Stories: All-New Tales

She began to organize the closets in the house—the front one, with the winter coats still in hibernation and the boots tossed like gauntlets into a Rubbermaid bin on the floor—and then the hall closet with its piles of snowy towels and heady potpourri. It was in that one that she found herself reaching to the rear of the top shelf—the hiding spot she’d never been able to reach herself without a struggle, before, and that therefore became her cache of Christmas gifts bought and saved all year for her daughter. One by one, Sarah pulled out a remote-control robot, an art set to make flower fairies, a dress-up kit—treasures she’d found in January or March or May and had known, in that instant, that her daughter would love. She stood immobile for a long moment, holding this bounty in her elongated arms, paralyzed by the most concrete evidence she’d found yet that her daughter was Not. Coming. Home.

Sarah sat down in the middle of the hall. She opened up the plastic shrink-wrapped robot, installed its batteries, and sent him careening into the bathroom. She opened the dress-up kit and wrapped a pink boa around her own neck; peered into the tiny heart-shaped mirror to apply the fuchsia lipstick and glittery blue eye shadow, a whore’s version of happiness.

When the phone rang, she ran into the bedroom to pick up an extension. “How are you doing?” Abe asked.

“Fine,” Sarah said. In the bedroom mirror, she could still see the clown-red cheeks, the garish mouth. “I’m fine.”

She hung up the phone and went into the kitchen for a large black trash bag, big enough to hold a yard’s worth of leaves, or a closet full of the future. She scooped all the unused toys for her daughter into the trash bag and carried it over her shoulder out to the garage. Because it was not trash day, Sarah drove all the way to the municipal dump, where she let the attendant punch her ticket once for the privilege of hauling the sack over the ravine’s edge. She waited, until this bag full of what she’d lost nestled itself between other bags stuffed with the things people actually chose to give away.

PHARMACISTS LIVE IN MINUTIAE, which is why Abe had learned a whole system of measurement in college that most educated folks don’t even know exists. Ask anyone who has ever filled the innards of a tiny gelatin capsule with a drug, and they will know that twenty grains equals one scruple. Three scruples equal one dram apothecaries. Eight drams apothecaries equal one ounce apothecaries, which equals four hundred eighty grains, or twenty-four scruples.

Abe was trying to count the twenty-four scruples, but they had nothing to do with the pills he had spilled before him on the little rubber mat from Pfizer, a freebie he’d gotten at some conference in Santa Fe. It was funny—a scruple, by itself, was a misgiving; make it plural and it suddenly was a set of principles, of ethics. It was that simple, he understood now. You only had to survive one of your regrets, and it was enough to make you realize you’d been living your life all wrong.

He regretted telling his daughter to clean up her room the day before she died. He regretted the fact that he hadn’t hugged her in front of her friends after her fall concert at school, because he thought her embarrassment was more important than his pride. He regretted not taking his family to Australia, when they were still a family. He regretted not having been given the chance to meet a grandchild. He regretted having seven years, instead of seventy-seven.

Abe pushed aside these thoughts and began to recount the pills. But he had to keep hiking up his pants—they were riding that low on his hips. Finally, ducking behind a wall of meds, he unbuttoned his white coat and notched his belt tighter. It would make sense that he was losing weight—he hadn’t been eating, really—but the belt suddenly didn’t fit at all. There simply wasn’t a notch where he needed it to be; he’d grown that thin, that fast.

Frustrated, he unwound some twine in the back room used for shipments and took off his belt, looping the rope in its place. He thought of going back inside and finishing the order, but instead he walked out through the back receiving door of the pharmacy and kept walking—around the block, and then down three more, and through the traffic light, until he came to a bar he passed every day when he drove home. Olaf’s, it was called, and it was open, even though it was only eleven A.M.