Ernie's Ark by Monica Wood

Francine to arrange poinsettia baskets when the call came. It was Bruce, with an invitation from Ann and Don Pratt.
    “Remember that stupid game?” he said. “Mindsweeper or something? The new version’s out and they’re looking for a rematch.” He laughed. “Couple against couple, Ann says. This is war, baby.”
    Cindy smiled. These intermittent moments she called intimacy felt like a series of dots that might still connect into a picture that made sense. He took a noisy sip of something: she pictured him in his small office adjacent to the art studios, drinking coffee. Who else was there? Who else waiting? “Shouldn’t we let them win?” she asked hopefully.
    Something in the air hovered disagreeably; Don Pratt was on Bruce’s tenure review committee. “Fuck, no,” Bruce said. “We bury the bastards.” She could hear an arty-sounding commotion in the background, easels being put up or taken down. “I need you, babe. I need my girl with the answers.”
    But Cindy was out of answers. She hung up and glanced around the shop. “Francine,” she said, “do you think you could hold the fort? I have to run out for a minute.”
    Francine—a myopic, unlovely eighth-grader—brightened, her hand on the phone. “If a really big order comes in, can I take it?”
    Cindy shrugged on her parka and swung her purse from a hook. “You can sell the place if you get a good enough offer.”
    “I’d never do that,” Francine said, shocked. Then: “Oh. A joke.”
    Cindy sighed. Francine, who was whip-smart and better than any of the part-timers Cindy had hired and fired over the years, had been born with absolutely no sense of irony. Her adoration, guileless and unconditional, made Cindy feel too powerful most of the time, an irony she could barely stand to contemplate.
    Two hours later, after panicking through Woolworth’s, Flint’s, Rite-Aid, and the strip mall on Libby Road, Cindy pulled back in front of her shop empty-handed. As she sat in the cold car considering her options—there had to be a MindMelt II somewhere in this town, there had to be—she spotted her ex-husband, Danny Little, coming down the sidewalk with a yellow dog.
    She felt extravagantly glad to see him, someone who had known her before she’d been granted the wish of a different life. “You got a dog,” she said, getting out of the car.
    “Your replacement,” he said, not bitterly. “How’s life on College Row?”
    “We never moved.” She lifted her chin toward the shop. “You should stop in once in a while, you’d know these things.” Since the divorce, Danny and his entire family had managed to avoid her altogether.
    “I’m not much in the market for flowers,” he said.
    “Nobody is,” she admitted. The mill had been on strike for ten months now. She’d seen Danny on television the night before, caught on the slushy picket line with his face scrunched up like a tin can, wielding a crowbar and spitting onto the greasy window of a pickup during shift change.
    “I saw the news,” she said softly. “Dan, I barely recognized you.”
    His eyes flickered. “You’re not the only one.” Now he held her gaze. “Timmy crossed.”
    Timmy was the youngest of all those brothers, his favorite. “Crossed?” Cindy said, half-comprehending. “You mean the picket line?”
    Danny nodded, his face puffy with grief. She found that she could still read him like a wife: he had given his brother up.
    “Danny, I don’t believe you.” She was of the opinion that love made exceptions to life’s most exacting rules. He looked haggard and old, and perhaps she alone was able to understand how much this breach had cost him. Thick as thieves, she used to think of them, thick as thieves, the flypaper family.
    Cindy scanned the weathering town, its snowy hills gone ash-colored in the overcast afternoon. “Maybe it will end soon.” She imagined herself as a striker’s wife, collecting cans for the food bank.
    “Is that your stepdaughter?”