Dale Loves Sophie to Death by Robb Forman Dew

how disarming, how unarguable, an admission of guilt and culpability can be. Martin could only stand at the window tap-tapping his fingers on the sill and look out while Claire sat on the floor of his living room, cutting and wrapping and tying ribbons on the presents she had selected for her daughter, Katy. In this instance, anyway, sorrow, or even guilt, might not have been the precise sentiment he would have had to accommodate. Nevertheless, he remained preoccupied. At other times in his life he had rubbed two fingers over his lower lip, abstracted; he had put his hand over the late-evening stubble of his beard and gazed out of some other window to avoid an issue. In none of this behavior was there intentional deceit; there was really only an element of reticence and tradition and simple clumsiness. Martin couldn’t have thought of any way to say to Claire that when they had entered his house, and he had watched her spread out the wrapping paper and ribbons and go to work with the tape, his immediate impulse had been finally to put his hands at her waist, with his thumbs pressed against that vulnerable cleft just below her winglike rib cage. It was all he had thought about as he watched her, because over the summer weeks his house had become a neutral territory, empty of his wife and not under the influence of Ellen. Summer after summer, he had experienced the same melancholy during the absence of his family, but his dejection always took him unawares. It had never become a habit. He hadn’t caught the knack of nestling gloomily into it so that it might even have been of some use to him. Vic and Ellen had always been his mainstay during the two and a half months his wife and children were away, but never before had he been offered any other distraction than simply that of their calm company. But now, since Claire and Katy had come to live with them, and even the Hofstatters’ lives were becoming complicated, he was drawn more and more into a new and separate domesticity.
    The souvenirs of Dinah and his children, dispersed throughout his house, had lost their significance, and the usual communal state of the household had gradually elapsed into an entirely personal order controlled only by himself, and he was seldom there. He had taken to sleeping on the couch many nights at the Hofstatters’ house in the country and staying in town only on the two days he had to teach. There was so little gas, and the cost of going back and forth was too great. He had forgotten, in some respects, that he was responsible for any house at all. And night after night he had thought about Claire, and he had convinced himself that she expected and desired just what he expected: that at last, like children growing up and leaving home, they could do just as they liked, now that they were alone together. Thus the lingering feeling that he should explain something to her, since they weren’t doing anything at all but wrapping packages. But she worked with incurious concentration, and not only could Martin not have said anything to the point or even formulated what was to be said, but his mind adapted with singular beauty to the situation and leaped over his original intentions. He was only looking out the window wondering where they could get all those balloons filled with helium.
    He and Claire had waited an hour in line at the gas station to fill Martin’s car, and he had expected to be able to have the balloons inflated at the same station, but he had found that they didn’t offer that service, and, in any case, this was a poor time to make the request. In answer, he had been given only a vacant stare. But Martin had latched on to the idea of helium balloons for Katy’s party, and he was not to be persuaded that they weren’t necessary. He had become privately morose, standing against his car waiting for gas and listening to people insult each other. The poor, gangly attendant burst into apprehensive perspiration under the accumulated