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Dabbing the cream on his forehead, he picked up another jar, a moisturizer with royal jelly. He wasn’t sure how a jelly could be royal, but he removed its lid anyway and spread the cream under his chin. He picked up the tube of retinol eye cream she kept behind her toothbrush and smeared it over his eyes. He removed his clothes and sprinkled acetone-free nail polish remover on his pubic hair and worked it in at the roots. His eyelids stung. He opened a precious-looking prismatic glass jar with a clear gel inside and smeared the gel on his testicles.
    He sprayed her perfume on the back of his tongue. It made him retch, and he gripped the sink, coughing and spitting toward the drain. The perfume’s fragrance was of flowers and some kind of light powder, but it tasted like cheap gin. It coated his tongue and cheeks and sank into his body. He splashed water into his mouth, but it served only to spread the flavor. He regarded his face in the mirror. Red welts were rising on his eyelids and neck. He resisted the urge to touch them.
    Crouching down, he opened the cabinets under the sink. He pulled out bottles of cleanser, gallon jugs of shampoo and conditioner Franny had borrowed or taken from work, the box of Franny’s pills. David counted ten months’ worth of pills, ten stickers bearing Franny’s name, twenty plastic hinges, hundreds of tabs of foil behind which hid hundreds of pills that meant nothing at all. A dental water jet attached to a turquoise-colored plastic box whirred when he plugged it in. David lay down and pressed his hands against the blind underside of the sink. He opened a jug of shampoo and emptied its contents over his body. The shampoo was a translucent blue and felt cold at first, but it warmed protectively and lathered a bit when he rubbed it. It covered his body and held him. He tried to crawl under the sink but could not fit his shoulders through the door. Instead, he lay with his head inside the paper-lined womb of the cabinet, its frame a wooden pillow under his head, the dental water jet whirring like a lullaby.

 
    17.
    DAVID STOOD beside his wife at their wedding reception. The event was well attended, in part because it was held at an Old Country Buffet during the dinner rush. Their invited guests didn’t seem to mind the $7.99 charge. David had just taken on more debt by buying his dental office, in addition to what he paid monthly for his mother’s care, in addition to her old legal bills. Franny and David had been married by the justice that afternoon, and she was still wearing the white lace skirt that made her knees look like the speckled hams under heat lamps at the buffet. Patrons of the restaurant wandered into their corner to shake David’s hand and tell Franny that she looked lovely. A child gave Franny a fistful of gummy bears from the ice cream station.
    The young husband of one of David’s dental hygienists brought a cooler of beer. David’s father returned from the dinner line with a plate heaped with meat. “Pig to pork,” he said. He shook his son’s hand and picked up a rolled silverware napkin from the table. “Live with meaning and die old.”
    Three empty plates at a table held corsages as symbols of Franny’s parents and David’s mother, who had moved herself into a women’s home when David was very young. He couldn’t recall exactly when his mother had gone to the home, and he and his father rarely visited. When they did, she always gave David something she had made, a card or ornament, out of the same type of construction paper her son had used in his kindergarten class. Once, the keepsake was a picture she had drawn of David in red and blue marker.
    His mother had been a math teacher and was the only truly calculating element across the entire course of David’s life. She expressed no interest in ever meeting Franny. On their wedding day, his mother called the Old Country Buffet and the