The Why of Things: A Novel by Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop Page B

skin.
    Arthur was sitting behind the counter, flipping through a magazine.
    “I need a phone book,” Eve said.
    Arthur looked up at her. “You look like a drowned rat,” he commented.
    “Thanks. But I need a phone book,” Eve repeated.
    “I don’t sell phone books.”
    Eve rolled her eyes. “I need to look at a phone book. Not just local. You have one?”
    Arthur studied her, then pulled a fat phone book out from a shelf under the counter. To her excitement, Eve found an L. among the Stephenses, whose information she greedily copied down, her mind racing.
    Now, hurriedly, she gets dressed, and then takes the cooler bag filled with all that she has collected from the quarry from underneath her bed. She empties the contents into a plastic bag, which she puts back beneath her bed; last, as sacrilegious as it seems to her to do in summer, she puts on a pair of sneakers, which she ties tightly, tucking the loose ends of the laces beneath the tongues. Even she’ll admit that Georgetown is too far away to ride barefoot.
    *  *  *
    J OAN isn’t concerned when she wakes to find herself alone in bed; she assumes that Anders has gone down early to make coffee, or else gone for a walk while the morning is still cool. She pulls her clothes on absently, making a mental list of the things she’d like to get done today, like getting that painting she’d bought last summer framed, and buying flowers for around the house, and organizing her study—and her brain—and figuring out how to get these things done while dealing with logistics, like ferrying Eloise to camp and home again, and dealing with the oil cleanup people who are scheduled to come this afternoon.
    She wakes Eloise and leaves her in her room to choose clothes; she is on her way downstairs when she notices that the door to Sophie’s room, which yesterday was closed, is open. She pauses, then continues slowly down the hall, pausing again when she comes to the open door. Inside the room, she sees Anders at their daughter’s desk, his head down on folded arms atop an openmagazine; Joan can tell by the rise and fall of his back that he is sleeping. She wonders how long he has been there, how much of the night she might have spent alone. She considers waking him, but she does not, thinking that perhaps he’d not have wanted to be found, that he came here by night purposefully, to mourn privately, and alone, and she respects this even as it heightens her own sense of isolation.
    *  *  *
    W HEN Anders comes downstairs, he finds Eloise and Joan already in the kitchen. Eloise is sitting sullenly at the table, absently stirring the few bloated Cheerios that remain in her bowl. Joan is leaning against the counter with a mug of coffee. “And one year,” she is saying when Anders appears in the doorway, “Evie’s group sailed up the river to Richdale and bought candy.” She slides over so that Anders can get to the coffee machine on the counter. A mug waits for him beside it.
    “I still don’t want to go.”
    Anders fills his mug and taps in a fine dusting of fake sugar from an open packet.
    “You know,” Joan says after a moment, “Daddy feels just the way you do. It’s his first day of camp, too, did you know that?”
    Anders pours cream into his coffee, watches as the white ribbons of it swirl into the dark liquid before it all clouds into a single color.
    “He’s feeling anxious about it, but he’s going to give it a try anyway and see how it goes. Isn’t that right, Dad?”
    Anders turns around. “That’s right,” he says, “I am.” It’s true that the first of his scuba classes meets today, but he has not yet in fact committed to going, as Joan well knows. He takes a large sip of coffee. It burns his tongue.
    Eloise peers up at her father suspiciously. “You’re going to camp?” she asks.
    “Well,” Anders says. “Kind of.” He puts a slice of bread into the toaster and pulls out a chair across from his daughter. He sits, leans forward