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

get paid to write
. We had no clue that we
were embarking on careers that would vanish within a
decade.
I had a job for eleven years and then I didn’t, it was that
fast. All around the country, magazines began shuttering,
succumbing to a sudden infection brought on by the busted
economy. Writers (my kind of writers: aspiring novelists,
ruminative thinkers, people whose brains don’t work quick
enough to blog or link or tweet, basically old, stubborn
blowhards) were through. We were like women’s hat
makers or buggy-whip manufacturers: Our time was done.
Three weeks after I got cut loose, Amy lost her job, such as

---

it was. (Now I can feel Amy looking over my shoulder,
smirking at the time I’ve spent discussing my career, my
misfortune, and dismissing her experience in one
sentence. That, she would tell you, is typical. 
Just like Nick
,
she would say. It was a refrain of hers: 
Just like Nick to
…
and whatever followed, whatever was 
just like me
, was
bad.) Two jobless grown-ups, we spent weeks wandering
around our Brooklyn brownstone in socks and pajamas,
ignoring the future, strewing unopened mail across tables
and sofas, eating ice cream at ten a.m. and taking thick
afternoon naps.
Then one day the phone rang. My twin sister was on
the other end. Margo had moved back home after her own
New York layoff a year before – the girl is one step ahead
of me in everything, even shitty luck. Margo, calling from
good ole North Carthage, Missouri, from the house where
we grew up, and as I listened to her voice, I saw her at age
ten, with a dark cap of hair and overall shorts, sitting on our
grandparents’ back dock, her body slouched over like an
old pillow, her skinny legs dangling in the water, watching
the river flow over fish-white feet, so intently, utterly self-
possessed even as a child.
Go’s voice was warm and crinkly even as she gave
this cold news: Our indomitable mother was dying. Our dad
was nearly gone – his (nasty) mind, his (miserable) heart,
both murky as he meandered toward the great gray
beyond. But it looked like our mother would beat him there.
About six months, maybe a year, she had. I could tell that
Go had gone to meet with the doctor by herself, taken her
studious notes in her slovenly handwriting, and she was
teary as she tried to decipher what she’d written. Dates and

---

doses.
‘Well, fuck, I have no idea what this says, is it a nine?
Does that even make sense?’ she said, and I interrupted.
Here was a task, a purpose, held out on my sister’s palm
like a plum. I almost cried with relief.
‘I’ll come back, Go. We’ll move back home. You
shouldn’t have to do this all by yourself.’
She didn’t believe me. I could hear her breathing on
the other end.
‘I’m serious, Go. Why not? There’s nothing here.’
A long exhale. ‘What about Amy?’
That is what I didn’t take long enough to consider. I
simply assumed I would bundle up my New York wife with
her New York interests, her New York pride, and remove
her from her New York parents – leave the frantic, thrilling
futureland of Manhattan behind – and transplant her to a
little town on the river in Missouri, and all would be fine.
I did not yet understand how foolish, how optimistic,
how, yes, 
just like Nick
I was for thinking this. The misery it
would lead to.
‘Amy will be fine. Amy …’ Here was where I should
have said, ‘Amy 
loves
Mom.’ But I couldn’t tell Go that Amy
loved our mother, because after all that time, Amy still
barely knew our mother. Their few meetings had left them
both baffled. Amy would dissect the conversations for days
after – ‘And what did she mean by …,’ – as if my mother
were some ancient peasant tribeswoman arriving from the
tundra with an armful of raw yak meat and some buttons for
bartering, trying to get something from Amy that wasn’t on
offer.
Amy didn’t care to know my family, didn’t want to know

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my birthplace, and yet for some reason, I thought moving
home would be a good idea.
My morning breath warmed the pillow, and I changed the
subject in my mind. Today was not a day for second-
guessing or regret, it was a day for doing. Downstairs, I
could hear the return of a long-lost sound: Amy making
breakfast. Banging wooden cupboards (rump-thump!),
rattling containers of tin and glass (ding-ring!), shuffling and
sorting a collection of metal pots and iron pans (ruzz-
shuzz!). A culinary orchestra tuning up, clattering vigorously
toward the finale, a cake pan drumrolling along the floor,
hitting the wall with a cymballic crash. Something
impressive was being created, probably a crepe, because
crepes are special, and today Amy would want to cook
something special.
It was our five-year anniversary.
I walked barefoot to the edge of the steps and stood
listening, working my toes into the plush wall-to-wall carpet
Amy detested on principle, as I tried to decide whether I
was ready to join my wife. Amy was in the kitchen, oblivious
to my hesitation. She was humming something melancholy
and familiar. I strained to make it out – a folk song? a
lullabye? – and then realized it was the theme to 
M.A.S.H
.
Suicide is painless. I went downstairs.
I hovered in the doorway, watching my wife. Her yellow-
butter hair was pulled up, the hank of ponytail swinging
cheerful as a jumprope, and she was sucking distractedly
on a burnt fingertip, humming around it. She hummed to
herself because she was an unrivaled botcher of lyrics.
When we were first dating, a Genesis song came on the

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radio: ‘She seems to have an invisible touch, yeah.’ And
Amy crooned instead, ‘She takes my hat and puts it on the
top shelf.’ When I asked her why she’d ever think her lyrics
were remotely, possibly, vaguely right, she told me she
always thought the woman in the song truly loved the man
because she put his hat on the 
top
shelf. I knew I liked her
then, really liked her, this girl with an explanation for
everything.
There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm
memory and feeling utterly cold.
Amy peered at the crepe sizzling in the pan and licked
something off her wrist. She looked triumphant, wifely. If I
took her in my arms, she would smell like berries and
powdered sugar.
When she spied me lurking there in grubby boxers, my
hair in full Heat Miser spike, she leaned against the kitchen
counter and said, ‘Well, hello, handsome.’
Bile and dread inched up my throat. I thought to myself: