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mail. I stared at the Bronx battleground where Mark and I
had spent Saturdays, envisioning little park benches where there was rubble. The bills were mostly for clothes. Some shirts he’d bought somewhere, shirts I’d never seen. I was trying to figure out if I should pay them or mail him the bills. Or walk over and hand-deliver.
    In the end it’s details that defeat us. The bills, not my doomed-to-fail urban planner’s vision for the Bronx, were what I couldn’t handle. It was the same when Mark left. I didn’t cry when I found he was gone. I cried four days later, when I found a wet puppy shivering in the rain. I took the dog by its clutch collar and led it to the address on its tag. I rang the bell, and a tall, heavyset woman in black toreador pants stormed down the stairs, shouting at me. “What’re you doing? Why did you ring that bell?” When she saw my face distort and saw her shivering hound, she began apologizing and even ran after me a little way as I dashed down the street. In the end, it was the dog and his screaming mistress who made me feel lost and destitute in the world, more than Mark and the note he’d left on the kitchen table.
    The phone rang as I sat, immobilized by Mark’s unpaid bills.
    â€œGuess who this is?” a woman’s voice said.
    â€œIt’s Jennie.” We’d lost track of one another over the years, after she married Tom, but I’d have known her voice anywhere. A few days before, Jennie Watson had received the directory from our high school reunion committee. My address listing was an old one, the first apartment Mark and I had shared in Manhattan, the one next door to the funeral home, where we’d had to push past mourners in order to get inside. Doom, it seemed, surrounded us. Our phone number had changed twice, but my parents’ number was still good, and parents seem to be a kind of constant in the lives of overly transient offspring.
    She was crestfallen. It was almost ten years since we’d
talked. “How’d you know it was me? Did your mother tell you?”
    â€œWe only spent half our lives together on the phone, remember?”
    â€œOh, God, do I remember. So, how are you?” I told her that my husband had just left me and I thought I was losing my job, but otherwise I was fine.
    â€œOh, that sounds great,” she said. She was living on a farm in Thrace, New Jersey. I said I didn’t know New Jersey had anything but chemical dumps. She reminded me it was the Garden State and that there were vast farmlands. “We got this one cheap.” I was surprised she said “we.” No one had imagined she and Tom would stay together, but now they had two children. All her sentences had “we” in them. They’d come east long after I had. Tom studied computer science at Columbia while Jennie went to Teachers College for her master’s in biology. They’d planned to return to the Midwest after graduate school, but Tom was offered a well-paying job at Bell Labs and Jennie got a job teaching at Princeton Day.
    With the insurance money from his father’s death, Tom made a down payment on a hundred acres of farmland as an investment. “But now he’s addicted. A real farmer. He works four days a week as a farmer. You know Tom.” She laughed. “He always was a workaholic.” I did know Tom and I didn’t recall him ever working very hard. “What about you?” she asked.
    â€œAre you ready for this?” She said she was ready, but when I told her Mark was living with Lila Harris, she was aghast. I told her I wasn’t sure what I minded more. That they were together or that they had never had the nerve to come and just tell me. The conversation turned somber, so I decided to lighten the mood. “My boss has been planning exotic vacations for me. Yesterday he told me to go to Ireland. He thinks I’m Irish.”
    She paused for a second.