The Why of Things: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

accidentally discovered this house, Joan could hardly resist. It required a lot of work to slowly restore it, and Joan had always envisioned winterization as the point of completion to their efforts. But then one year the house in Maryland needed a new roof, and another year they thought they might be moving to London, and then they had three girls to get through school. Joan has always wanted to see the quarry frozen, a football field of smooth black ice, but she never has; the few times they have been able to come up in winter have always been too warm.
    She brings the sheets to the laundry room and kneels down behind the washing machine to hook it up for the season when she hears Anders’ footsteps behind her.
    “I thought I’d go get donuts,” he says.
    “Oh, don’t do that,” Joan says. She is hooking up the dryer now, trying to fit the stubborn plug into its socket. “Let’s go out when the girls get up. I could use something substantial.” She crawls backward on her knees out from behind the machines and stands up, brushing her hands off on her thighs. “We could go to George’s.”
    Anders helps her push the washer and the dryer back against the wall. He, too, is wearing yesterday’s clothes, Joan sees, and he has had a shave. A small white square of toilet paper clings to his neck, and something about this, the vulnerability it suggests, strikes Joan’s heart with a bolt of distress. Anders has aged since October, the manifestation of a sadness that Joan is both desperate and helpless to ease. And the facts of his graying hair, his deepening wrinkles, have propelled her imagination through the years to consider a time when she might be without him. She frowns.
    “You cut yourself,” she comments.
    Anders touches the spot. “Last year’s razor. Somehow I managed to forget mine.”
    “I hate to think what I’ve forgotten,” Joan says. She sighs, giving the dryer a final push into place with her backside. She goes to the sink to wash her hands, which are dusty from the tubes and wires behind the machines.
    “They’re coming with a towing rig later today to bring the car up,” Anders says, over the sound of the water. “Truck, rather. Apparently it was a pickup. They’re coming from Rowley, I guess.”
    “Right, you said last night.” Joan rinses her hands. That it was a pickup in their quarry was one of the few things Anders had said last night, after he had come to bed. They hadn’t talked about the irony of what had happened, though it seems impossible to Joan that he hadn’t been thinking about it, too.
    She shuts off the tap and turns around. “I hoped at first when I woke up it was a dream.” She gives a laugh. “I wish.”
    “Hmm,” Anders says. “Talk about a welcome.”
    “What time are they coming?”
    “They said between two and four. Whatever that means.”
    Joan bends down to retrieve the laundry detergent from the cabinet beneath the sink, shaking her head. “The whole thing isjust sort of hard to believe,” she says, standing. “I don’t even want to think about it, really. It makes me feel ill.”
    “Well. There’s a book in it for you, anyway.”
    Joan regards her husband reproachfully. “Maybe someday.” She wants to wonder aloud about the young man’s reasoning for driving himself into their quarry, if that’s what happened, about the family he may have left behind. She wants to acknowledge the parallels between what happened with Sophie and what may have happened here. “I’m going to run the washer,” she says instead, holding back because she is afraid of dwelling with him there too much. “Would you bring the bags upstairs, and whatever else? Then maybe the girls will be up, and we can go. I’m starving.”
    Joan listens to Anders’ footsteps on the stairs as she dumps detergent into the washing machine. They are slow and plodding, ponderous. She imagines him carrying up not one or two bags at a time, but laboring up the stairs with as many