Free Someday_ADE by Lynne Tillman

brilliantly, the adored son.
    Sunday, Katherine was rambling in Central Park. The night-time man’s wife appeared in her path, and it wasn’t a dream. She wore an unadorned black jacket, slim black pants, slingback shoes, understated make-up. Katherine admired how well-composed her image was. The wife seemed bemused, chin held high as if loftily acknowledging something or someone in the distance. A girl walked beside her, their daughter, and when they passed by, Katherine felt a furtive intimacy with her night-time rival, like a fragment secretly attached. The daughter was taller, longer-legged, unsmiling—what had happened—her face similar to her mother’s, though much younger. Daughters manage fathers like him, and what do they tell themselves. What does he tell her. “I love your mother, this has nothing to do with you.” What does the girl feel. The daughter’s long, gold earrings danced at her swan-white neck.
    Her mother’s charm bracelet. Katherine saw it flutter, a golden relic hanging from a bare branch. That would be a strange picture, she thought, not easily dismissed, uncanny even. But how would she do it, if she did. Startling, what gets kept.

The Shadow of a Doubt

    Imperfect knowledge accompanied him across the field to a big tent. It was strange, it was just like the tent Thomas dreamed about the night before, with green and white stripes and billowing white flaps spread wide like labia. Inside the tent, a three-piece band played “All of Me,” a beguiling smell of gardenias insinuated itself, and five veiled women, their naked, fleshy bellies curling and uncurling—maybe the gypsy women from a small circus in southern Turkey—waved and pointed behind him, and there she was, Grace, his love, embracing him, lustily biting his lips. You’re eating me up alive, he dream-talked, and everything was right in the world, until he awoke.
    Déjà vu all over again, Thomas thought, entering the tent. His dream wasn’t a flash of prognostication, he knew the ceremony and reception would be under a tent, so the dream made perfect sense, even if her marriage didn’t. Its inevitability had plagued him for months, especially since Grace had once told him she couldn’t be with him because she didn’t know how to love, couldn’t love, it wasn’t him, she said, downcast, she was incapable. Hers was a hopeless, existential condition. My mother, she explained, made loving anyone impossible. Her mother had disappeared one day, didn’t pick her up from kindergarten, and finally turned up dead, or was pronounced dead, it was murkily put, and that was all, she wouldn’t say more, so he didn’t prod Grace, assuming the disappearance was the result of another man, drugs, or alcohol. He doubted she’d died—her father kept the truth from her—but Thomas believed the terrifying, great loss and abandonment had diminished Grace’s capacity to trust, and desperate insecurity carved out her being. Grace left it, and many other matters, open to interpretation; her vagueness shaped their relationship, until, disastrously bent out of shape, it disintegrated.
    Now Grace was actually marrying Billy Webster, a man—Thomas would’ve preferred a woman—a man she could love, presumably, unless she had other motives and reasons with which she’d tie her Gordian knot. Living gardenias cascaded down thick, moss-green plastic vines, but there were no women in veils, except for Grace, when she walked down the aisle next to her father, who looked just like the New Hampshire modern-day farmer he was. This was New Hampshire, Thomas reminded himself, glancing away from Grace’s swishing peau de soie dress, whose hem touched his foot as she walked toward the other man. But how much a dream tells and doesn’t, how it plays tricks, just like people. His only consolation was to attend her wedding the way he would a funeral for a colleague or a former friend, because it was required and ennobled him with easy virtue.
    Thomas knew