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if Dallas would start teasing her again, but he never did. When he commented at all, it was to say that she looked well, and since she knew that wasn’t true, the compliment had the opposite effect of what was intended.
    Indeed, as he watched her at the sink, he did feel bad for Loraine. With her husband gone and more than half her life ahead of her, it seemed to him that she needed to be prettier than she was. “So,” he said whenshe turned around and discovered him looking at her, “how are you making out?”
    She dried her hands on the dish towel and looped it through the refrigerator door handle. “Fine. How can you look at these lavish surroundings and ask such a question?” Her sweeping gesture included not just the kitchen, but the rest of the house, the yard, the neighborhood, and probably all of Mohawk.
    “I’m serious,” Dallas said, feeling immediately the silliness of his remark, since Loraine was obviously serious too. Her attitude in this respect was inexplicable to him, partly because her surroundings
were
quite lavish compared to his. Admittedly, there was a threadbare quality to the house. Even when David was alive, they had been forced by necessity to make do with things until they were used up. Now what had once been simply thin was close to transparent, like the dish towel Loraine had used to dry her hands. But that was one of the things Dallas had always liked about his brother’s house. Dallas himself never wore anything out. He lost it before wear-and-tear became an issue. His clothing was never ragged, because when he went to the laundromat he always managed to leave at least one load in one of the machines. Loss was perhaps the central feature of his existence, and he had learned to accept it the way one does a scraped knuckle or skinned knee. In the long run things equaled out anyway. For every load of clothing he forgot in the washing machine, he gained another in the dryer. Tumbling towels and shirts inside one dryer often bore a striking resemblance to those in the next, and more than once Dallas had discovered, after shoving the spun-dry contents into his duffle bag and going home, that it wassome other man’s wardrobe he had inherited. Provided the clothes fit, or near enough, Dallas was content and his life various.
    Only when he visited his brother’s house and saw the sameness of things, the continuity of familiar objects, did he feel keenly dissatisfied with the lack of control he exercised over his daily affairs. He had always liked Loraine’s house and was more comfortable there than just about any place he knew, except maybe the track or Greenie’s Tavern after work. He was so comfortable in his brother’s house that he disliked even the smallest changes or additions, and on those rare occasions when Loraine bought something small and bright and new for the house, he couldn’t help but wonder what she wanted with it. Fortunately, she wasn’t one of those women who liked to move furniture around. She was far too sensible to suppose that rearranging resulted in improvement.
    “You never see anything,” she told him, “but the whole place needs work. The cold seeps in everywhere during the winter. The lower cabinets are rotting where the plumbing leaks. None of the doors hang right anymore. I can’t even close the one in the bathroom. Not that it matters.”
    “I could—” Dallas began.
    “Don’t go making offers. I’m just fed up, that’s all.”
    “Don’t,” she insisted. “You’ll promise and then half an hour from now you’ll forget, and then I’ll dislike you for a while until I forget. Then in a few weeks you’ll remember and be mad at yourself until you forget again. So spare us both.”
    Dallas could tell that she was already angry with him, and he knew, of course, that what she said was true.He doubted she was miffed about this, though. And he knew enough about women to guess that she wasn’t mad about anything as obvious as his having awakened