And Even This

Jeffery Wolf

“If God would have split the sea for us, and not let us through on dry land, 

that would have been enough.” — Passover Haggadah 

Six decades after the war, thirty years after his sister cut him out, five years after his daughter’s murder, two years after his wife’s death, Gil started pissing blood. 

His first thought was a VD. No clue how he got one; he hadn’t been with a woman since Shirley. The blood sat in curled rivulets. It turned the water pink as it dissolved. 

Why did he tell Fred?  

His brother called, what, ten minutes after he flushed? It was some anniversary of something. For Shirley, Roxanne, his parents. Maybe it was D-Day. He knew all the dates, but they ran together, a long march blurred to a steady din, and there was no point dwelling. 

“Just wanted to call and say I’m thinking about you, okay.”  

It was pure schmaltz, pure Fred. But something about that moment. The floating in his head, the blood floating in the toilet. Once it was out, it was out—and Fred wouldn’t let him off the line until he promised to see a doctor. 

Then, a few days later, there he was. Fred in his living room, staring up through his owl glasses at the twenty-foot ceiling. Gil’s hard-earned mansion in Vernon Hills. Once upon a time, he and Fred lived in identical homes. Same layout and everything. Those ready-built four-flat co-ops in Skokie and Albany Park. But look how far he’d come—and how far Fred hadn’t. 

Fred sat on the sofa with his legs crossed. Gil loomed in his favorite chair. Six-three, two-fifty, still built like the Mack trucks he rebuilt for years down on Cicero. It was almost summer, and light spilled through the picture window into the vast, open room. Chandelier, rugs, side tables—things Shirley picked out ten years ago, the last time she redecorated. They talked about Fred’s grandkids. Then Gil cut to the chase. It was kidney failure. 

Right away, Fred jumped in about a transplant. Could he offer his own? There were tests. And you only needed one to live. 

Gil laughed. “You think I want your tired-ass kidney?” he said. “Besides, doc won’t do surgery. I’m too old.” He made a face, mocking squeamish doctors. 

“Dialysis,” Gil said. “Four hours I gotta sit there while they clean my blood.” 

“You never were for sitting still,” Fred said. 

“Damn right,” Gil said. 

He drained a bottle of Michelob and watched Fred watching him. Like any worship worth a damn, there was wonder and terror. When they were kids, Fred would hide behind Gil when he was scared. Gil took Fred’s allowance, his candy, his bouncy balls. When Aunt Lena died, he took Fred’s inheritance. He was signatory on the accounts, and besides he was expanding his business and needed the capital. What would Fred have done with it? Buy flowers for his girlfriend? 

Fred who couldn’t go two minutes without a woman. The Vorner men were Methuselahs, outliving their wives. Fred had already done it twice. Each time he went back, found someone new to hold him at night. 

“You want me to come with?” Fred said. 

Gil laughed again. “Who do you think I am? You?” 

Fred shrank in his seat, refolded his legs. 

Gil felt strong. A little dizzy, but vipers coiled in his arms and chest. 

Across the house, shadows raced through empty rooms. 

✳

The dialysis center smelled like sour milk and carpet cleaner. An open room lined with medical chairs, each heavy with monitors, tubes, and a long, jointed arm holding a ten-inch TV. Old sagging people occupied the chairs, their arms plugged in, their tubes deep crimson. Their bodies pale and yellowed like rags left in the sun. A few shuffled around, into or out of the chairs, but mostly a sinking stillness reigned; cold air and the steady click of pumps. 

A young female nurse called his name. She was shockingly pretty. Soft cheeks, loose ponytail. She led him to an open chair and started reading questions off a clipboard. Did he use alcohol, tobacco, or drugs? Did he have feelings of depression? The list kept going. 

“Do you operate heavy machinery?” 

“Not for twenty years.” 

“Do you feel safe at home?” 

He looked her up and down. Twenties, maybe. Light makeup.  

“Do you have problems using the telephone?”  

“Give me your number and we’ll find out,” he said. 

She grinned. “Let’s get through your dialysis first, Mr. Vorner.” 

“Call me Gil. We can go dancing. I know a spot.” He winked.  

Still grinning, she left to trade his chart for sanitized equipment. 

He sat back in his chair. If he wanted to, he could be king of this place. 

The patient on his left, an old man who’d been silently offering his arm to the machine, spoke. “Where’d you serve, sailor?” He nodded at the US Navy cap pulled halfway down Gil’s forehead. 

“D-Day,” Gil said. “Normandy Beach.” 

His neighbor was lumpy, jowled. Liver spots streaked his head. “Well, that’s something,” he said. “The world owes you a debt.” 

“I been saying that for years,” Gil said. “Every tax season. But Uncle Sam keeps making me pay.” 

“I was Four-F,” the man said. “Already a wife and kid, plus the asthma. National Guard it was.” 

The man’s blood flowed through a maze of tubes. Beneath the needles and tape, his arm was a grotesque rainbow. Yellow-green bruises spread from the entry points, painting over purples and browns from previous treatments. He kept gabbing. 

“Three years I’ve been coming here, three days a week. Makes a new man of me every time—isn’t that right, Jodie?” 

He shouted to the young nurse, who was returning with a fresh catheter over her shoulder. “That’s right, Bob,” she said, her voice full-on diner waitress. 

She set to work on Gil, laid out his arm and strapped it to the table. 

With an outstretched arm, He led us out of Egypt, Gil thought. King of this place. 

Jodie wiped skin inside his elbow, made him squeeze the rubber ball. Soon blood was flowing out of him. He watched it rise up into the tube. It looped around. Up close, the distance seemed much farther. 

“Strange, yeah? But you get used to it,” Bob said. He kept talking, something about the people here, his grandkids visiting. 

Gil fixated on the blood. Dark, dark red. He’d seen plenty of blood in his day. But this was endless. He felt it leaving. The machine kept clicking and pulling blood from him. Draining his ghost. He felt himself sweating. 

Bob kept talking. He hadn’t stopped. How was he still talking? 

Gil felt himself sinking. Wrapped in cotton. Sounds faded—except for that steady, infernal click. 

“Stay awake, Mr. Vorner!” Nurse Jodie said. Her voice was sharp and impatient, and he wanted to bark back at her—I’m fine!—but he couldn’t form words. 

When he came to, there was a second nurse, a cold pack on his head. Jodie pressed her fingers to his wrist, her touch clinical. He met her eyes, and she looked through him with disdain. 

“We got a live one!” Bob said. “I knew he’d be back.” Bob was being disconnected from his catheters, his dialysis finished. He’d barely broken a sweat. 

Jodie smiled at Bob and squeezed his shoulder. “See you Tuesday, champ,” she said. 

The second nurse held a child-sized tub of apple juice and pushed the straw toward Gil’s face. “Drink, Mr. Vorner,” she said. He wanted to growl and swat it away, but he didn’t have the strength. 

✳

The whole rest of the day, and into the next, he couldn’t keep anything down. Not even crackers. He couldn’t lay down without nausea, couldn’t sleep sitting up. Couldn’t lift a saucer off the table without feeling faint. His weakness made him angry. His anger rose and burst—then his blood drained to his feet and he felt like puking. He kept seeing the nurse’s eyes. First time a woman had ever looked at him like that. Disgust for the old and pathetic. The house echoed around him. High ceilings, expensive tables. He felt like a fraud. He wanted to throw something, break something, but he could barely stand.  

Another day passed. His stomach stretched from his forehead to his shoes. He needed to calm his body, settle his mind. He went out for a walk. 

It was humid. The grasses pushed thick spores into the air. He felt stabbing in his temples. Mud ringed the lawns, refusing to dry. And there were bugs. He heard them first, a droning hiss. Then they were everywhere—spilled out across the tree trunks and littering the sidewalk. They climbed on bushes, parked cars. Their bodies crunched and oozed under his feet, and he nearly lost his balance sliding on the splattered innards. He shouted a curse and felt himself getting dizzy. The insects stared out from their red eyes and hissed. 

✳

Gil, it’s your brother, Fred. I’m calling again, okay. Just to see how everything went and how you’re feeling. Call me back. I’ll be home. 

✳

Couches disheveled, food sitting out spoiled. The house was a mess. Tired, still pissing blood, he started to clean. Spray bottle under the sink, double-lined garbage bags. 

Scrubbing, wiping, sweeping, shaving, pissing, wiping, scrubbing. Pointless repetition, everywhere he looked.  

Was this his life now?  

He scaled the stairs and stared at his body in the bedroom mirror. His shirtless torso. Scars from machine accidents, boyhood altercations. He still looked good. Firm, broad. His strength was in there, waiting. But he was tired. So tired. 

Behind him, the cherry armoire that Shirley had picked out from the showroom floor, the walk-in closet where her shoes and dresses still lived. Two years gone, but ghosts of her everywhere.  

He slid to the floor and stared at the ceiling. Talk to me, Shirl, he whispered. I got nothin’. 

✳

“What do you mean you’re not going back?” 

Fred was over again. 

They sat in the living room, and Fred leaned forward with his wrinkled face halfway across the table. Gil sat calmly, surrounded by cushions. He’d given up on cleaning. A bag of trash sat bloated near the kitchen. 

“It’s no way to live, Freddy,” he said. 

Fred’s glassy eyes, his white hair floating. “But the other choice is…” 

“I know it,” Gil said. “I ain’t dumb.” He glanced down at the wide purple bruise on his arm. “Besides, it was never a cure.” 

“What if you regret it?” Fred said. 

Gil laughed. “How? You can’t regret nothin’ when you’re dead.” 

It was morning, the light still soft. For years, they’d both been early risers. Fred’s jeans billowed around his scrawny legs. Gil spread his arms over the chair back. 

“Who else I got to live for?” Gil said. 

Fred blinked like he’d been hit. He was quiet for a moment. Then he stiffened. “So you’re giving up?” he said. “Just like that?” His voice dripped with bitterness. 

In eighty years, Fred had never talked to him like that. Gil rose up in anger.  

“What do you know about living?” he said. “You never took a chance in your life.” 

A story so rehashed it snapped into place: Gil had once offered Fred a partnership in his business, and Fred turned it down. 

“I would’ve made you a rich man if for five minutes you’d pulled your scared yellow heart out of your twat,” Gil said. “You spent your whole life on your knees, begging for scraps. You don’t get to tell me shit.” 

Gil felt himself breathing heavy. He had to pee.  

Fred sat higher in his chair. “You act like such a tough guy,” he said. “All your life, big tough guy. And you’re going to let this get your goat? If I’m scared, what the heck are you?” 

“This is different.” 

Fred’s face was red. Tears pooled in the loose circles around his eyes. “You’re nothing but a quitter,” he said. “A weak little quitter.” 

“You gonna talk to me like that in my house?” Gil said. “You can get the hell out.” 

“Maybe I don’t want to!” Fred shouted. 

“Get out! Scram!” Gil stood and immediately felt faint. He slumped and panted.  

Fred watched him. His jaw hardened, then his eyes flashed with pity. He stood.  

“Okay, I’ll leave,” he said. “But only because I want to now.” 

Gil’s gaze lingered in the blank air above his nose. The screen door clattered. Fred’s car hummed in the driveway. He waited for the engine to grow faint. Then his lip caught and he started sobbing. 

✳

Flies scaled the windows. They buzzed, settled, buzzed again. They were getting in somehow. First one, then another, and he was too slow to swat them. He used to have reflexes. With a mighty hand, he smote intruders in his domain. Now he swung with his swollen joints and hit empty window. The flies buzzed wide circles and settled back where they started. They congregated on walls, side tables, lamps. 

With a mighty hand. With an outstretched arm. 

Beaten by flies. Tiny uncleans, cavorters in filth. Yet another of his plagues. There had been blood, locusts…  

Death of the firstborn he’d suffered first. But he knew to expect them out of order. His final plague would be darkness. 

✳

He went to the basement, pressing the stairwell with each step. Dim, cold. The room where Roxanne had lived—twice, briefly—after prison. Empty bed, empty dresser. Bobby Rydell poster and a box of records long removed from their sleeves. Dust thick against his face. 

She kept getting in trouble. First arrest in her twenties, accessory to armed robbery. Gil was so furious he wouldn’t bail her out, even with Shirley pleading. She served a year, then spent the next two in this room. Silent, scowling. She kept the door shut. Wouldn’t come up for dinner until he and Shirley were off watching funnies on the tube. But they’d hear her voice rising through the vents. Sweet-talking the men she used to know and the ones she’d just met. Men who’d keep tangling her up and tossing her aside. Who’d leave her bleeding out on cheap carpet. A yellow corded phone still sat on the dresser. 

How much was enough? 

He’d been a boy when life started taking. His first memories were of his father’s bankruptcy. His toys shipped out in boxes and never seen again. He learned the law of the jungle. Life took, so he took back. But he was always playing catch-up. The list so long, it was comical. Too much to believe. Buried his daughter. Buried his wife. Survived war and childhood squalor. He didn’t complain. Nobody would listen, anyway. 

A stream of light through the window well. The dust rising, almost glittering. Scratches on the wood furniture they never bothered to replace. This room so tiny without anyone in it. Even now, he couldn’t enter beyond the first steps. 

Maybe this was enough. But he wouldn’t end things a quitter. He climbed the stairs. Grabbed his keys off the mantle and drove to the dialysis center.  

✳

On D-Day, the hardest part was going back. 

He drove a Higgins boat full of soldiers into the breach. He was nineteen, a lion—he should have been with them, toting a rifle. Told his engineering skills made him too valuable for infantry, and like a good soldier, he obeyed. 

H-hour-plus-two his first drop. They bobbed through heavy mist, mortars like distant thunder. When the beach emerged, it looked like a model set, the iron hedgehogs like games of jacks. Then bullets ripped the water. Explosions deafened. Another landing craft burst into flames. His training took over, and there were only actions, decisions. Correct course, check the tiller, find a clear lane, deploy the winch. He got his platoon to the beach, reversed out. 

Not until he was in open water again, wet salt replacing hot smoke, that the images came through. Flesh and shrapnel. Men still alive as they spilled into the shallows. Iron and rot. The empty hold pitched in front of him—sloshing, echoing—and he felt unworthy. He’d entered hell. And he had to go back. 

Near the harbor, a new platoon filed in. All young like him, pimpled teenagers, but he felt decades between them. He pictured their intestines hanging outside their jackets. He wanted to tell them. But then the ramp latched shut, and he was away again, caught in the inertia. 

Five times that day, he steered the boat to Omaha Beach and back. Each time the smoke was thicker, the wreckage thicker, the tide stained darker. But worst of all was the waiting. Before the second drop, they were ordered to hold at sea—the backup of landings was too great—and the false hope crept in that they might turn back and be done with it. But of course, ultimately, it would continue. 

✳

He told Fred he didn’t have to come, but there he was, again. 

Gil met him at the door. “You’re an old man,” he said. “You shouldn’t be driving so much.” 

“You hurt my feelings, okay,” Fred said. “You haven’t always been nice to me. But you’re my brother and I love you.” 

“I’m sorry,” Gil said. “That what you want me to say?”  

“Save it,” Fred said. His eyebrow crested. 

He brought food. Hot dogs from Herm’s. White bag, greasy wrappers. French fries and tamales. They sat in the kitchen and ate.  

“I made up my mind,” Gil said, mouth full of hot dog. “Life’s too short to do things you don’t wanna.” 

“In this case, the not doing is making life shorter,” Fred said. He slid his pickle spear onto Gil’s wrapper. 

“This a sales pitch now?” Gil said. “Won’t take no for an answer? Gonna come back every week ‘til I change my mind?” 

“You’re not giving me much choice,” Fred said.  

“This is what I want,” Gil said. “So let it alone.” He crunched Fred’s pickle. 

Fred paused between fries. “Who else knows?” 

“Cousin Howie,” Gil said. “I’m calling Libby tomorrow.” 

“What about Ruthie?” 

“What about her?” 

There was quiet. The soft mash of chewing. Fred’s breath smelled like meat. 

“She’s still our sister,” he said.  

“She didn’t come to Shirley’s funeral. She didn’t come to …” Gil trailed off, his daughter’s name too heavy to speak. 

“Did you try calling her then?” 

More chewing. 

“She hated Iris, you know,” Fred said. “They never got along, but she came to pay her respects.” 

Gil watched the grease stains set in the waxed paper. 

“How do you do it, Fred?” he said. “All that loss. And you keep going back for more.” 

Fred barely had to think. “What, am I supposed to stay miserable?” he said.  

“First Bev, then Iris…”  

“It ain’t a contest,” Fred said. He watched his brother’s face. “I don’t have any wisdom. Grandkids help. It’s hard, but you keep going.” 

“It don’t make you stronger,” Gil said. 

“No, it doesn’t.” 

Empty wrappers. Darkening skies. They sat in silence. Eventually, Gil stood and turned on a lamp. 

✳

The house was getting bigger, its corridors longer. They’d wanted it for years, he and Shirley both; a big house with a yard, far from the city. Neo-colonial, wide garage, columns classing up the front door. Like everything else in the subdivision, but they got to make a few custom choices. Crimson siding, full deck in back. People would look and think: That man did okay for himself. Sure, he couldn’t afford Deerfield or Lincolnshire, but he did alright. 

They’d have people over. Shirley loved parties. Any excuse to pour wine and use the fancy china. She wore a slip dress, cinched with a belt, and as much jewelry as she could carry. Straight-backed, sashaying like a model. She was a fox.  

He still remembered the day they met. Sophomore year, after a football game. She came down from the visiting bleachers and cut in front of him near the forty-yard line. Hair blazing, lilac perfume. 

“My friends think you were the best player out there,” she said. “But I’ve seen better.” 

He looked her up and down in her South Shore letter jacket. “Sure you don’t mind fraternizing with the enemy?” 

She stood there, smoldering. “I didn’t come over here to make friends, honey.” 

Sure, he’d cheated on her during the war. Everyone did it. She could see it in his face the moment he got back. The first time they were alone, she took him as fiercely as if she’d been the soldier bred for war. Her body firm yet delicate. He suspected she had her own fling, just to make things even. That’s how it was with them—passionate, competitive. The kind of love between beautiful people where there’d be trouble if one ever pulled too far ahead. They kept each other climbing. And in the quiet moments? Well, it was never supposed to be easy. But he was stronger with her; he always knew that. 

Room after room in this house. Long halls upstairs that only the two of them knew. The real betrayal was that she died, that he’d reach for her now and she wasn’t there. What happened to ‘us against the world’? Or maybe it was his doing, that he had the gall to continue without her. He was still paying for something, and maybe that was it. 

They’d never asked for forgiveness, never needed it. Nothing hurts, Shirl. It never did. Orange light cutting through the bedroom, painting the wall, setting the furniture aglow. 

✳

He was in the kitchen flipping through mail. Junk, solicitations, bills. All the worthless paper that kept arriving. The afternoon burned through the picture windows. Mail still came for Shirley. Shopping catalogs from Carson Pirie Scott, and some charity for birds that she’d donated to once. His swollen fingers squished everything in turn. 

Then the temperature dropped. And the light fell, like someone flipping a switch, sun and shadow pressed flat.  

Except none of this had happened.  

When he looked again, the shadows were still there. Light glared on the cabinets. The rush of clouds was inside him. He felt it, a sudden distance from everything. He stood there for a long time before he moved again. A robin chirped in the yard. 

✳

It rang once, twice, three times. Then she answered. 

“What do you want?”  

Her voice crackled. Age had deepened her snarl. 

“Ruthie, it’s me,” he said. “It’s Gil.” 

“I know,” she said. “I have the caller ID.” 

He pictured her. Sharp cheeks, sharp chin. Did she still draw her eyebrows on? 

“It’s important,” he said. 

“You haven’t called me in thirty-three years. It’d better be important.” 

“It was you who stopped talking first.” 

“Do you want me to hang up?” she said. “Because I will.” 

She was still his sister, alright. 

“I’m dying, Ruth,” he said. 

“And?” 

“What do you mean ‘and’? I’m dying.” 

“It’s a hazard of getting old.” 

“I got kidney failure. I stopped treatment. It’s no way to live, so I won’t be living no more. Two weeks, maybe a month.” 

“Well, sounds like you’ve made your decision.” 

What had he expected? “You’re my sister,” he said. “Can’t we talk? Just a little.” 

“What’s there to talk about?” she said. “You’re a nasty, selfish bully. Should I list everything you took from me? I could start at kindergarten…” 

Ruthie the scorekeeper. There was her graduation envelope from Uncle Mendel, Aunt Lena’s inheritance, the furniture from their mother’s estate, the money he wouldn’t give after her divorce. 

“Everything I put up with until I finally grew a backbone. And that’s somehow my fault, too.” 

Gil’s voice softened. “Will you come, Ruthie? Will you come to my funeral?” 

For a moment, there was silence. 

“Thirty-three years, I haven’t seen you in life,” she said. “Why should I see you in death?” 

She hung up. He kept the phone in his hand and let the dial tone buzz. 

✳

He took himself out for a steak dinner. The house and its silence were closing in, so he got in his car and left.  

The steakhouse was at one of the malls, an island in a sea of parking lots. The inside was packed with middle-aged couples and gangly teens and families with young children talking about Little League. It was loud and he was the only one dining alone. He had to wait for the server to take his order, and the whole time he held his piss and boiled. Then he made the awkward dance to extricate himself from the table, which felt clownish and exposed, and he knew he would have to repeat it multiple times before his meal was over, but he gritted his teeth and vowed to enjoy himself. 

After his second piss, he returned to find his steak waiting. It came drenched in mushrooms and garlic, garnished with sage and fluffy mashed potatoes. The smells floated through him, and the first bite flooded him with bliss. The flavors, the juices. He hadn’t had a good steak in years. He sat tall and took slow bites and savored.  

Then death was with him. The fork in his hand felt miles away and the tastes in his mouth faded and everything grew pale. When he returned, all he could notice were the other people in the restaurant, full and laughing in their ignorance. Their presence a profanity. Every stranger, every restaurant, every mall in the world appalled him. He flagged down his server and asked for a box. Back in his car, he decided he would die alone.

✳

“Remember when Dad had the fruit store?” Fred said.  

This time, they were on the deck. The cicadas still screaming, but distant. The weather was good. Fred wore a t-shirt from his grandson’s college. 

“He’d make you get up every morning to move crates,” Fred said. “I wanted to help so bad, but he’d never let me, ’cause I was small and you were big.” 

“I’m still a tank, case you hadn’t noticed,” Gil said. “You’re gonna need fifteen pallbearers to lug me off.” 

Fred sipped a summer wine. Gil was drinking water. It was all he could stomach. 

“It’s your life, okay,” Fred said. “I can’t tell you how to live it, but I wish you wouldn’t do this.” 

“I’m too old to change, Fred. You know that.” 

Fred nodded. 

“Whatever happened to Dad’s fruit store, anyway?” Gil said. 

“You were all the muscle he could afford,” Fred said. “After you volunteered for the war, he went out of business.” 

Gil sat there. The breeze picked up. A robin plucked a cicada by the wing, held it down atop a fencepost. 

“We came through a lot, didn’t we?” Gil said. 

“I’m hoping for a little more,” Fred said. “Graduations. Volleyball games. Maybe a wedding, God willing.” 

“Volleyball is a thing now?” 

“Whatever they want to do is fine by me.” 

“Maybe it’s good I never had grandkids,” Gil said. “You do alright with yours. I ain’t seen it much, but I can tell. You got the temperament.” 

“You would’ve done fine,” Fred said. 

Years of sitting through Fred’s photo albums, the way Fred’s power grew just thinking about his grandsons. Seeing him like that. Happy, sure. Resentful, sure. And today?  

“You’re a good man, Fred,” Gil said. “You always have been.” 

“You must really be sick, talking like that,” Fred said. 

Gil sat up tall. “I don’t think you’re going to see me again,” he said. “After today.” 

His look said the rest. There wasn’t much left to say, besides. Fred blinked a couple times. 

Gil rose slowly and shuffled to the bathroom. Fred stayed in his seat. 

✳

In the morning, there was heavy dew on the grass and it was quiet. His neighbors around the cul-de-sac were still asleep. The dim beginnings of light, and he woke to bloating and pain. Head pounding, bladder screaming. He lumbered on ankles full of water and pissed a little, and soon he was pissing again. He cooked eggs in a skillet, then sat to catch his breath. Past the picture window, robins scurried unbothered in the yard. 

During the day, once his body got going, there were bursts of adrenaline enough that he didn’t notice for stretches. But his body always remembered it was failing. Around five-thirty, fatigue fell like a heavy curtain, and he collapsed sideways on the sofa, his swollen organs pressing into each other. The house too big, the bathroom too far, his legs settled like clay. The long afternoon rays taunted him across the wall. Only once did he consider wetting his pants, but he bit the inside of his lip and grunted to his feet, knowing somewhere Shirley was watching. 

✳

What about Roxanne? He groaned around the house, rattled saucepans. She kept coming back to him. Her big hair, her set chin. The sting of her voice. Nobody blamed him for what happened, for how she turned out or how it ended. After all, he was one of the people she stole from. Aggravated identity theft, repeat offender; it put her away for years. He was already giving her money, would’ve given more if she’d asked. For months after, he practiced the lines in his head. Which of those lowlifes put you up to it? But even after she got out, back living in their basement, he never said a word. Because he already knew. It was never about asking, never about money. 

His daughter’s restlessness. The way her eyes kept turning you over, no matter who you were. Something about this was always staring back at him. It stared now. In the kitchen, with the hard tile and settled smells, her eyes behind every shut cabinet. When the world fell away and death reached through to remind him, he tried reaching back for her, but it wasn’t possible yet.  

What’s done was done. He couldn’t change it. Only the future remained. He didn’t know what he’d say when he got there. 

✳

Vernon Hills, Illinois, continued. Dense walls of elm and oak formed the horizons. Easy hills, lone gazebos, ponds with fountain features, brick-and-shingle shopping malls. Goldenrod grew wild across undeveloped lots between the subdivisions and corporate parks. Bold signs announced new property available. Middle-aged men in half-zips and ballcaps gunned their SUVs down curved roads.  

✳

Fred liked to think it was a quiet moment: 

Gil at home when the fog gripped him. The long tunnel. But something was different this time, and he knew.  

He went to the wine rack and pulled a bottle of Bordeaux. Shirley’s favorite. He took a crystal stem glass from the top cabinet. One night they’d been hosting friends and he was getting rowdy, holding one of those glasses a little too tight, and he crushed it in his fist. Needed eight stitches. Not a party unless Gil goes to the emergency room—for months, that was the joke. 

He poured the wine and sipped. He was too dizzy to taste it. Always more of a highball man, anyway. He sipped again. His fingers numb, but not shaking. He’d worried that he would be afraid, and maybe he was. Hard to know what he felt. He refilled the glass and set the bottle on the counter. Then he walked to the living room and sat in his chair. Sunlight painted the backyard. Soft shadows whispered from the ceiling. He sipped again, then he set the glass on the table next to the armrest. He waited. 

Image © Artvee

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Jeffrey Wolf is the author of And Even This (Cornerstone Press, forthcoming 2028). His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Conjunctions, Prairie Schooner, The Common, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He has received a fellowship grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, a Special Mention from the Pushcart Prize, and residencies in Iceland, Finland, and the Quad Cities. He lives in Chicago, and you can find him on Instagram at @jeffreywolfwrites.