Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

I give up
. I begged her, cajoled her to return,
hearing nothing but peeved silence on the other end. After I
hung up, I made an anxious pilgrimage to her apartment in
the Bowery and saw Gary, her beloved ficus tree, yellow-
dead on the fire escape, and knew she’d never come back.
The Bar seemed to cheer her up. She handled the
books, she poured the beers. She stole from the tip jar
semi-regularly, but then she did more work than me. We
never talked about our old lives. We were Dunnes, and we
were done, and strangely content about it.
‘So, what?’ Go said, her usual way of beginning a
conversation.
‘
Eh
.’
‘Eh, what? Eh, bad? You look bad.’

---

I shrugged a yes; she scanned my face.
‘Amy?’ she asked. It was an easy question. I shrugged
again – a confirmation this time, a 
whatcha gonna do?
shrug.
Go gave me her amused face, both elbows on the bar,
hands cradling chin, hunkering down for an incisive
dissection of my marriage. Go, an expert panel of one.
‘What about her?’
‘Bad day. It’s just a bad day.’
‘Don’t let her worry you.’ Go lit a cigarette. She
smoked exactly one a day. ‘Women are crazy.’ Go didn’t
consider herself part of the general category of 
women
, a
word she used derisively.
I blew Go’s smoke back to its owner. ‘It’s our
anniversary today. Five years.’
‘Wow.’ My sister cocked her head back. She’d been a
bridesmaid, all in violet – ‘the gorgeous, raven-haired,
amethyst-draped 
dame
,’ Amy’s mother had dubbed her –
but anniversaries weren’t something she’d remember.
‘Jeez. Fuck. Dude. That came fast.’ She blew more smoke
toward me, a lazy game of cancer catch. ‘She going to do
one of her, uh, what do you call it, not scavenger hunt—’
‘Treasure hunt,’ I said.
My wife loved games, mostly mind games, but also
actual games of amusement, and for our anniversary she
always set up an elaborate treasure hunt, with each clue
leading to the hiding place of the next clue until I reached
the end, and my present. It was what her dad always did for
her mom on their anniversary, and don’t think I don’t see the
gender roles here, that I don’t get the hint. But I did not grow
up in Amy’s household, I grew up in mine, and the last

---

present I remember my dad giving my mom was an iron,
set on the kitchen counter, no wrapping paper.
‘Should we make a wager on how pissed she’s going
to get at you this year?’ Go asked, smiling over the rim of
her beer.
The problem with Amy’s treasure hunts: I never figured
out the clues. Our first anniversary, back in New York, I went
two for seven. That was my best year. The opening parley:
This place is a bit of a hole in the wall,
But we had a great kiss there one Tuesday last fall.
Ever been in a spelling bee as a kid? That snowy
second after the announcement of the word as you sift your
brain to see if you can spell it? It was like that, the blank
panic.
‘An Irish bar in a not-so-Irish place,’ Amy nudged.
I bit the side of my lip, started a shrug, scanning our
living room as if the answer might appear. She gave me
another very long minute.
‘We were lost in the rain,’ she said in a voice that was
pleading on the way to peeved.
I finished the shrug.
‘
McMann’s
, Nick. Remember, when we got lost in the
rain in Chinatown trying to find that dim sum place, and it
was supposed to be near the statue of Confucius but it
turns out there are two statues of Confucius, and we ended
up at that random Irish bar all soaking wet, and we
slammed a few whiskeys, and you grabbed me and kissed
me, and it was—’
‘Right! You should have done a clue with Confucius, I
would have gotten that.’

---

‘The statue wasn’t the point. The place was the point.
The moment. I just thought it was special.’ She said these
last words in a childish lilt that I once found fetching.
‘It 
was
special.’ I pulled her to me and kissed her. ‘That
smooch right there was my special anniversary
reenactment. Let’s go do it again at McMann’s.’
At McMann’s, the bartender, a big, bearded bear-kid,
saw us come in and grinned, poured us both whiskeys, and
pushed over the next clue.