A Small Indiscretion by Jan Ellison Page A

alone with the man with the crumbling tooth. He was holding my hand as he climbed into the cab, trying to pull me in after him.
    I resisted. If I got into that taxi with him I would be entering a new life, a cheapened one, where gums swelled, where teeth rotted, where bones and muscles and skin grew thin, where books and houses and cars and furniture and all the objects of order in the world were allowed to corrode and decay.
    “I’m not sure I will come,” I said, pulling my hand out of his. “I’m tired.”
    “Come on now, love. We’ll put you straight to bed,” he said. He got out of the taxi and tried to take my hand again. But I’d crossed my arms over my chest.
    “Come on now, love,” he said again. “Taxi’s waiting. Taxi won’twait forever.” He was slurring his words and his face had grown hard. “Get in now.”
    “No,” I said. “I won’t, after all.”
    We stood eye to eye. He was a small man, which I hadn’t noticed before, small and fierce.
    “You frigid cunt,” he said venomously.
    I was stunned. I’m not sure I’d ever heard the word spoken out loud.
    He tried to get his arms around my waist, but I slipped out of his grasp and jumped in and locked the door before he could come in after me. The taxi sped away, and my head began to spin. I vowed, in the morning, that from then on I would keep my drinking in check. But I found I couldn’t, or wouldn’t. I carried on drinking excessively as long as I could—right up to the moment I decided to become a mother.
    It was not so difficult, then, to stop. The stakes changed, and you grew inside me, and the muscles of restraint I hadn’t known were there became strong.

Thirteen

    D ECAY . C ORROSION . N EGLECT . Things we found readily enough last fall at the Salvaged Light, which I’d mostly abandoned after the night of your accident, when the claw-foot tub in the loft fell through the floor and smashed the lights below. Repairs could not begin until negotiations with the insurance company were complete. And I really did not have the energy to address the problem, anyway, given my preoccupation with you.
    We also found neglect at the Mermaid Inn, where your father and I alternated nights, each of us taking a shift to be close to you, then a shift at home, to be with Clara and Polly. But we didn’t find neglect in the places we might have expected to—inside the hospital, with its expensively framed art and butter-colored paint, or in our own house, which was kept clean and orderly by my mother last fall, and animated by my father, who’d effectively moved in, too. The evenings I was home from a shift attending to you, my mother and father attended to me. I imagine they did the same for your father the nights he was home, at least when he let them. They took care of me as perhaps they wished they had when I was a child. I’d come home long after dinner and they’d sit me down at the table. My mother would put a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup beforeme. My father would cut me a piece of some concoction he’d invented and baked with the girls—caramel chocolate pie or peanut-butter-and-banana cake or his famous bread pudding. My mother whisked around, cleaning and straightening and doing laundry. My father played with the girls, and played the piano, and sometimes sat with me on the front porch while your sisters worked on perfecting their cartwheels on the lawn. He never took a drink that fall, as far as I know. He settled in. He made it clear he would stay as long as we needed him. He’d stay out the year, if we’d have him.
    It was as if two decades had not passed, and there had been no estrangement. I was unable to keep myself at a distance from him. I needed to confide in someone, and as soon as he was there, I knew he was that person. So I talked, and he listened. Sometimes, when I spoke about your condition, and the accident, and the summer that preceded it, I laid my head on his shoulder and wept. I ended up