Free The Color Master: Stories by Aimee Bender

said, “I’m sorry,” when people bumped into him on the street, as if his presence on the sidewalk deserved apology, for had he notbeen there in the first place, he reasoned, the person would have had no one to bump into. “I am a mouse, a mouse,” he had whispered to her as he was dying. The problem was that being a mouse sometimes made people irritable, and many raised their voices in her father’s presence because he spoke so softly it was aggravating. “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” her mother said, often. “SPEAK LOUDER, MAN!” While he was dying, which took a few days, the nurse kept leaving her mystery novel on his stomach, along with her purse, and sometimes her snack, so when the secretary visited he was covered with objects, breathing thinly and carefully so as not to shake anything off.
    Hans joined her father’s ghost-space easily. The two men walked through her dreams together, unable to speak, shoulders folding in, followed by dogs. She couldn’t stop thinking about them. Once, she had yelled at her mother about something small, like clothes, or the telephone, and her father had stumbled in, weeping and whispering, “Stop it!” His exclamation point came in the form of a loud
hush
, like a radiator expelling heat. She and her mother had looked over, startled. They both liked fighting. It felt like a good workout, somewhat aerobic. German women had a different legacy to manage.
    Through leads on her computer and in the phone book, the secretary tried to find living Hoefler relatives, but no one returned her phone calls. Finally, through an advertisement she placed on the Internet, she was able to track down a former girlfriend of Hans’s, from their courtship in the 1950s, when Germany was split in half like a bread roll; when the Ottoman Empire could still occasionally be found on globes in thirdhand trinket shops.
    The secretary walked up a dark stairway, curling aroundto the back of the stone building. The walls smelled of wine, and mold.
    “The curious thing about Hans,” said the woman, after introductions had been made and she was now curled on her sofa with bubbly water in a green glass on a coaster of cork, “is that he would not let me perform what many men enjoyed. That is,” she said, petting the long-haired white cat who’d hopped onto her lap, “what men often request. I assume you know what I mean?”
    The secretary thought of several things. Which was it? The older woman leaned in. “With the mouth,” she whispered, tapping her chin with a long red fingernail. “Just that.
    “He never allowed it. He did let me once, and then he insisted on serving me repeatedly for days. It was very pleasant for me,” she said. “Were you similarly treated? You’re awfully young.”
    The secretary frowned. “No,” she said. “He was only an acquaintance.”
    “Is he dead?”
    The secretary picked at the old chocolates in a silver dish between them, their corners whitened and chalky with time. She removed one and took a cautious bite. Crystallized maple sugar inside.
    “Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry. I should’ve said so earlier.”
    The cat closed its eyes, and no one took a sip of anything, and the sugar was sticky and too sweet in the secretary’s mouth.
    The older woman reached out a hand and put it on the secretary’s elbow. It was a light touch, but there was something else in it. “Let me show you something,” she said. She lifted the cat onto her shoulder and led the younger womaninto her bedroom, which smelled musty, windows shut forever, and even with the lamp lit, had an undefeatable dimness. No direct sunlight, only the reflection of it off the building’s bricks next door. It made the secretary instantly weary.
    The older woman knelt, and from a drawer next to her bed removed a small gold locket. Inside was a lock of hair.
    “It’s my hair,” she said. “Not Hans’s. I soaked it in a deadly poison. Hair is porous. Had I needed to, I would’ve eaten it and died. We