Free As Good as Dead by Elizabeth Evans Page B

people tell me that, honey!”). Then I brought her up to speed (Martie’s death, the miscarriages, and my sense that I couldn’t push Will on adoption).
    “This has been a sad time for you, honey,” she said when I’d finished, “but you’re rich in so many ways! Do you think you could get in touch with some of that? Try remembering you’re worthy of happiness and love, Charlotte! And, even though your husband is a saint”—she winked at me; she had a good wink—“could you work on not thinking of him as your HP?”
    I laughed. HP stood for Higher Power in AA lingo, an out for those of us who got itchy at the more conventional talk of God.
    “How about—if you don’t feel comfortable asking Will to think about adoption yet—how about inviting him to work with you on some little thing? That’s always good for Billy and me. You two cooperating on a project instead of your separate jobs? It wouldn’t have to be anything ambitious! Don’t even think ambitious! Think—maybe something from a list of chores you’ve put off.”
    We had such a list. It was long and included items like gutters , lights for ramada , reset bricks along front walk . At the very top of the list, however, was an item that had been there ever since we had moved to Tucson: boxes. We needed to go through the bowed, dust-covered cardboard boxes that had passed a sealed-up life in the crawl space of our Minneapolis duplex even before we had hauled them to Tucson and the brick shed in our backyard.
    That was the chore that I picked.
    It was not easy to get Will to agree to a day—he had this to do, that to do—and then the day we picked turned out to be incredibly hot. When it was time for us to get to work, the brick shed was an oven. “Are you sure?” Will asked. I was sure. While Will went to the alley to fetch the wheeled recycle bin, I attacked one of the big cardboard boxes marked CHARLOTTE .
    “Watch this!” I called to Will as he returned, wheeling the awkward, rattling bin across the rocky yard. “Open up the lid!”
    His gaze from under the bill of his baseball cap suggested skepticism but he did open the big bin’s flabby plastic lid. And I did pitch in the entirety of my first box (papers from my undergraduate days, it had turned out to be). Will moved past me and into the shed and pulled a box of his own from one of the dusty shelves and set to opening it with a pocket knife. Always prepared. Methodical. Neat. I admired that about him.
    The heft of my next box surprised me. WRITERS ’ WORKSHOP/DRAFTS read the fat Magic Marker letters scrawled across it. I peeled off the crackling length of paper tape—almost all of its old glue gone—that I’d used to seal the top so many years before. Inside was a mess of papers. Letters, manuscripts—mine and my Workshop classmates’— and drafts of stories I’d abandoned. “Blotto” by Charlotte Price sat on top of the heap. I picked it up, meaning to lift the title page and read a bit of that almost forgotten story, but what I spotted beneath the manuscript stopped me:
    Three torn-in-half-and-taped-together-again photographs—all nearly identical—that I’d thought lost forever.
    In the photographs, two very eccentric-looking old ladies, each holding a yellow plaid coffee cup, leaned into one another in what seemed to be both friendliness and support. Poor old creatures. Their bran-colored stockings drooped around their ankles so, you might have imagined the old dears were in the process of shedding their skins. Both wore cardigans (sprung in the elbows and missing buttons and doing nothing to conceal the sorry-old-lady saggy boobs that hung just above the waistbands of pleated wool skirts that, I knew, reeked of mothballs). Faces powdered a ghostly white. Eyebrows drawn on in loony, pitiful scrawls. Mouths painted a dead red and puckered as the tops of drawstring bags.
    Esmé and I, circa 1988, decked out in clothes from Goodwill, standing in our kitchen on Burlington