At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott

appealed to her or were the very stock-in-trade of any executive secretary, but because she thought these things were the world’s, mankind’s, salvation. Because in what May saw now as her misanthropy Agnes found all else, all the soiled, dull, and tasteless things about humankind, somehow appalling.
    â€œThank you,” May said humbly, although it was pride that coursed through her veins at the moment. “But you could have waited.”
    Agnes looked up from the silver coffee server. “I beg your pardon?”
    â€œYou could have waited until later,” May said again, her wrists in her hands. “To change the water.” She might have waited until Lucy’s husband had seen them.
    Agnes studied her. Her eyes were a weak blue but her skin was pale and lovely and her black hair streaked dramatically with gray. “Does it matter?” she asked.
    â€œOh, no,” May said, carefully, but also throwing caution to the wind. “No, it doesn’t matter. It just seems odd. To do it now, with Lucy and the children just leaving.”
    With a sudden snap of cloth Agnes pulled a dish towel from the rack above her, turned, lifted the vase from the sink, and dried its bottom with one round swipe. She turned again, caught May’s eye, and then marched out of the room with the flowers held before her and was met by Lucy’s voice saying, “Oh, Bob hasn’t seen them. Look. They came for May.” In a whisper, “From her mailman.”
    The air at her back felt damp, although when she moved
closer to the window she realized it was only the unaccustomed coolness. When had summer become fall? She sat at the kitchen table. Agnes returned, poured the coffee, and now refusing to meet her eye, carried the tray away.
    May brushed back the curtain to see the courtyard and the lighted rooms of the other apartments and then, on an impulse, pushed back her chair, raised her knee to the sill, and climbed out to the narrow fire escape. She straightened up slowly. She had not stood out here for years. She placed her hands on the black railing and gazed out like a woman on the deck of a ship. The floor of the courtyard, the uneven patches of concrete and dirt, the tall wooden fences like corrugated cardboard that divided them, were lit dimly by the light in each apartment window and by the high, distant moon.
    She turned and saw the square metal milk box where they kept extra milk and butter in cold weather, and walking carefully over the grate floor of the fire escape, she moved to it and sat down. She leaned her back against the brick wall. She could no longer distinguish her anger from her sense of humiliation and she closed her eyes for a moment in order to dispel both.
    She could hear her brother-in-law’s voice through the open window of the dining room, hear the rise and fall of coffee cups. She felt the breeze under her skirt and wrapped it more tightly around her knees.
    When she opened her eyes she saw a man in shirtsleeves in a lighted window of the apartment house behind theirs. Among the many things she would have to consider if she were to let this possibility, this second life, become real, was her own physical inexperience. She would have to consider the odor of starch and smoke and after-shave on her brother-in-law’s collar when he bent to kiss her. She would have to remember the clean odorless fingers of the priests as they
touched her forehead and her lips. Remember even the hands of Monsignor Lockhart in her first convent. Every morning he had left the rectory with a slap of Aqua Velva, and then with each Communion wafer placed a mouthful of the scent onto their tongues and into their empty stomachs at six o’clock Mass. She would have to remember her brother Johnny in the year or two before she entered the convent and he left home for good, remember him asleep on the couch in the living room, remember the warm odor of his breath and the long, white hand on