LITMIR.BIZ

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wings and halos, the sheep and a lamb, the cows and a donkey in a brown jumper with a tail. Where had I been in my thoughts? Was I also in a recessional?

      Some of our friends told us they’d noticed our absence in the Sunday school class we’d attended for years.

      “Where have you been?” They asked. “We’ve missed you in the Fidelis class.”

      “I’m going to another class.” Solome said. “I am examining my Christianity— the heat has been turned up.”

      Solome Savard

      The Christmas season was busy with parties. Gretchen came home from school for three days. She spent most of the time e-mailing or on the phone with Dennis who lived in Connecticut and didn’t come with her. Soos and Brian seemed happy. Solome’s mother was cheerful. Things were hopeful.

      The bleakness of January hit after the holidays. Solome fell into the sub-zero weather. She sat in the chair and imagined she sat in a room in which there was nothing. That’s the way she felt. She rarely thought about herself as a person without Stephen and the children. When she did, it was a snow-covered field without any tracks. Solome’s volunteer job at the Historical Society was not a consideration. Two days a week. Nothing that demanded much of her. And if it did, she could let go.

      Solome was too tired to go to the Monday night Bible study after Christmas. She wanted the nothingness of her thoughts a while longer. But nothing did not stay nothing. Something always began to form. A fallen hair. Dust from the air. They settled on the floor. Were drawn to each other. They formed a gray fuzz which was the beginning. More dust from the air settled on the floor. It came up in the air from the furnace. It sifted down through the ceiling and in through the insulation and the windows. She used her hand as a broom. She was on her knees on the floor. She swept the fuzz as though her hand was a broom. She swept the holy, living dust mites.

      Stephen Savard

      Forgot to put ice cream back in freezer. Left on counter. Ran down into drawers. Solome angry then sorry she was angry. It’s all right all right— it happens to everyone no don’t say anything— don’t.

      I had another appointment with the doctor. He imaged my brain to have a map to measure its future journeys.

      I could be in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, though it was not certain how soon the disease would develop, or if it would. There were several things that could look like Alzheimer’s. Maybe it was a phase— an adjustment a little more jarring than normal. Maybe I was unconsciously backing out of responsibility I didn’t want. Or felt no longer wanted. His words seem to cross. Was he crossing me? I felt anger. Solome put her hand on my arm. Was he blaming me for the blame I already felt? Was I hearing him or imagining what I heard?

      “How do you know for sure?” I heard Solome ask.

      “Usually the only way is an autopsy.”

      We were shocked into silence. The doctor must have realized he spoke hastily. We had not gone that far in our thoughts yet.

      The doctor apologized.

      We returned home silently in the car.

      “I thought we could travel,” Solome said as we ate supper that evening.

      “We’ve been to Europe several times,” I answered. “I wouldn’t mind going back to Germany.”

      “I was thinking of someplace farther— why not China?”

      I met a colleague in Germany— at a conference— at the university in Freiburg— a man named Siceloff. There— I had remembered his name precisely. His wife was Johanna.

      “Remember?— we ate with them at a table in a restaurant on the square— alfresco—” I told Solome. “Afterwards we traveled.”

      “I’ve always liked the Chinese rooms at the Minneapolis Art Institute,” Solome continued.

      “I remember nearly missing the plane in Frankfurt,” I said.

      “We wouldn’t go on our own,” Solome told me. “We’d take one of those faculty tours that guide us along. We get their brochures in the mail all the time.”

      I knew Solome was high on responsibility. She was low on the feeling of loss. She would face her worries. She had run at first because she was frightened. Maybe horrified was more like it. But she came back. She would go on as she always had.

      Solome Savard

      Wear warm clothes, she remembered. Those warm clothes would have to be faith. What else did she have to wear? She dragged herself back to Bible study, though her discussion group was reading a book that numbed faith.

      Imagine a language not your own. Imagine a Monday night Bible study where a little group studied the book of Hebrews. They were Else and Bill Renke, Elaine and Harold Franklin, Charlotte and Ralph Steward, the Forman sisters, sometimes Pastor and Mrs. Croft, and of course, John Everett, the man without his wife. Solome listened to John Everett read the list of men who had lived by faith— Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel.

      “Faith is evidence of things not seen. Faith is the substance of things not seen,” Reverend Croft concluded. Solome would have to think about that.

      Solome lived in a country founded by pilgrims. The Indians had been pushed out of the way, their languages nearly extinguished. The continent had been cleared of buffalo. Their history was kept neatly in exhibits and in the stacks of the Historical Society. Refugees and immigrants still arrived, but the new wave of immigrants was non-European from Somalia and Mexico and all parts of Asia. The whole world seemed to be coming.

      Stephen continued to manage his work with small lapses. It was as if being in the office, he could do office work. He also still traveled to meetings. Sometimes Solome went to conferences with him, when wives were invited. Otherwise, she kept busy with shopping, working on Wednesdays and Fridays, lunching with the Faculty Wives Club, or with Soos or her mother. She had her discussion group on Thursday afternoon, church on Sunday mornings and the Bible study on Monday evenings. She walked the dog, visited with Hetty Grunswald, and other neighbors and friends. She looked forward to trips to Crane Lake.

      Solome still felt like two different women, divided between the responsibility to her husband and children, and doing what her mother wanted. But there was another Solome. One who wanted to do what she wanted. But what was it she wanted?

      When a friend died suddenly in late February, Solome saw his widow grieving in a side row of the church. Solome thought of the loss of Stephen, who sat beside her. Her mother on the other side. She remembered her father’s funeral. The smell of flowers. The words summing up her father’s life. At least, the end of those two lives were known. The anxiety of the journey to the end was over for them. Now their work of grief began.

      Stephen Savard

      Solome and I lived on Upper St. John Street in St. Paul.

      Did she think there were enough saints in their address? I had asked.

      Soos and her daughter, Susan Anna Stiple, and Soos’ husband, Brian Stiple, the son-in-law, came for supper one night in March. Solome had e-mailed Gretchen that she was planning a family dinner for Friday evening, if there wasn’t another heavy snow, which was forecast. They would miss her.

      But the snow wasn’t heavy, and I picked up Solome’s mother after work. We had settled at the table. The food was served. I felt like myself. The evening felt solid. Yet Solome seemed nervous, as if at any moment we could topple off the earth.

      Mark often brought home friends from the college. They seemed in awe of being in the provost’s house. Mark always had a different girl. Tonight he said he was bringing Jill, but showed up with Jean.

      After dinner, on that Friday evening, the phone rang. It was Gretchen.

      She was getting married. That was the news. Gretchen and Dennis were going to marry. Strange, I thought— when Gretchen called or wrote, it often seemed they weren’t together.

      “What’s

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