Crooked Little Heart by Anne Lamott Page A

better boys. They would be home by nine or so. James was upstairs working in his study. He had offered to help her clean, but she had not wanted his help. She did not even want music on the stereo. She just wanted to be alone in the silence, and clean.
    The floor of their living room was honey-colored wood. When she and Andrew first moved in, it had been varnished brown and deeply scarred, of no distinction. He had spent a week on his knees sanding it with a small hand sander, blasting off the ugly brown shellac until beautiful amber pine appeared. Hag to princess, he said, when the surface dross was gone, the gouges and scratches and discolorations. Elizabeth called it their second-chance floor. They bought a thick green rug, sea-foam green, just big enough for the two of them to lie on. Sometimes on sunny afternoons they put pillows from the couch on their little rug, and they read. They read poetry, books on the Renaissance, novels with no plot, on the quiet green island that was their marriage.
    T HEY are lying on their rug with Rosie, who is four years old and asleep face down on Andrew’s chest. He is sleeping too. Elizabeth studies them for a moment, listens to them sleep. Then slowly she reaches out and touches the distinct arch of Andrew’s dark brow. She strokes it with the lightest touch. She feels like a mother wiping away sorrow, or headache. After a moment, he opens his eyes, blue as a Siamese cat’s, blue as Rosie’s. There is nothing more intimate, shethinks at that moment, than tracing a loved one’s eyebrow. Those delicate hairs, so close to the vulnerable eyes; one is saying, tracing the brow, I am right next to your unprotected place, and I am blessing it. Rosie makes an impossibly loud snore, like an old pug, and they both smile, and Elizabeth just keeps tracing the one eyebrow with her baby finger, without taking her eyes off his.
    T HAT rug was no longer there. Elizabeth had thrown it out a few years after Andrew’s death. There had been too many other men on it. She had never really wept for Andrew; there had been Rosie to tend to, and besides, she felt somehow protected by the newness, the unbelievability of it all, of having gone from being totally married to being a widow. The stabbing sense of loss never caught up with her. She’d kept it at bay, night after night at the bar, drinking Scotch and water, bringing home that night’s suavest available man, anyone semihandsome who could make her laugh. She had been through a lot of carpenters, businessmen, poets, painters, writers, some cowboy types, even a biker or two. And when this stage had come to an end, more or less of its own accord when Rosie was seven or so, Elizabeth had gotten a new mattress for her bed and replaced the sea-foam rug with a handsome dark green dhurrie. James had courted her on this rug four years ago. They used to lie on it in front of the fire. Now Rosie and Simone slept on it in sleeping bags whenever Simone stayed over, because Rosie’s single bed had grown too small for the two of them.
    It seemed lately that Simone had spent every weekend night here with them; Veronica was dating someone new, and perhaps that partly explained things. But whatever the case, James and Elizabeth had fallen asleep most nights recently to the sound of the girls in late-night whisperings of boys and tennis, of the places they would live when they were older.
    Rosie never had insomnia when Simone spent the night. They slept side by side in their separate sleeping bags, huddling against each other like puppies.
    James had always maintained that there was good crazy and there was bad crazy and that you just had to make sure you stayed good crazy, but it seemed to Elizabeth that Simone was in danger of teetering off toward bad crazy. “No, no,” said James. “
Boy
crazy, not badcrazy.” But Elizabeth wasn’t so sure, and the more time she spent with Simone, the more she worried that bad things were in store.
    She was so lovely, fair