74 THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019
floor. There were, it appeared, two of it.
The client was smoking dispassionately,
staring at the new one.
“What happened here?” Bev asked.
“Don’t ask me,” the client replied.
“You moved it.”
“There’s another one?”
The woman just shook her head.
This new futon was identical to the
last, sweat- and piss-stained,
charred on one corner. The
cats were nowhere to be
seen—presumably they’d
fled to the bathroom.
“O.K.,” Bev said. She
could feel Emily bristling
behind her like a guard dog.
“O.K., well, let’s just put it
up against the other one.”
They wrestled the sec-
ond futon up against the
first, pushing and kicking it to keep it
in place. Then they fetched the box
spring from the hall and let it thump
into place.
Out at the truck, Emily said, “I’m
not going back in there.” Her arms were
crossed over her narrow chest and she
scowled at Bev. “I’ll help you get the
mattress to the door. That’s it.”
“O.K.”
“This isn’t what I signed up for. It’s
fucked up.”
“You don’t have to go in, Emily.”
“Good, because I’m not.”
It came to Bev, suddenly, who Emily
reminded her of. Two years ago, Ce-
leste’s father had told her she could take
a weekend trip, with a bunch of friends,
to a mountain cabin that some boy’s
family owned. He hadn’t consulted with
Bev, because, apparently, he and Celeste
had agreed that Bev would be unrea-
sonable about it. Celeste admitted as
much when an overheard phone call in-
advertently revealed the plan. “You will
not go!” Bev said, proving their point.
She shouted it at her daughter in the
hallway of their half-empty old house—a
creaky Craftsman on the flats, expen-
sive to heat and plagued by hidden decay.
At the end of the hall, behind Celeste,
hung an enormous ornate mirror that
the previous owners hadn’t bothered to
unbolt from the wall when they left; it
showed a reflection, partly obscured by
the desilvering glass, of her daughter’s
tense shoulders and, deep in the shad-
ows and very small, her own remote
figure, arms crossed, as fiercely power-
less as a cornered tomcat.
That’s who Emily was like: herself,
not Celeste. The lanky frame and coarse
hair, the cluster of freckles over the long,
humped nose. Now another image came
to Bev, this time a photo her father had
snapped at a high-school track meet:
young Beverly frozen in the act of pass-
ing the baton to her team-
mate. It was objectively a
great picture, dramatic and
flattering and perfectly
framed, but Bev remem-
bered the instant after it
was taken, remembered let-
ting go of the baton too
soon, a half second before
her teammate’s hand would
have closed around it, and
the sound of it ringing
dully on the asphalt. This was the photo
that her father had framed, that he still
kept on the mantel along with snap-
shots of Celeste throughout her life
and—vexingly, as though the divorce
had never happened—a family portrait
from Bev’s wedding day. “That’s how I
like to remember your mother,” he ex-
plained, and that was that.
Bev and Emily carried the mattress
to the door, and Bev dragged it through
the apartment alone. She dropped it
onto the box spring while the client
stood, two cats cradled to her chest,
watching with suspicion. “Are you going
to be all right?” Bev asked as she backed
out of the room, hazarding a final glance
at the two identical burned futons, now
collapsed into a mound on the floor.
The client pretended not to understand
the question.
The run was over. It was time to
go home.E
mily said nothing during the drive
back to the storage lockers. When
they arrived, Bev signed her school form
and thanked her for her help. “Sure,” the
girl said, turning to leave. She climbed
into an enormous dented S.U.V. and
carefully made her way off the lot and
back to her life.
Bev locked the truck and walked to
her car. It was evening. Curtains of rain
obscured the hills in the distance, but
here honeyed light illuminated the
nearby veterinarian’s office and the Turk-
ish restaurant and the D.M.V. Gullshopped and bobbed around a pile of
French fries and their dropped paper
basket, and a couple of kids made out
in front of the defunct bowling alley.
Bev’s freedom and loneliness felt beau-
tiful. She climbed in behind the wheel
and headed for Kim’s house.
On the way, she passed a little red
coupe, its inhabitants scowling, their
mouths moving: an argument. It was, of
course, her ex, being ferried about by the
assistant, her white fingers gripping the
wheel, her golden hair tugged and flat-
tened by the air flowing through the open
window. Bev ought to have felt a bitter
satisfaction at glimpsing this moment of
disharmony. See?, she could say, the new
one’s mad at you, too. Instead, it reminded
her of their fights over Celeste: his cod-
dling of the girl, his enthusiastic embrace
of her new name, of “Rose.” She did all
the work, he got all the glory! And a new
woman to argue with, too.
Well, he could have it. Her ex’s eyes
met hers and he kept them there, his
head turning as the two cars passed, as
though it were some kind of surprise to
him that she still existed, that she would
continue to haunt him as long as they
both lived in this dumb town. A minute
later she arrived at Kim’s. She turned
over the keys and the clipboard, and rat-
ted out the final client while scratching
the poodle’s head. Could the dog even
walk? Bev had never seen it walk. Maybe
it couldn’t. Maybe this was Kim’s cross
to bear, to ferry her ailing dog from room
to room for the rest of its life. Bev be-
came aware that she was jealous of Kim.
She was jealous of the poodle.
Later, she would wonder if it was the
closing of Kim’s front door that marked
the beginning of it—the perhaps unin-
tentionally heavy thunk of wood strik-
ing wood, the snick of the latch, the
gentle clank of the pressed-tin welcome
sign bouncing against the decorative
cut-glass window. It felt appropriate, as
a metaphor.
But eventually she would come to
realize that it was the cul-de-sac where
the shift took place. That slow circum-
navigation past highway and ditch, the
mountain of gravel and the porta-john.
Somewhere in there, evening shaded
back into morning, because the end of
it was always the same, with the pickup
truck and the Bills fan with the sick
chicken. It was the light, that’s how