously embarrassed because I was too lazy to get up and find a tissue, or at least some toilet paper. I cried again as I imagined Deputy Sheriff Jones—the fat, wobbly idiot—driving me to the scene of Max’s demise in the deputy’s SUV, with both of our brains bouncing around in our skulls because Roscoe’s shocks were demolished by his tremendous weight. Roscoe would compel me to identify Max in the horrific condition the animals and the elements left him, because Roscoe was and always had been, an unmitigated dumbass.

After I tired of tormenting myself with the wolf vignette, I imagined that the local teenaged ruffians had kidnapped Max and were torturing him out of sheer boredom, or perhaps they were driven by raging testosterone unbalanced even more by marijuana, home-cooked amphetamines, and alcohol. I abandoned the ruffian theory quickly though, because even in my agitated and semi-shwacked state, I thought it highly unlikely that the local youngsters were systematically abusing Max. None of the kids my sixteen-year-old niece Lizzie brought around had the snap to systematically tie their sneakers. They seemed abominably stupid rather than viciously psychopathic. I could not think of even one who had an attention span sufficient to bash someone over the head with a brick without being distracted halfway through the task.

By 5:00 a.m., I was a wreck, exhausted, and on a full-blown crying jag brought about by three planters of wine. There was still no sign of Max, and when I finally relented and tried to call him on his cell phone, I heard it ringing from the kitchen counter where Max left it charging before we went to bed. I remembered that a young man who rode a motorcycle had recently moved into a house on Murphy Hill. I was suddenly sure I’d heard he was a member of one of those bikers from hell gangs—the sort that hated everyone but white people. Whoever the hell white people were. Maximiliano Flores was Spanish, Native American, and Mexican, an obvious target for the white power motorcyclists, who I was certain were headquartered in the house at the bottom of Murphy Hill.

In desperation, I considered searching for Max in my pickup, but cataracts had rendered my night vision worse than my day vision, which was dicey at best. The only chance I had of finding Max in the dark would be if I happened to hit him with my truck.

***

Chica, chica, what in the hell is the matter with you? Max asked quietly and patiently when he finally arrived around 6:00 a.m. to discover me intoxicated, drained, and weeping. I managed to tell Max how frightened I had been, but I sensed immediately that he was unsympathetic.

Esther, he asked, "how many wolves have you seen on this hill in the thirty years you’ve lived in this house? And sweetie, a guy is not a one percenter because he rides a motorcycle with his buddies on the weekend. I’m not even going to discuss the white power bullshit except to ask you to never say such a thing again. If the neighbors aren’t about the Aryan Brotherhood, it’s mean and full of prejudice; and if they are, they’ll probably kill us both when it gets back to them that you’ve been talking trash."

What about the neighborhood delinquents? If you will recall, they have vandalized our property before, I said. And what is a one percenter? You make them sound like ugly, bearded cartons of milk.

Kids vandalized the fence ten years ago, Max reminded me, his patience waning. "The fence, not even the house. All they did was paint, Ester is a Lesban. Even you said they were harmless—illiterate, but harmless. The term one percenter was coined after WWII by newspaper reporters to refer to the small number of motorcycle enthusiasts who lived outside of society’s rules, like Hells Angels, none of which is germane to our conversation. I’m fifty-two years old, Esther. I’m able to take a walk in the dark without my mommy or my wife following to make sure I don’t fall down and get a boo-boo."

Frankly, Max, I said, sniffing a hurt little sniffle, I think you are exercising a shameful lack of gratitude. I was impressed by Max’s use of germane, and then I felt like a snob for being impressed. Why should it be surprising that Max would possess a decent vocabulary? I had the formal education, but Max was self-educated, and on a much wider range of topics.

Max is most likely smarter than I am, I thought, but immediately amended the thought to, as smart as I am. I begrudged Max the idea that he was more intelligent because I was then, and am now, vain about my IQ, which is actually quite high.

Would you not be worried if I went out for a walk at two in the morning? I demanded.

I’m terrified when you walk down the hall to the bathroom at two in the morning, Max answered firmly. You’re blind, a spatial moron, and with your bad hip and that stupid crutch you’ve been dragging around lately, I expect to find you unconscious in a heap at the bottom of the stairs at any time. Why don’t you use your cane?

Oh go screw yourself, I thought but refrained from saying. I tried to avoid using obscenity when speaking to Max, even when drunk; no, especially when drunk. It was too reminiscent of Eloise, my charming mother who looked like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and spoke like a special guest on The Jerry Springer Show.

What I did say passionately was this: Fine! I hope the next time you go out walking you fall in a big, dark hole and break both your legs. I hope you lay there in excruciating agony waiting for super sleuth Roscoe Jones to find you sometime in the next millennium.

At that, I stood stiffly, albeit drunkenly. I climbed the stairs with the aid of the banister and my stupid crutch. I stumbled breathlessly to my room and once there, found my secret bottle of Crown Royal and knocked back three fingers before I crawled, absolutely washed out and wasted, into my old, comfortable, and extremely beautiful antique bed. Several of my grandmothers had climbed into that bed before me, who had, no doubt, occasionally been as angry with their husbands as I was with mine that morning. Once in bed, I fumed a while and then slept the better part of the day, not giving a thin damn if Max was or was not delighted.

Max and I did not discuss his nighttime treks again for several weeks. He continued to go out on his mysterious walks at night and sometimes he disappeared during the day. I climbed into the cupola to search for Max if it relieved my anxiety, but I refused to ask Max where he went.

Occasionally, one of the neighbors, or even a stranger walking about, caught my eye, and I discovered that I enjoyed, unbeknownst to them, watching people going about their business. I began spending enough time in the cupola, gazing through the binoculars or the telescope at my neighbors, that one might have considered it compulsive.

And that is where the trouble with Max began.

Chapter Two

Never mind my eccentricities and bizarre behaviors. Max loved me. Even so, I would not be truthful if I denied that I could and sometimes did, annoy the bejesus out of him. Since I have gone so far as to acknowledge that painful truth, it would be silly, if not blatantly hypocritical, not to admit that Max had been annoyed with me more often than he had not in the weeks after his first night out on the mountainside.

It was all so confusing. Max was the one committing what might be considered the marital crime, yet he was irritated with me. Max was renowned for his acceptance and tolerance of my unique points of view and styles of communication; he had even become a bit vain regarding the overall saintliness of his nature, but there was no denying that Max had been less than tolerant during the period of time in question, and I was clueless as to why.

I was contemplating the problem while hiding in the cupola and staring through the binoculars. After scanning the countryside, I landed on Max sitting outdoors on his thinking stump, smoking a cigarette, and drinking a cup of coffee. It was the second week in January, early on a Saturday morning and bitterly cold. Max was watching me watching him watching me; and he was, if his expression was a valid indication, angry.

I have no idea why Max is wrapped around an axel, I commented to Ariel. I did not promise to cease looking out the window of the cupola, nor did I give my word I would stop watching the neighbors through the binoculars or the telescope. I did mount a defense against his accusations, and I admitted there was a possibility that knowing I was observing them might irritate or even frighten the neighbors; but I never agreed to alter my behavior in that or any arena.

I was referring to the discussion Max and I had the previous evening over a sumptuous repast of frozen pizza and Genesee Cream Ales with Willis Alan Ramsey’s Ballad of Spider John playing in the background. Max had been unusually uncommunicative from the moment he entered the house after a long, hard day of flirting with the adoring girls who frequented his tattoo parlor. Aside from Pass the salt, and Would you get me a beer? Max said nothing, which was unlike him. Max almost always had an amusing anecdote to share about someone ordering a delicate hummingbird tattooed squarely in the middle of an enormous blob of cellulite or a piercing in a painful or awkward location.

I knew he was troubled, but I had no idea I was the source of his dilemma until Max blurted, Esther, you’ve got to stop surveilling the neighbors through your binoculars!

After a tenth of a second’s consideration, I replied, "I am hardly surveilling the neighbors. And I am certain there is no such word as surveilling."

Max opened his mouth, thought better, closed it, and said nothing. So I continued.

I find the cupola relaxing, and I am not looking at any particular person or thing. I am merely contemplating the warp and weave of my ancestral lands. This house and these ten acres have belonged to the women in my family for one hundred and forty years, and the cupola affords me a complete view of all we own. It seems natural that I would want to survey our holdings from time to time.

I was trying for a light and amusing tone, but fell flat as I so often do and instead sounded like an arrogant snob, like my mother, the imperious Eloise. Never, not once have I ever known when to stop speaking, and that night was no exception.

Furthermore, I continued in a knowing tone that made Max jaw-grindingly crazy, the fit of pique in which you are currently engaged has nary a thing to do with the neighbors. Were we to face the unpleasant truth, we would be forced to admit that your knickers are in a twist because it was my turn to cook tonight, and I threw a crappy frozen pizza into the oven and bought Genesee Cream Ales in Alta instead of driving to Broken Ridge for the eighteen dollar a six pack microbrew beer of which you are so passionately fond and of which I cannot remember the name. What is it? Flat Tire Dry Dusty Ale? Zombies in a Bottle? It was probably a passive/aggressive act on my part, born of the resentment I feel over being forced to cook.

Max sat in silence, and I took a breath so as to indicate it was his turn to comment. Max shook his head and waved me on, so I continued my mild rant.

It was only last week that you said, at this very table, that you did not care what I prepared, as long as I prepared something. But that is clearly not true. You do care; you care very much indeed. I cannot cook; I never could cook, and I do not know why you continue to press the activity upon me when my efforts are clearly a trial for us both. I fail to comprehend why we cannot hire a cook when we can so easily afford one.

Max replied without rancor, weary of an old topic he found tiresome. "Two adults can and should feed themselves without exploiting some poor woman like the rest of those rich, lazy, white females who live up the road in Broken Ridge."

Did it not occur to you that we might be helping someone by offering gainful employment to a woman with children to feed and no skill set with which to feed them? I asked. Even I could hear the edge of hysteria creeping into my voice.

No, but it has occurred to me that you are skillfully maneuvering the discussion away from your peeping tomism, Max said. You know, Esther, one of the things I’ve always liked about you is your ability to be honest with yourself. I would hate to think you’re becoming manipulative and deceitful in your old age. If you’re hooked on gawking at people, admit it—there are worse things. What are you looking at, anyway? You hate everyone. ‘Hell is other people,’ as you’re so fond of saying.

I am never honest with myself! I gasped at Max, genuinely taken aback. Max was honest with himself, but I had always prided myself on my finely honed denial skills.

Manipulative and deceitful with regard to what? I added after his remark registered. I am not deliberately gawking at the neighbors. I look out my window, from my property, and if someone happens to cross my line of vision, then I, of course, see them and occasionally make note. What would you have me do? Gouge out my corneas? Good heavens, Max. I am human and I do have spontaneous reactions to that which I observe—observations which I share with you, my spouse, my beloved, my other half from whom I withhold nothing. Besides Max, I have lived in this house, on this hill, for more than thirty years. My neighbors are familiar with my idiosyncratic nature.

Your neighbors know by now that you’re a serious whack, Max said with a sureness. Stop watching people from the cupola before you get my ass kicked.

I searched my mind for, but did not locate, a snappy comeback, so I made do with, ‘Hell is other people’ is not something I said, but a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre, I delivered as haughtily as possible. Feeble as it was, I had the last word.

***

Even though the conversation had taken place only the night before, I was once again in the cupola. When I replayed the discussion, I became even more indignant. I had not promised to stop doing anything, but Max had clearly inferred a promise of some sort and he was angry. I knew what Max was thinking: There she is, up in the cupola, clutching her binoculars, scanning the neighborhood with grim fascination, pissing everyone off and perpetuating the all-pervasive notion that Esther Murphy Fountain Flores is the town nut job. As I said, Max and I knew each other well.

And you! I said to Ariel. You are a despicable traitor.

Ariel always stuck with the underdog. Her presence alone told me she thought I was wrong. To drive home her point, Ariel stood, looked me in the eye to ensure my attention, turned around three times, and then stretched out on her brand-new cupola pillow with her backside facing me.

Delightful, I said aloud to Ariel. My dog is giving me the ass. It was a clever and tasteful phrase I had recently acquired from my eldest brother, Howie Jr.

I looked outside again just as Max stood from his stump to enter the house. There was no question about it, Max was a lovely man. His dark hair was thick, full, and wavy, streaked with just enough gray to be stunning. His skin was smooth and olive—a testament to his Hispanic, Native American heritage. His features were well chiseled, and his greenish-gray eyes were as striking as they had been when Howie Jr. first brought Max home the year we were all seniors in high school. Max was more attractive at fifty-two than he had been at forty-two when we married, and I wondered once again why men got better looking with age while women looked more and more like the family pet.

I sat in the cupola for a while longer and argued with Max in my head. I would have made all my salient points to Ariel; however, she was not speaking to me. The whole issue was preposterous. I had the right to sit in my cupola to meditate, gaze into space, or watch the wallpaper curl off the wall. I did not know why I was spending so much time in the cupola looking through the binoculars or the telescope, but it was my time to waste and my cupola in which to waste it. I resented Max asking me to stop.

Max and I had often entertained ourselves by bantering about that which we found ridiculous in one another, but it was always in jest. Max knew it was wrong to monitor my behavior just as I knew I had no right to demand he account for his time. When I suggested Max was peeved about the frozen pizza, I was avoiding the issue. Max knew that on my nights to cook, he could and should expect anything, and he had done so for years without complaint. I knew I could hire a cook if I so chose, but Max would insist on a wage certain to instigate a riot between domestic labor and management in Peak, Summit, and Garfield counties, and would make us the target of bitter resentment from the likes of Eloise and her pals, who had been happily exploiting local workers for decades.

The tension between Max and I had not a thing to do with the cupola, the neighbors, Max’s spontaneous day or nighttime walkabouts, or even that I was a bad cook and a lazy housekeeper. There had been a monster the size of a Woolley mammoth in our house for weeks that Max and I had been politely dancing around. I was sad, confused, and felt plagued by the self-doubt that had crippled me the first forty years of my life. Max had lifted me away from all that unhappiness, but there it was again, unexpected and uninvited. I had not been desperately unhappy for a long time, so long that I had almost forgotten what unhappiness felt like. But I was no longer able to dodge the big ball of discontentment that was rolling around the house, attempting to bowl me over. Max was irritable and I was unhappy. I did not believe either one of us had any idea why we felt as we did.

***

Children born in the fifties have all, at one time or another before they turned eight, been forced to choke down liver and onions. I have