He did love his food too, thank goodness, because Jolene loved her cooking. She liked sewing the girls’ clothes, she enjoyed fixing her friends’ hair and taking the girls to Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey on Sundays, but most of all she loved cooking. Not the drudge stuff, the daily dinners, but real cooking, foreign recipes and New Age organic dishes included. She could always bring over her latest dish to the block parties if calling it by a familiar name didn’t fool George and the girls into trying it. Jolene was a natural-born chef, daring and talented, and she knew it.

One time she really wanted to take an Asian cooking class at the Sunset Center in Carmel. Two hundred fifty dollars it cost. This was when Cathy still lived at home and before the girls were born, and they were just as short of money then. George couldn’t stand that kind of cooking. Bamboo shoots in his soup, not gonna happen, he would say.

She showed George the ad and asked him for the money. The idea put him in physical pain, she could see that. She didn’t say another word, just washed the dishes and went to bed and got up the next morning and cooked breakfast.

After breakfast, he handed her the check drawn on Wells Fargo Bank. She’d always remember the wagon-and-the-oxen picture on that check, like a wagonful of treasure being brought to her. “Waste of money,” he said, smiling, as she hugged him.

She learned a lot in that class, but most of all, she never doubted again that George loved her and would always love her, and this sure knowledge had given them a good life together.

So now she didn’t feel too happy about what she was about to do. The two file drawers on the right-hand side of the desk had always been kept locked, and in there George kept the checkbook and bank statements.

She could just ask, but asking wasn’t seeing. George wasn’t feeling good, his mind wasn’t as clear as it used to be, and she was going to have to find out for herself if he’d done anything foolish. And if he had, because he was so mad about not being able to build out back, she wanted to be able to take care of it quietly and soon.

She tried the letter opener, but that didn’t work. She tried a bobby pin and tweezers and a safety pin. No luck.

She went into the bathroom and unzipped George’s shaving kit, his secret hideout place, and wrapped in a baggie she found two silver keys. In a jiffy, she had those desk drawers wide open.

He kept folders for each utility and for the mortgage company, the doctors, taxes, the car insurance, and so on. A big thick folder had the title “Wells Fargo.”

Jolene tiptoed back to the window and peeked out the curtains. George had finished with the weeding and was bagging up his pile. In a hurry now, she went back to the folder and opened it up.

They had two accounts, both in her name too. Why, she’d never known her name was on the accounts along with George’s. One was a savings and one was a checking.

George would never do anything fancy with extra money, like put it in the stock market or something, so she knew any money they had would be in the savings account. She pulled out the latest statement and took a look.

“Well, I’ll be,” she muttered. They had forty-two thousand dollars!

She looked back a few months. No withdrawal of around six thousand. The most was twelve hundred fifty drawn a couple of months before. Thank goodness! She looked back further and further in time, at the same money sitting in the same dusty account gathering its paltry interest. George’s nest egg had probably been sitting there for twenty years while they got along on the nursery money and lately the Social Security.

Her eyes went back to the most recent statement. With forty-two thousand dollars they could be doing so much to make their lives easier, for Cathy, for the girls… George could get a medical consultation at Stanford. They had a secret fortune!

She heard the back door rattle. Then she heard George saying “Now, what’s this?” to himself, and the door rattling again. Meantime she was pulling out a blank withdrawal slip from the savings book, closing the file up, closing the file drawer, and locking it up just like before.

Rattle rattle. “Goddammit!” George roared. “Jo-lene!”

“I’m comin’!” she called. She whisked across the kitchen and opened up, the withdrawal slip crammed into her pants pocket.

“Somebody locked the goddamn door!”

“Those little rascals,” Jolene said, “played a trick on you. Well, come on in.”

At 3:00 A.M. Elizabeth woke up. She went out onto the deck to see the stars, wrapped in a blanket. Looking out into the quiet black, she lay down on the chaise lounge. The Milky Way was an old creviced lane of light. She followed the handle of the Big Dipper to Arcturus and on to the Corona Borealis and Vega. A satellite moved across the sky, a solid point of light, consistent, fast. Soon the night sky would fill with such man-made lights, glittering space stations would wheel around, rockets would leave trails of brilliant debris…

Darryl had called and left one of his urgent, inane messages around noon. It disturbed her deeply. She had a hard enough time keeping herself together without this insistent male interest intruding on her life.

He better leave me alone, she thought. And felt such a pang of loneliness that she had to clench her teeth and wrap herself tight in the blanket to make up for the arms that weren’t there. Darryl, damn him, had reawakened some needs that she had tried hard to forget.

When she could think again, she told herself many things: about how connections are not worth it. About how all is impermanent and transitory, most especially human relationships. It all led to nothing but acute suffering. Loneliness was nothing compared to loss. She had made her decision to remain alone, and it was so unfair for this foolish married man to bring his warmth and wanting to her home, to interfere with her and knock her off-balance.

But then, perversely, she thought, if only I had someone just for a few minutes, I could open my arms and he would fill them and I could press my cheek against his warm living cheek…

She went back inside and flipped up the computer screen, brought up her journal, and wrote:

Please don’t say anything

I know loneliness too

Just cup your hand

Behind my head

Open my mouth gently

With your lips

And with your tongue

Search, search for me

Then, finally, she could sleep.

That first moment, opening her eyes and seeing the red line across the trees that meant the night had finally left her, Elizabeth was content. Morning, hope, the dawn, old and effective symbols, drew her from bed into the weary round once again.

Today is a special day, she told herself, trying to hold on to that evanescent hope.

Downstairs, she made herself breakfast, listening to the sparrows and jays. She ate oatmeal, because that was the current health fad, which should keep her alive to suffer the indignities of an undeservedly long life, and then she dressed carefully. She needed to present an aspect of mental and physical health. She wanted to look important.

Today she would present a progress report to her thesis committee at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She repacked her burgundy briefcase, making sure she had everything, and went out to the Subaru. The mountains lay gentle under the morning sun, and in the quietness she began to feel a strong urge not to go out there to the land of freeways and people.

Get a grip, she told herself, you’re getting phobic. She decided to get it over with efficiently and get out. There were some problems with the study right now that she didn’t want to get into with the committee.