Next year I’ll bring a poem if that’s okay.”

“Fine,” I had answered miserably. It was after that that she told me about my writing a novel and being a loner, and having wanted to join the LPGA back in the sixties. I think she felt sorry for me—I’m sure of it, in fact—though I also felt sorry for myself.

“Did you bring another Housman poem?” she says now and smirks at me, then turns and throws her nibbled egg as far as she can off into the gravestones and elms of the old part, where it hits soundlessly. She throws as a catcher would, snapping it by her ear in a gainly way, on a tape-line into the shadows. I admire her positive form. To mourn the loss of one child when you have two others is a hard business. And we are not very practiced, though we treat it as a matter of personal dignity and affection so that Ralph’s death and our loss will not get entrapped by time and events and ruin our lives in a secret way. In a sense, we can do no wrong here.

Out on Constitution Street an appliance repair truck has stopped at the light. Easler’s Philco Repair, driven by Sid (formerly of Sid’s Service, a bankrupt). He has worked on my house many times and is heading toward the village square to hav-a-cup at The Coffee Spot before plunging off into the day’s kitchens and basements and sump pumps. The day is starting in earnest. A lone pedestrian—a man—walks along the sidewalk, one of the few Negroes in town, walking toward the station in a light-colored, wash-and-wear suit. The sky is still milky, but possibly it will burn off before I leave for the Motor City with Vicki.

“No Housman today,” I say.

“Well,” X says and smiles, and seats herself on Craig’s stone to listen. “If you say so.” Lights are numerous and growing dim with the daylight along the backs of houses on my street. I feel warmer.

It is a “Meditation” by Theodore Roethke, who also attended the University of Michigan, something X will be wise to, and I start it in my best, most plausible voice, as if my dead son could hear it down below:

      “I have gone into the waste lonely places behind the eye….”

      X has already begun to shake her head before I am to the second line, and I stop and look to her to see where the trouble is.

She puches out her lower lip and sits her stone. “I don’t like that poem,” she says matter-of-factly.

I knew she would know it and have a strong opinion about it. She is still an opinionated Michigan girl, who thinks about things with certainty and is disappointed when the rest of the world doesn’t. Such a big strapping things-in-order girl should be in every man’s life. They alone are reason enough for the midwest’s existence, since that’s where most of them thrive. I feel tension rising off me like a fever now. It is possible that reading a poem over a little boy who never cared about poems is not a good idea.

“I thought you’d know it,” I say in a congenial voice.

“I shouldn’t really say I don’t like it,” X says coldly. “I just don’t believe it, is all.”

It is a poem about letting the everyday make you happy—insects, shadows, the color of a woman’s hair—something else I have some strong beliefs about. “When I read it, I always think it’s me talking,” I say.

“I don’t think those things in that poem would make anybody happy. They might not make you miserable. But that’s all,” X says and slips down off the stone. She smiles at me in a manner 1 do not like, tight-lipped and disparaging, as if she believes I’m wrong about everything and finds it amusing. “Sometimes I don’t think anyone can be happy anymore.” She puts her hands in her London Fog. She probably has a lesson at seven, or a follow-through seminar, and her mind is ready to be far, far away.

“I think we’re all released to the rest of our lives, is my way of looking at it,” I say hopefully.