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the night off to raid the snack bar, turn on the TVs in the appliance department, crank up the stereos, ride bicycles through the aisles.
    I stand off to one side while Phil borrows Rhonda to demonstrate for everybody the right way to execute a California twirl. He spins her fast so her blue cotton skirt swirls out and up past her knees, giving us all a glimpse of her pretty legs, sturdy in their low heels, and when she stops, the skirt swirls and wraps up around her thighs, then settles back. This is a thing I like to see, this glimpse of my wife’s legs as if they are someone else’s. When the demo ends, everyone claps. She pushes a strand of hair off her forehead and blushes with the heat and attention, smiling.
    â€œAll right, now. We’re doing great, folks,” Phil says, drunk on his own false cheer. I feel like reminding him he’s getting paid for this, that “folks” is not a word anybody uses anymore.
    While the band retunes, we get ourselves paper cups of water out of the cooler. People file in the door, pulling the cold in behind them, snuffing off their coats, blowing into their hands. I imagine this place from the outside, how inviting it must look: a tiny building set off in the cold, giving off its light and heat and music. When we arrived, I hadn’t noticed this.
    The band members introduce themselves while the folding chairs along the walls fill up with people, many of them old ladies dressed up in dangling earrings and carrying beaded purses, wearing smudges of rouge, like this is their big night on the town.
    â€œI feel sorry for them,” Rhonda says after I point them out to her. “Hoping to meet Mr. Right.” She smiles a little.
    â€œAt this point, most of their Mr. Rights are probably dead and buried.”
    Rhonda’s smile vanishes. “You are just so cold sometimes, Curt,” she says. “Those women are lonely.”
    But I know it is not my joke as much as it is my mention of the word: death . It is something we are supposed to have silently agreed to banish from our vocabularies, ignoring the black gash it has torn through our lives. Sometimes it’s like a meteor has ripped through our house, left huge holes in the roof and floor, and we step around them, ignoring the rain that pours in, the cold, the weeds growing into our living room. Just keep stepping around.
    We dance through the evening, the smell of perfumed sweat filling the little building, the windows steaming over. The old ladies occupying the folding chairs in their wilting dresses try to keep their gazes interested and curious, expectant. Like any moment, some good thing might happen. A couple times, I ask them to dance. I smile like a salesman and dance gently; they smell of powder and ammonia. The bones of their hands and ribs feel as fragile as bird bones. I almost envy them, for how imminent their deaths are, how perfectly placed at the end of their long years. Just where it is supposed to be. All my life death has been cutting ahead in line: first my father, a heart attack at forty-two, my mother of ovarian cancer at fifty-six, and now my daughter, at eleven months, killed by a fucking acronym. When we finish dancing, they kiss my cheek or squeeze my hand. Rhonda tells me I’m a sweetheart.
    Friday night at Kmart, after the floors are all done, the boys throw a party. I allow this for certain occasions, and lately I’ve allowed it more and more. Party the rest of your lives, I feel like telling them. Tonight is Corliss’s birthday, plus Danny and Lisa’s first wedding anniversary. They all bring along wives and girlfriends. The assistant manager gives me a look before he locks me in, but he doesn’t say anything; as long as the place is shiny clean at 8:00 A.M. he doesn’t really care what happens while it’s dark.
    The boys work fast and by one o’clock the place is scrubbed and the supplies are back in the storeroom. Danny cranks up all