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during her days alone, back and forth in her limited track: the kitchen, the bathroom, the front room. The chairs she used carried the print of her backside. Her shoes were formed to fit her badly shaped feet and bloated ankles. There was a long coat she wore most days she went outdoors, even when it was steaming with heat. This held the shape of her stooped back even as it hung on the coat stand by the door.
    â€œEileen is fine,” I called to her.
    She made no answer, and I figured that she had lost herself in staring out the window again.
    I walked out the side door and went into the garage. Since my mother did not drive, the garage served as a depository for all the items from the old house and from my rented house, which I had recently given up. Worthless truck was piled up against all four walls and tucked up into a loft made from old floorboards I had nailed into a platform. I meant to retrieve an old rake and some shears for Eileen from the garage. My father’s old workbench sat along one wall, and I would have to hoist it aside to get at the rake.
    The bench was not overlarge but it was heavy because it had been made from a number of boards glued together like a butcher’s block. I supposed my father had made it himself as a younger man. The legs were as thick as my arm and looked as if they might have been turned in a rush on a lathe; they were hewn with uneven grooves all along their length. The top had been hacked and burnt and drilled so that its surface was splintered and uneven. Where the great vise had been attached, the grime was not as thick and the wood was not as splintered, and so I gripped the bench there when I tried to move it.
    I found I could move the bench only an inch or two from the studs of the garage wall, and as I did it, pain tore through my back and shoulder, where I had been slightly injured by a bullet from Roger Hardiman’s derringer just three months earlier. It ran through my mind that I was getting old and out of shape; I pictured my father shifting the bulky thing with ease. Between the swearing and the grunting and the heaving, I made little progress. I’ll go on a regimen, I thought, I’ll take up boxing again, work the gym. Each time I held my breath to shift the bench another inch across the concrete floor, I felt the veins in my head throb. I knew that even a young man could die in an instant if his blood spilled out into his brain. That’s the way to go, rotting out here for a month before my mother thinks of looking for me. Finally one front leg snapped off the bench at the top and the whole thing fell slowly over. I fell, too, and just managed to avoid getting pinned under the big block. Worry had come to work so quickly in my mind that I couldn’t help but imagine how my leg bones would snap under the massive weight of the bench. I gritted my teeth and tried to shut down the sinking nausea in my gut.
    I picked up the snapped leg and felt a wave of emotion. It wasn’t that I had any use for the bench. But I knew it was something that had been of much use to my father, and I could see what the work of his own hands had done to the worn wood. Some of my father’s working tools were there in the garage, forgotten and useless for a man like me. My own extra things were there, too, my shoulder rig and my gun-cleaning kit, my record collection, some books I had read.
    All of Fred Caudill’s children were dead but one. What remained of his blood in the world amounted only to one misshapen son and one lost grandson. It seemed by my own lack of strength or faith that I was fading away, too, and I felt sad for my father. By all accounts he had been a good man. He had worked and worked his whole life and tried to hold things together. I was saved at that moment by my lack of ability to believe that my father could be looking down at me from some great hereafter. I was spared that shame.
    I picked up the broken leg and examined it more closely.