The Rolling Divorces of Boundary Street

Like some unseen blight burrowed deep in the local vines, divorce kept preying on Boundary Street. The trend seemed a stealthy contagion drawing closer and closer, its malign influence headed squarely at the Copeland’s corner lot. Martin and Reese Kendell kicked off the path of destruction when Marty’s financial business imploded under the withering scrutiny of a nearby blogger whose “deep dive” into the practice revealed a clumsily veiled Ponzi scheme. Bankruptcy soon followed and their union went over a cliff.

Lilly and Mason Pranger’s Waterloo was less conventional but perhaps even more stirring. It did not follow the familiar detour of adultery or capital ruin, but rather a passion for travel and bridge which held Lilly in thrall. There was something about the novelty of new vistas combined with the intellectual combat of the tournaments that drove her out of her respectable Georgian near the forest preserve on an almost monthly basis. Mason consequently found himself forever “holding down the fort.” When he issued an ultimatum that the family’s accounts could no longer sustain such frequent journeys, that his own time and vitals had been stretched to the limit, she made an earnest effort to comply. Yet her sense of ennui, of trumps and distant sunsets, became so great that one evening she took up with one of her fellow card-counting zealots and lit out for Reno.

There had been seven marriages sundered in a four-block span, moving like the jet stream and continental drift, west to east. Like any suspenseful movie where the sense of foreboding rises by degrees, with the music descending to adagios in the lower range, romance met defeat with every new fracture and set of lawyers. These things tend to defy a rational pattern but Boundary Street appeared to be the scourge’s locus and vortex.

There is probably an equation which would predict the number of years it took for spouses to fully appreciate the defects of their pairing, even when the knowledge would not yet finish them. Some along the route who called it quits had been together for decades and at least one couple lasted only fourteen months.As the windows would dim in one house after another, Lang could not help but imagine a boxer whose smile contained several well-spaced vacancies; the trend also called to mind the odd, almost biblical selectivity of tornados which might leave one residence pristinely intact, even as the lot next door was demolished.

Lang was susceptible to finding explanation where perhaps none existed, so as to construct some hazy meaning. He was no conspiracy theorist—he rarely registered these notions out loud—but perhaps he was akin to the real seers in apprehending some obscure symmetry. To recognize some still abstruse phenomenon was to know what to watch out for, to break off a piece of the vast unknown and wrestle it into the light.

Maybe all the broken marriages were due to the fractious tenor of the times. He could not recall an era when national politics had been more filled with acrimony, causing otherwise frank people to avoid the topic like a sacred taboo. There had been a quiet rash of dissolved friendships, some direct and outright, but more frequently through a subtler kind of attrition, the withholding of a call or text to touch base, something that could be explained away with a blizzard of personal duties. All of this was not without the sting of absence, but the shock of suddenly being privy to others’ beliefs in a group chat, so unlike what had been imagined on the streetcorner or weekend lounge in more circumspect times, seemed even to alter the memory of better days.   

Other portents seemed to abound. Lang seldom visited the lakeshore in winter with its frozen slabs of discolored ice marring the edge of the water, the unforgiving north wind and dearth of sails. So when spring came and the water level had risen by God knows how much, swallowing up most of Merrill Street Beach, the lifeguard stations standing in a kind of tidal pool, the sand having retreated to a narrow island just short of the jetty, it seemed a cruel freak of nature. Droughts in many other places had revealed forgotten shipwrecks, rusting hulks of cars, medieval fortifications, corpses and abandoned towns, while conversely here, the waters submerged what had been long visible.

No one knew if it was the all the venom generated by so much suppressed discord or some other insidious force taking its toll on the elements. What had felt changeless when he was growing up—the regular alternation of sun and rain, the steady continuation of nondescript local trades, the rarity of sensational crimes–often wasn’t the case anymore, rather just another snapshot in time. More and more Lang found himself trying to anchor whom and what he liked, to keep those treasures from straying too far from sight where they might gradually disappear.

So it was with this backdrop that a sense of trouble between Brent and Rella Griffin unmoored him further. Lang had met Brent at Rosemont High where they were both trying to figure things out, both parsing several levels of alienation with rueful humor, sports mania and occasional weekend six packs. They seemed to move in tandem, marrying in their late twenties, plodding steadily up their respective company ladders. Casey had hit it off with Rella almost immediately, over their mutual love of French Cinema, Pilates and generous doses of Malbec. She was amused by Rella’s wildness—typified by a tiny tattoo on her shoulder from college—which drew them down some tenuous backroads. 

Lang had always thought the Griffins’ breezy marriage as solid as a battleship, with their stories of outrageous pranks and obvious ease with one another. He had never seen them in anything but the most jocular quarrel. Yet it seemed to him lately some fissures were showing, as if Boundary Street were again working its dark magic.

Lang’s own marriage was solid but he and Casey felt they couldn’t afford to lose any more friends, and he imagined himself a gambler whose stacks of chips had fallen perilously low. Without kids yet and siblings scattered, they clung to familiar places and the provincial camaraderie, the few friends who had settled there. If the Griffins ran aground, who knew what dominoes would fall next?   

Boundary Street’s name derived its origin from once lying just outside the city, on the other side of the mild escarpment that was formed during the ice age when enormous glaciers flattened most of the surrounding terrain. The ridge that ran for several miles made a natural border, but the area had long since been annexed and was not considered particularly rarified, as it rested just sixty feet above the land to the East. The houses and the problems were fairly similar on both sides of the forsaken perimeter. It was hardly Mount Olympus, even if the real estate at the top of the hill commanded a mild vista. And yet, the avenue continued to have a distinct identity and Lang still thought of Marfield as a kind of borderland.

Brent and Rella often prodded the Copelands into exploring things they wouldn’t otherwise; going to a reggae club, attending a lacrosse game, playing Mahjong. The previous month Rella had coaxed them to a shooting range though none of them had so much as held a gun before. One recent outing had them playing miniature golf at a historically themed layout. The course wound through flimsy replicas of the sphinx, the Colosseum and Parthenon, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and Stonehenge, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and pillars of Easter Island, their various ramps, bridges and funnels thwarting every straight line. It was there that they witnessed the Griffins’ first real public skirmish. Brent wasn’t a golfer and it showed, his shots often caroming over the shallow walls of the holes into a filthy mote or dusty wasteland. The rest of them were more careful and attuned to the game, calculating the angles and grades.     

They all chuckled at his folly in the beginning, unable to help themselves, and he seemed initially unphased by his ineptitude. “Are we insured, if anyone in the group ahead of us suffers a concussion?” Rella kidded him. “Maybe they should have issued helmets,” he went along at his own expense. But Brent was used to being good at things—gin rummy, touch football, the stock market—and eventually his rocketing score began to get under his skin. Rella must have noticed this but she was enjoying the mishaps so much, and perhaps because she was so accustomed to being on the short end, she couldn’t let up.

“Maybe a little more finesse, dear,” she advised. “The hole for the attack on the Alamo isn’t until the 17^th.”

“Some of the shots require a little force and then the hazard catapults the ball half way across the course,” he replied, his composure finally cracking. “It’s a ridiculous design.”

Finally, after one more errant strike that ricocheted off the Eiffel Tower and jumped the fence into the street, he broke the club in two, its steel head bounding off in the direction of the driving range. Lang and Casey couldn’t help but laugh and after a few seconds when the silliness of it sank in, Brent followed suit, but Rella seemed put off that a cluster of children were now gawking at them. “So much for family fun,” she announced guiltily.          

Afterward, when the weather cooperated, the two couples usually retreated to the Griffin’s capacious patio, with its hedged privacy, hot tub and fire pit, where they would engage in boozy conversations that ran the gamut between the mundane and the sublime. The yard was decorated with a few stone lanterns in the shape of Japanese pagodas which reminded Lang of a Buddhist rock garden they’d visited the previous autumn. Casey had taken to wearing long flowing summer dresses and with the heat, Rella had switched to a shorter curly hairstyle. Their wives were always evolving into different versions of themselves.

As they all settled in Adirondack chairs under the soft lamplight, the crickets mounted wave after wave of their peculiar chant, insistent as a pulse, rising to a crescendo before dying out like cheers from a distant stadium.

“Time to celebrate Rella’s almost hole-in-one,” Casey said.

“Almost only counts in horseshoes and gunshots,” Lang responded. “But I’ll drink to it anyway.”

“They make little knobs under the carpeting so nobody wins a prize,” Brent said about the teaser at the end, a steep mountainous challenge offering a free game for a fluke shot. “Somebody ought to sue them.”  

“That reminds me,” Casey interjected. “We haven’t played ‘My Favorite Complaint’ for a while. We must have some good ones stored up.” The rule was that it should never be anything personal, nothing to impugn an individual but merely a criticism, the more trivial the better, about some facet of their lives.

A few stock pet peeves were offered, how there were too many choices nowadays, how complicated everything was, or how few objects were tangible anymore, records or movies or bank accounts, how much it all just seemed shot through the ether and beyond one’s grasp. There hadn’t been much disagreement about these common nuisances.

Rella had been drinking a bit faster than usual and this must have loosened her up for the next round. Her usual witty discourse about the demands of her cell phone, especially the hectoring of its constant texts, threatened to devolve into a rant. “The pings are like wind chimes now.” 

“Just turn it off. That’s what I do,” Brent said, matter-of-factly.

“So that’s why you’re so often incommunicado lately. Especially when the kids need an urgent ride somewhere and I’m in a bind.”

“Meetings, forever meetings. The bane of my existence.”

“But with whom, that’s the million-dollar question,” Rella almost whispered yet with a terse ferocity. 

A charged silence opened up between them as Brent fidgeted with his drink and Rella looked out into the Chinese Elms that rimmed the yard, with her expression that suggested a slow burn. For the first time in memory, they were straying from the guidelines.

“I’ll tell you what I can’t stand,” Lang exclaimed, hijacking the subject as he eyed Rella’s body language, frozen like a cat’s. “Everyone’s lust for travel, the great antidote. Whatever life denies you, go find it on the other side of the rainbow.” He could understand why everyone would want to flee the heartland in midwinter when the shroud of grey, vanishing light and unforgiving cold appeared like some kind of underworld. But the whole idea had taken on the veneer of boasting across multiple platforms. And somehow Lang associated this compulsion to jump on a plane with other odd events happening in the neighborhood; the high-water mark of the lake eating up Gresham beach like a permanent tide, or the strange congregation of birds at a particular house, local mailboxes being robbed, graffiti in the form of strange symbols strewn across them.

The Copelands were glad Brent and Rella had stuck around. More than one set of friends had succumbed to the siren song of leaving town permanently. He missed the Haniffs who had decamped to New Mexico on the heels of some too-good-to-pass-up job, in pursuit of some desert mirage, spurning the familiar at all costs. The absence of another pair, the Lamberts, was acutely felt because they were funny and laughter seemed to salve a score of minor wounds. They had been part of the “eight musketeers” before the attrition had set in. Rella had joked the other night that the way things were going, they would have to start auditioning other couples as replacements. 

“But isn’t that just the point of travel,” Rella said, thrusting her wineglass out in front of her like a shield, “to fashion a real break, get completely elsewhere when it all seems too much.” Brent subtly shook his head at this but said nothing. A rogue gust shook the branches of one of the cottonwoods and one could imagine spores unavailable to the naked eye spreading around the perimeter. Suddenly, Rella seemed to relax, flopping back almost supine, and everyone lost their zeal for persuasion. “I’m not going anyplace,” she said, perhaps a little drunk by then, “but there’s something in the air and it isn’t just the virus.”

Lang and Brent had met at Marfield’s dog park, a thin oasis of beach, cordoned off from the craft and swimming sections, that had survived the legal challenges aimed at preventing its establishment. Dozens of inert sailboats lined the shore on one side, their masts a chorus of hollow clanging, while a handful glided under a wispy sky less than a mile out. The water had eaten away nearly a third of the sand due to some meteorological facts Lang never took the trouble to decipher. He recalled earlier aberrations like the year alewives washed up by the thousands, or the swarms of dragonflies that gathered one season, swooping and darting in a frenzy as in some display of aerial combat, and the strange fog that enveloped the quay a few summers before like a cloud sunk from its own weight to the earth. They sat on one of the flat boulders that were piled as a bulwark to storms. Brent was smoking, a habit he’d recently taken up again, probably much to Rella’s dismay, but Lang made a point not to mention it.

“So things got a little testy the other night,” Lang said, as he watched the spirited hijinx of the dogs tearing along the edge of the surf. “I’ve never quite seen Rella like that.”

“She’s been a little on edge lately. Better to leave it alone, until it passes.”

“Really, that’s your solution?”

“That and,” Brent hesitated, seeming to fix on an object far out on the calm expanse, “I’m seeing someone.”

“A shrink? How can you afford it?”

“Not that kind of someone.” Lang had misunderstood because he couldn’t conceive Brent was capable of such a deliberate, heartless deception. He knew this sort of thing was like the most routine of sins, but he’d always seen his immediate circle as a preserve of frankness. 

“No.”

“I’m afraid so. She’s great before you get all in a lather about it.”

Lang tried to disguise his shock, to mimic the kind of sophisticated ambivalence many people would portray, but he knew it wouldn’t work. He was so seldom surprised anymore that when he was, it made him a little dizzy, threw his breathing out of sync. Lang felt as if he’d been drawn into an alternative universe, imagined Brent in the shifting afternoon light pulling off an invisible mask. 

“Why did you tell me? Do I look like a priest?”

“Not in the slightest but sometimes you have to say something out loud to make sure it’s really true. I thought you’d be flattered. I know I can trust you,” he added with a long look of consternation.

“Of course, you can but why do I now feel like an accomplice who could get five to ten in Leavenworth for driving a getaway car?”

Lang was reminded of those movies where some blistering testimony gets loosed in the courtroom that shouldn’t have been, and the judge’s feckless task of trying to strip it from the jury’s consciousness. What did they say in court about prohibited evidence, how do you un-ring that bell? He watched as a number of gulls lined along the breakwater stationed like sentries broke away and strafed the shore.

“OK, forget I said it.”

“I don’t think so. What happened?”

“Like most of the most significant things in life, pure coincidence.”

Brent related how on a walk with their beagle Cooper he’d looked in one of the free little libraries which had proliferated throughout the neighborhood the last few years. Most of the volumes they contained were random junk passed over even at rummage sales, but he spied a not too disheveled novel called “Dunhill’s Folly” which he thumbed through before finding a slender note in a delicate, flowing script buried in the middle that read, “Liked this much more than I thought I would. If you feel the same, drop me a line. Aphrodite899@yahoo.com.”

“The book wasn’t any sensation but who could resist pursuing what that was all about?” He went on, taking an especially deep drag on his Parliament. “I read as much as I needed to. We exchanged a few furtive messages, two more literary suggestions, and were off to the races.”   

This had happened the previous fall when Brent had sunk into a slough of despair about the coming winter, when they didn’t have the money to escape in February as they normally did. They had probably traded blame behind closed doors. The convergence of dissatisfaction and intrigue must have sent him reeling. 

Brent must have been uneasy about Lang’s unspoken judgment, as he told him something he’d heard at the racquetball club about an experiment with gnats. He said that if you kept them in a jar long enough, they would remain there even after the lid was removed. “Not only that,” he went on, flaring his free hand for emphasis, “but their offspring, having been programmed not to test their limits, won’t try to fly out either. Can you blame me for trying to get out for a little while? See what’s still out there in the world?”

“Usually a boatload of trouble.”

“Pretty damned interesting trouble occasionally.”

“I’m not willing to bet the whole fucking store to find out,” Brent said as a fight broke out between two of the dogs, snarls and charges, over some duck toy tossed too close to the pack, near a slatted wooden fence that acted as a barrier.

“Think of it like a vacation, a vacation from yourself. And it’s going to be over soon. Believe me, it will all blow over.”  

It wasn’t that Lang had never been tempted, but he had always snuffed out the whole idea as impossible before it had the slightest chance of blooming. He recalled how Brent had gushed about Rella when they first began dating, and a long time after that. And Rella was their friend too, a loyalty now suspended if not fractured outright. If trust was the currency of human connection, one way or another he would have to draw down his account. Every secret, even undiscovered, left its mark on the one who kept it. 

“Just forget I said anything. File it away somewhere you won’t find it again,” Brent said, stubbing out the cigarette and flicking it near the curb. “You’d be surprised how easy it is.”

What did one do with unbidden knowledge one never wanted in the first place? When Lang encountered certain stories in the news, he instinctively turned away, not because he was hypersensitive but because the tottering foundation of all human nature seemed exposed.  He understood the impulse, the need to jolt oneself out of the tunnel of sameness, to retrace one’s steps toward some earlier fork in the road before the weight of commitment descended on everything. He had once or twice mused about quitting the company and opening his own bookstore, eschewing the crappy bestsellers and putting only the finest, most difficult stuff in the windows. But then he had pictured his favorite sofa being hauled out to a repo van, and ultimately had thrown on the brakes.  

As common as it was these days, Lang regarded divorce as monstrous, unimaginable. The friendships dislodged, the near-death experience like being unceremoniously fired from your life. He imagined someone divorced must feel like an actor who has become familiar in a role being forced to take on a very different one, disorienting the audience and oneself. The only person in his family struck by that severance was his Aunt Marnie who had changed utterly after the event, becoming strange and remote, most of her conversations afterward appearing to occur inside her own head.

More and more Lang happened upon bitter invective launched between couples in public places. One instance involved whether the couple had parked too close to a fire hydrant, the man walking off the length of the space with the conviction of a referee marking the yardage of a penalty. Another concerned the lapse of failing to bring an umbrella when the sky opened up like Noah’s Genesis. Yet another was in a different language, Mandarin or Cantonese perhaps, but the squabble hit all the familiar rhythms and hysterical notes. Lately, he would walk away wondering if they had “fallen under the spell.” 

For a long time, Lang and Casey’s union seemed to trundle along without overt threat. Not that there weren’t robust arguments, loud enough to be heard across the gangway. They might shout about what movie to watch, whose parents to visit for Christmas, why the bedroom sometimes looked like a disaster site on TV, the inevitable frictions of life. Once after a party where Casey felt he had flirted with another woman too much, she’d thrown a magazine at him and knocked a lamp clear off the night table, but amid repeated reassurances that it was nothing, the episode subsided in a couple days. While these skirmishes remained infrequent and in the normal register of connubial discord, in view of all the casualties on Boundary Street, he’d begun to regard them as the first signs of a fraying bond, like tiny cracks in the hull of a flimsy skiff.  

And he knew no subterfuge would work very long in Brent’s case. Rella was too perceptive—she peered straight into people’s thoughts sometimes, the many they decided to withhold. He pictured her roller coaster of fury and sorrow, the distinct rising and falling sounds of it. Not to mention the turbulent effect it would have on Casey, just another rogue wave no one saw coming.   

With the approach of Halloween, layers of ochre leaves coating the sidewalks and lawns, a new bite in the wind swept through the gaps like an express. The time change would soon eclipse a bigger piece of the afternoon. It wasn’t yet dark outside but the sun’s brightness had already dimmed, blocked by the roofs that surrounded Delaney Park across the way. The Copelands’ modest split level looked obliquely out at the cul-de-sac in the front and at a warren of yards and phone wires in the back. It seemed the perfect season to brood about the sudden discontent of his friend, and his precarious antidote. Lang poured himself a Dewar’s and water, hoping it would do its tranquilizing work and make Brent’s disclosure fuzzy enough not to matter.  

Lang wasn’t privy to any more than the kind of offhand cavil any spouse could let slip. Rella apparently wanted a new car because the current one was eleven years old and getting unreliable, but Brent was adamant to hold off until the mortgage was paid, about two and a half years hence. He hated compounding what he owed and once dreamt that their monthly charges filled a giant sack that he was hauling up the side of a mountain. 

Casey rattled through the door, getting back from the small college where she worked in the personnel department, assessing the applicants with a combination of reading between the lines and pure instinct. She seemed startled by his presence—she usually got home first—as she wrestled her coat off, as if he were an intruder doing an inventory of their valuables.

“Rella thinks Brent is seeing somebody else,” she said, pausing just outside the kitchen, preempting any automatic dismissal. “She’s frantic and I pray she’s wrong.”

“That’s hard to believe,” Lang said, he hoped with just the right mix of skepticism and concern.

“I assume you haven’t detected anything a little off.”

“I don’t think I’m cut out for the spying trade.”

“I know you. You sometimes like to play dumb.”

“You’d be amazed how little acting that takes.”

“It would be good to know if he’s about to blow up my best friend’s life.”

His voice didn’t waiver and sounded natural enough. For Brent, Lang found he could be a fairly serviceable liar, but he knew this wouldn’t last long.

Their cat “Gulliver” sprawled on the armrest of the loveseat, taking in the whole scene with his perpetual indifference. He was the epitome of calm until they were sound asleep at which point hecould knock over vases, knickknacks, wine bottles and priceless photographs to his heart’s content.   

“Maybe they have gotten dinged up a bit lately but it’s probably just the rotten state of the world these days,” he said. “They’ve always been great together.”

Lang had never been a good at deceit, someone who could sustain a bluff, manipulate his expressions or otherwise carry out the most routine imposture. His face and deportment were usually a broadcast signal of his interior state. At poker, it was all he could do not to break out laughing when he drew a pair of aces. Lang could have strangled Rella for confiding her suspicions in the same way he wished Brent had failed to keep kept his mouth shut; neither could contain the poison on their own. But Lang knew he had no such luxury, that to drop one hint would be tantamount to hiring a skywriter to spread the news. He was perched on a see-saw of whom to mislead.  

“That’s what they used to say about the Flanagans too. Now their attorneys are going at it tooth and nail.”   

“Sometimes you just have to let people thrash things out for themselves,” he said, as Casey fidgeted with a feline bookend. “There’s only so much you can know.” Sifting through his uneasy guilt, he thought that was at least partly true.   

Lang had no dog to walk but sometimes liked to roam the neighborhood late at night with no real destination, as if he were on some resident watch patrol.  Lancelot’s, the bar where he’d first met Casey, had recently been demolished to build a senior living development, but he wished he were still there at his favorite spot by the shelf of antique shields and sipping a Manhattan. Instead, he wandered through the no-mans-land of dangerous confidences with which he’d been entrusted over the years. His officemate Harris told him he’d once stolen a car. His sister vouchsafed that she’d once had a fling with a movie star early in his career. A fairly smashed stranger at a party divulged that she thought she was a lesbian her sophomore year in college. What did one do with these confessional intimacies? 

The streetlights in Marsfield were dim, the subject of many an elder driver’s complaint, but Lang’s night vision was still keen. He observed the suspended beauty of a sickle moon poking out behind the eves of the closest house, and the silent image of a young couple dancing slowly, melded to each other in their living room, to a song only they could hear. He had to blink a couple times when he saw Brent standing at the free library station a good half block away, to make sure this wasn’t some nocturnal illusion. Something in the way he held one of the books and leaned against the post with the nonchalance of someone in his own den identified him amid the deep shadows.

He swayed as if he were stoned to oblivion and aided with a flashlight, started ransacking the array of mismatched titles. Lang thought to greet him at first but Brent had become agitated, so Lang ducked behind a thicket of briars. Whether Brent was seeking a clandestine message from his lover or trying to find some other obscure communication, it was clear that neither could be found as he pitched one volume after another onto the parkway, then pounded the top of the cabinet, the illumined ember of his cigarette clearly visible.

Lang wondered if there were some ancient rite he might perform to lift the curse, halt the marital epidemic. He thought of what he might say to Casey to placate her for whatever outlandish accusation she might hurl, once he reverted to his natural transparent state and the whole episode erupted. Brent might come clean or not, go on searching for a chance message from the great beyond but odds were their marriage would be wrecked within a year, their separate belongings shipped to far-flung addresses. No doubt there would be another baffling occurrence, a dinosaur bone appearing out of nowhere in a forest preserve or a piece of space junk plunging into someone’s garden around the time of their departure.

The houselights were doused and the outlines of the structures beneath them lay innocuously quiet. Brent suddenly hesitated in his tirade, as if discovering he was no longer alone in his own mind. It must have been that, not finding an answer to his last missive, he wanted to eliminate all the not quite random chances, the multitude of choices thrown in one’s path. He took stacks of books out of the box, made a pile by the grass, poured some liquid from a bottle he’d stashed in his coat over it, and then tossed the glowing cigarette on top such that the sprawl of it roared up in a burst and jetted out in spikes of flame, though the stone sidewalk prevented the danger from spreading.

It must have been the meandering smoke or light from the fire because another half- submerged memory broke through as from behind a crumbling wall. At one of their gatherings years before he had surprised Rella cooking in the kitchen, bent to kiss her on the cheek but in her rush to finish, she had quickly turned such that he caught her square on the mouth, yet neither retreated for a second or two. It was then he’d first seen the tattoo, of a woman rising from the sea, just below the collarbone. Something had spattered on the stove, steam hissing such that there was time only for one bemused look, neither vexed nor welcome but an alchemy of both, in that instant when she darted to cover the pan.

As Brent watched the smoldering pages, Lang decided to permanently forget what his friendhad revealed. Sometimes you needed a little margin for error, a fire break to prevent the transmission. He wanted to reach out and save his friend but Brent had wandered into the liminal zone of betrayal and failed to retreat, had crossed all the way over. As the sparks winked out on the lawn, Lang felt a peculiar lightness, all his cares about separation and loss seeming to ascend, swirling and feathery as the smoke itself, into the night sky.

He and Casey would just have to keep their distance and wait for all the strangeness to pass. Maybe it was time to leave town for a while and see what else was out there.  

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