Union Atlantic Page 0,31

interests you involuntarily?"

Smearing plum sauce over his third pancake, Nate tried to surmise what exactly she was after.

"You mean, like, what makes me unhappy?"

Wincing slightly, Ms. Graves said, "I suppose that will do, but you understand I'm not asking about the trivial here. Failing to win some prize, or that sort of thing. I ask because you listen to me in a rather particular way - and believe me, I spent years being listened to by people your age - and it suggests to me the world's not obvious to you. I simply want to know why."

When he asked if it would be okay if he finished the lo mein, she fluttered her hand dismissively, never removing her eyes from his face.

Seeing no reason not to, Nate mentioned his father.

"Yes. I imagined it was something along those lines. Where did he do it? In your house?"

"No, in the woods."

She considered this for a moment.

"Inverting for you, I would imagine, the standard inquiry, Why kill yourself? to the less often asked, Why not? A sophomoric question, but then there are times in life when that makes it no easier to avoid."

Nate nodded slowly. It was weird to be talking about this to Ms. Graves but she wasn't wrong and she wasn't pretending. In fact, it was a relief to tell someone about it and not receive in return awkward condolence. To just say it and have it heard.

"Mostly it's just lonely," he said.

"You'll get used to that. Maybe you'll meet someone one day. Which may or may not ameliorate the feeling. When did you say this happened?"

"Last September."

"Ah," she said. "You're in the early stages. When you get to my age, the borders open up a bit. The barriers between times aren't so strictly enforced, which is a problem that you might say I'm conscripted by. This way in which we're not just dying animals. Do we have souls strapped to our bodies? That division seems too neat to me, but that's an intellectual matter. It lacks force in the end. But decay - rot - that's more complicated. It has a purpose, after all. It leads to new things. To other life."

A few minutes later the waiter approached to ask if they would like dessert. Ms. Graves shook her head and the waiter went to fetch the bill. The remains of their food had quickly congealed. She placed a few dishes on the floor for the dogs and for a while their lapping tongues were the only sound in the dining room.

___________

BY THE MIDDLE of May, the AP exam had come and gone. But still, each Friday afternoon, Nate went to the old woman's house. He had stopped giving her checks but she didn't appear to notice. Her lectures, if you could call them that, grew more disjointed as the weeks passed. Comments on Henry II's abrogation of jurisdiction from the ecclesiastical courts of twelfth-century England led into a discussion of precursors to the English Revolution four hundred years later, which apparently had something to do with the poetry she read aloud describing Adam's conversation with God: "'In solitude / What happiness, who can enjoy alone / Or all enjoying, what contentment find?' Can you hear that?" she asked. "He's asking God how a person can be content alone."

With her voice veering from angry to elegiac, she sounded as if she were narrating stories brought to mind by family photographs, the actors all intimates, their deeds still full of consequence and culpability. At the end of an hour or sometimes two, as Nate sat at her kitchen table drinking tea or stood in the doorway to go, rather than offering him some blandishment or goodbye, she would announce without transition what she saw in his expression.

Once, she said, "Boredom is easy. Which is why sadness hides there so readily. But don't be fooled for long. Dying of boredom. There's reason behind that idiom. It'll kill you sure enough."

Her peculiar affect freed him to ask things he otherwise wouldn't.

"What if I don't meet someone?"

"Then you won't. And that will be the condition under which you'll live. But remember: people won't save you."

Each time, on his way to and from her house, Nate would pause at the top of the hill to see if there were any signs of life down at the big house along the river, a car in the driveway or a light on inside. No for sale sign had appeared in the yard and yet there was still