Sylvia gapes at him, scoffing. "Unbelievable, the dentistry in this country. It's barbaric. I thought the whole reason you went into London and not just Exeter was to see a better dentist. And still they didn't give you anything?" She shakes her head, indignant for him. "How do your teeth feel?'

Ted's chin drops; he looks at the floor. "My face is worse."

They are quiet for a moment, listening to Nicholas, Frieda in the background, the scraping of the spoon in the cup.

"Did they fill your teeth, at least?" Sylvia asks, her tone more gentle.

Ted's breathing is slow and measured. He sighs and pauses. "Yes."

"Gold, I hope," Sylvia mumbles.

Ted shrugs vaguely.

They give you sedatives, things to relax you. Then they scoop it out and you're done.

Sylvia looks up at her husband, his weirdly colored, oddly distant face. "Does it hurt?" she asks quietly.

"Yes," he answers, not moving his mouth.

"I'll get you some aspirin in a moment," she says tenderly. "I'll finish the mowing, too. Can you take the ice away now?" she asks.

Ted withdraws the ice pack from his mouth, resting his hands in his lap. He sits utterly still as she surveys the welts on his head. On his ears, his neck, his lips.

"You look fine," the nurse said nervously. "Just a little swollen."

But they wouldn't give her a mirror. She could feel the right side of her face under the bandages. She was sure she was blind in that eye. It felt like a meteor had crashed there.

"You're going to look a fright for my mother," she says, her voice low.

"When's that, now," he mutters unhappily.

"Thursday," she answers. "And Rose says Percy is worse next door. She's sent for their daughters. I listened to her braying into the phone all yesterday while I hung the laundry. July is going to be a long month." She taps the spoon against the edge of the cup and drops it the last few inches to the floor; it hits the softwood with a flat contracted ping. Holding the cup in one hand, Sylvia dips two fingers into the slushy paste and gently begins to smooth it over the hard, knotted bee stings.

Her fingers on his skin. His softness, the radiating heat of his burning face. It feels oddly different to her, new in a way. New as the stranger who came back to her hotel in London six years ago, as she was leaving Cambridge for spring break. The ex-Cam poet with the broody cowlick, with the voice she could hear in the soles of her feet. The one with Shakespeare in his pocket who met her at the train station with his friend. His friend, his groomsman, who soon disappeared. All the next week in Paris, magnolias blossoming along the river, she could think of nothing but him. His fingers on her throat, her ribs. Magnolias blossoming, flushed and heavy scented, parting like lips as she walked through the gravel of the Tuileries.

The cool milky paste is dripping down his neck. Into his thick dark eyebrows, down his shirt collar. Neither of them says a word. She holds her hand to this new face. Ted doesn't even look up. He doesn't move. She catches the drips with her hand. She wipes them away with her finger.

Sylvia rakes the lawn her husband mowed, the blades cut down like overrun soldiers, broadcast with random finality over the yard. Her shadow looms over the clipped grasses. She covers their shocked faces with a bag.

Old Percy across the lane, blue-faced, wheezing, is dead. Three months ago he had stooped through her April daffodils in his billowing jacket, waving, his eyes soupy in his collapsing face. He had called to her through the window glass. She couldn't understand what he was trying to say: the wind was eating his voice, as something else had eaten the rest of him. What was he doing in her garden? It wasn't a public park. She couldn't hear, and turned away.

All that is left of his flesh pools into the satiny cushions of the coffin, his nose flinty and steep, his eyes like currants baked into a fallen cake. His wife has had him set up for viewing in the parlor in front of his telly, that dead too. The villagers troop by to gawk at the corpse, holding their hats as they shove in to the box. So lifelike, they yop to the widow. They gabble with sock-puppet sincerity, they trade recipes. Rose has colored her hair. Sylvia slides her eyes over Percy's dead face: the powder that chinks his wrinkles, the book wedged under his chin to keep his mouth shut. So lifelike, she nods as she backs out the door.

Already the mattress has been slumped down the staircase and tumbled outside to air; it lists in defeat against the cottage wall. A freshly laundered sheet flaps at the window like an escapee. Parakeets hang from a hook in the doorway, whistling and butting their bells, bobbing their senseless cucumber heads.

Sylvia cleans. She paints and weeds and mends. She scrubs, echoing through her house, her yard, in wet-kneed pants, alert to signs of corruption, wary of anything frayed or soured or askew. She drags the ash cans, freighted with grass clippings, out to the lane.

She glues the shredded edges of the wallpaper in the parlor. She washes every window in the house, sunk with age in their wormy casements. She hangs garlic in a braid along the mahogany sideboard in the kitchen, a dented horseshoe in the back hall. She throws netting over the ripening cherries, cushions the melon vines with hay. She whitewashes her children's furniture, trims it with small painted hearts. She sends for more of the pink memo paper from Smith, her covert fetish, its pages stiff like the face of a shield.

Workers have cemented the playroom floor, sealed off the cold stones from inside. Still she knows they are there: the stones that never change. Under her house, muttering below the linoleum. She puts down a rug; she hears nothing. She hems the checkerboard curtains and pulls them shut.

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