A Hole in the Universe by Mary Mcgarry Morris

couldn’t tolerate. He stood up and said it was getting late; he probably should be going now.
    “No. Please, don’t,” Lisa said.
    Dennis apologized and asked him not to leave. Gordon continued to stand while on either side the children stared up in wide-eyed intrigue. Even for their sake he couldn’t manage a smile. “Actually, I’m really tired. I think that little bit of beer did me in,” he said, stooping to kiss the top of Lisa’s head.
    “I’m just trying to help, that’s all,” Dennis said, hand raised suppliantly.
    “No, I know,” he said as Lisa reached back for his arm. “I just hate causing you two any more trouble, that’s all.”
    “Believe me, it’s not you.” Lisa squeezed his arm hard.
    “She means me,” Dennis said with a rueful smile, then told him again that he was sorry.
     
     
    He let Dennis take him only as far as the bus stop. He found himself enjoying the rackety bus ride home. The driver, a woman with an orangy buzz cut, kept smiling at him through the mirror. A white-haired woman in soiled turquoise pants was the only other passenger. Clamped between her legs were three bulging shopping bags filled with smaller plastic bags. When he had gotten on the bus, she’d stared angrily out the window.
    He knew how she felt. The hardest part of prison life had been not the lack of freedom, but being surrounded constantly by people. He’d always thought he would have been one of the few who could have endured solitary confinement without going off the deep end. But then of course he’d never done anything wrong or broken the rules. That was not to say he’d been a model prisoner. Not like Jackie McBride, who worked at improving not only himself, but everyone around him. The old man thrived on the ruthless complexities of prison society. In another time and place, Jackie might have been an inspiring general or congressman instead of a steel-nerved Mob underling. It had taken Jackie a long time to break through Gordon’s reserve. He had admired Gordon’s pursuit of a college education. While other inmates openly derided Gordon as the “spook,” Jackie considered his aloofness a sign of intellectual superiority. The old man had died two weeks before Gordon got out.
    Prison life already seemed so distant that even when he tried to recall them, most details evaded him. The experience had often been so vile that little had seemed real or, in the end, just. What price had he paid? Two lives were lost, yet he still had his. The emptiness and the lost years could not have been the true punishment. Unless it was this constant dread like static in his soul. No.There’s more, more to come, he thought as the bus rattled under the overpass into Collerton.
    The pleated door closed quickly behind him. The tall arc lamps spilled a lavender glow over the dingy streets. Bradley Hill had once been one of the more desirable neighborhoods in the city. Now most of the large Victorian homes had been partitioned into apartments like this one on the corner, its massive oak doors flanked by rows of mailboxes and doorbells. Spray-painted on the porch wall was the word Aurora. Unmatched colored curtains hung in the windows, some too short, others knotted and wafting in and out over the sills. Leaving gaps like missing teeth, balusters had been wrenched or kicked out of the railing. Where the wide front lawn had once been green with tended grass and neat hedges, now six cars were parked on paving laid from the sidewalk right up to the granite foundation. The front door opened and a plump, bare-armed woman in baggy jeans came onto the front porch, carrying a bottle of beer by its neck. She sat on the top step and lit a cigarette. She stared down as he walked by. He remembered going to Joan Kruger’s seventh-birthday party under the pear tree in the backyard there. Mrs. Kruger had silvery frosted hair, a fur coat, and a cleaning lady who came every week. A cleaning lady, and she didn’t even have a job, which