Free In Need of a Good Wife by Kelly O'Connor McNees

front and give him time to notice her arrival. She didn’t want to startle the man, and she held out hope he would recognize his daughter.
    “Hello, Papa,” she called, and waved.
    His gaze flicked to the brim of her bonnet and he stared as she approached. Then his eyes drifted back to the water. When Rowena sat down beside him, the man flinched and pulled his arms into his chest, crying out.
    “Who are you ?” he asked, anxiously. “Did you take my hat?”
    He was getting worse. “Papa, it’s me. Rowena. I am your daughter. Remember?”
    He narrowed his eyes at her. “My daughter is a little girl. She is playing in the back garden with that awful kitten. What is his name? He is not to come in the house anymore.”
    “Beelzebub,” Rowena whispered.
    Her father looked up at her, surprised. “Yes, that’s it. Are you a neighbor? Has he done something to your garden? I’m so terribly sorry.”
    “No, Papa. I’m Rowena. I was a little girl playing with the kitten in the back garden, but time passed and I grew up. Don’t you remember? You were there for it all. My birthdays, my wedding. You were the one who introduced me to Richard.”
    “Say what you will about that cat—he is the best mouser in lower Manhattan.”
    Rowena took a breath and laced her fingers slowly in her lap, left thumb, right thumb, forefinger, middle finger, ring finger—now bare—pinkie, then clutched her hands together until the knuckles blanched.
    “You remember, don’t you, Papa, that Richard died?” She looked at him but he didn’t reply. A broad maple tree stood near the bench, its leaves brown and curled and missing in patches, like a demented man who had yanked out fistfuls of his own hair. The wind off the river was chilly and Rowena shivered. She turned her body on the bench to face her father, put her hand on his elbow, then moved it slowly up to his neck, the liver-spotted rim of his ear. “Are you cold, Papa?”
    “Yes, my dear. I am.” She stood and helped him up, knowing she would run her mind again and again over that my dear on her way home, as if it were a charm, an omen that she had chosen rightly. She took his arm and led him back to the asylum’s entrance. The building had been under renovation since Mr. Blair had come to live there a few years before. There was a satisfying proportionality to the structure; if it had been a drawing on paper, a child could fold it in half and both wings of the building would match up precisely. They passed through the foyer into the large open sleeping quarters the nurses called “the chapel,” for that was the room’s original purpose, back when the building had been an immigrant hospital. Under an archway on the far wall, they had set up an altar with a white tablecloth and wooden candlesticks, always lit beneath the cross that hung on the wall. There was symmetry, too, Rowena noticed, in the cross. What is it about this balance in a shape that holds such innate appeal? she wondered. Why do we expect life to take the form of action and reaction, gift and reception, when it is so often out of balance? Two long rows of beds stretched out between the door and the altar, and at the foot of each was a rocking chair.
    “Papa, let’s get you comfortable,” Rowena said. “And then I have something to read to you.”
    He grunted but didn’t protest and Rowena helped him over to his bed, about halfway down on the left-hand side, and eased his overcoat off his shoulders. She draped it over the back of the chair, then pulled his blankets back, taking a knitted shawl from the foot of the bed, one that had, in fact, belonged to her mother, and opened it over his shoulders. In the windowpane behind her father’s head was an image of his perfect double.
    “The nurse will bring your tea in a little bit.” Rowena sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled the letter from her dress pocket. “Papa, I want you to hear this,” she said.
     
Dear Mrs. Moore, I am very pleased to make