THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019 69
power station, was opposed to nuclear.
Sean shrugged. “We need the work
round here.”
“You could go somewhere else.”
“I tried that. Anyway, my kids are here.
They stay with me at the weekends.”
She smiled at him warmly, conven-
tionally. “And how old are they?”
Once his children were out in the
open, Serena and he could be friend-
lier; she felt the old tide of flirtation ris-
ing between them, promising to lift her
from wherever she was stranded. He
had a girl, five, and a boy, three. “I never
wanted children,” she explained. “Prob-
ably because I was born with a hole in
my heart: my father prayed all night
over my crib in the hospital. I can’t re-
member this touching scene, but I’ve
carried it with me, that burden of hope.
After his prayers worked, he thought
he owned me. It’s why I’ve got this hor-
rible name, too.”
“It’s not so horrible.”
“Worse than you think. Actually, I’m
Angel—Angel Serena. You can imag-
ine why I dropped the Angel part. Mum
had nothing to do with choosing it—
Dad was the sentimental one. Did you
know he was headmaster at Dares-
brook? He was an awful bully. I’m glad
he was never my headmaster.”
Sean said that he had gone to Dares-
brook, but it must have been after her
father retired.
“We heard that it went to the dogs,”
she said. “But then, he would say that,
wouldn’t he?”
Sean tried to weigh his experience
at school impartially. “I didn’t react
well,” he confessed, rueful, “to being
confined in a classroom.”
“You were probably one of the dogs.
I mean, that my father thought it went
to.”
Wondering whether to feel insulted,
Sean said that he regretted it now. “I
wish I had my time over again.”
She widened her eyes at him, doubt-
ing it, and said that she never regretted
anything. Whatever happened had to
be that way. As she spoke, however, she
was waylaid by a vision of her mother
in that hospital bed, so miniature and
yellow, her jaw slack, absent from her-
self, held up between the bleeping heart
monitor and the drip and the catheter,
the tight knot of her long life loosen-ing. The sadness that had evaded Ser-
ena when she’d searched for it, so that
she had believed her own heart was a
dry husk, found her here in the café
when she least expected it. She blotted
her eyes with a tissue, sipped her water.
“It’s a difficult time for you,” Sean
said sympathetically.
He covered her small cool hand on
the table with his own, which was huge
and hot, calloused across the palm, black
dirt rimming the nails. Of course Ser-
ena couldn’t begin to describe all of her
private difficulty, not to a stranger. She
pulled her hand away and spoke instead
about climate change, the political chaos
that would follow it. “I should act,” she
said. “But I don’t have any conviction.
I’m no good at conviction.”
Sean wrote his phone number on
the back of his receipt from the café.
“Text me,” he said, “so that I’ve got
your number, too.”
“All right, I will.”
“No, do it now.”
She smiled, watery-eyed, at his scrap
of paper lying untouched on the table
between them.
“Go on, you might as well. In case
you need anything, any odd jobs done.”
She wouldn’t text him while he
watched. But she picked up his number
before she left, dropped it into her bag.T
hat evening, while Pippa and Gil-
lian watched television, Serena went
rummaging through the cupboards up-
stairs, renewed and energized. Her sis-
ters were still jarred by the scene she’d
made; she’d always had this trick—of
unleashing her worst and then being
the first to recover from it. “Look what
I’ve found!” she sang out, but the oth-
ers were reluctant to move from in front
of their documentary on Minoan Crete.
“Come and see! It’s the Bunty Club.”
“Oh, the Bunty Club!”
Gillian was perplexed. “The what?”
“You remember the Bunty Club!
We had those secret club meetings in
the shed. ‘We swear not to do good
and never to help people.’ ”
“I’ve got no memory of it. Were we
horrid?”
“It was just a reaction to Daddy,”
Pippa reassured her. “The actual bad
things we did were terribly innocent,
mostly. I think we hid his slippers, dug
up some potatoes he’d planted in theTHE PO ETS ARE DYING
It seems impossible
they seemed immortal.Where are they going
if not to their next poems?Poems that, like lives, make do
and make that doing do more—holding a jolt like a newborn,
a volta turning toward a god-loadof grief dumped from some heaven
where words rain downand the poet is soaked. Cold
to the bone, we’ve become. Thick-headed, death-bedded, heartsick.
Poets. Flowers picked, candles wicked,forgiving everyone they tricked.—Brenda Shaughnessy