Ernie's Ark by Monica Wood

sloppy, grayish onslaught that was half rain. The ark, alone on the lawn, resting on its flat bottom, looked both finished and abandoned. I kept the engine running, and the heater, and the wipers. I left the radio on low in case we had nothing to say. Junie spread herself across the backseat. I cracked open a beer and handed it to my brother. The car felt cozy, in a way.
    “It’s not a bad-looking boat,” Timmy said, grudgingly. “Kind of tall and beamy.”
    “I’m supposed to make him take it down. Poor guy’s right at zero on the happy scale. Two degrees, maybe, if you count the dog.” He didn’t say anything, so I kept going: “I’ve been wondering if maybe God halted the weather fronts or what have you just so this guy could finish a going-away present for his wife.”
    The car swelled with the ticking wipers, the dog’s breathing, and the radio’s quiet static. “It’s not a going-away present,” Tim said quietly.
    I flicked off the radio. “What, then?” I really wanted to know.
    He shook his head, then took a sip of beer. “Look at that thing, Danny. He’s begging God not to take his wife, come hell or—well, or high water. It’s like a totem or something. I don’t know. A prayer.”
    “A lot of good it’ll do,” I said. “I’ve seen her. She’s days from dying, Tim. Hours, even.”
    “Maybe God spared her. Maybe she’s in there right now trying on some new clothes.” He drained the beer. “For all we know they’re both so happy the mercury’s exploded.”
    What snow there had been disintegrated into a steady rain. The hulking, useless ark, so heavy with a stranger’s strange hope, glistened with water. “For all we know,” I told my little brother, “she’s already died.”
    Timmy nodded. “That’s the difference between you and me.”
    I let some minutes tick past. “Write to me, Tim, will you?”
    He was looking at the ark. “Come on, Danny,” he murmured. “What would I say?”
    “Say anything. Hell, just buy a postcard and sign your name.”
    He nodded. A crisp, deliberate nod, the gesture of a grown man. Our father, whose thoughts contained so little ambiguity, had moved his head in exactly this way.
    The rain melted down. Junie was snoring, and the beer was gone. Through the smeared windshield I thought I saw the ark move, a nearly imperceptible rocking at the stern as water pooled beneath it.
    “Did you see that?”
    “See what?” In the waning light my little brother’s eyes appeared older, blunted by the hours.
    “I half-believe that thing might float,” I whispered.
    Timmy sat up, very slowly, the vinyl seat groaning around him. And we waited.
    Ernie’s ark did not rise up and float away that night. I hope it doesn’t matter. I hope what matters is that we believed it might. That we waited there together in the dark. I hope my little brother understood why it was not possible for me to apologize, and that he will remember me, as I will remember Ernie, as one man doing the best he could against uncontrollable forces. This is my hope. Meanwhile I’m the one sending postcards, one every seven days, the way Noah sent his dove in search of dry land.

The Joy Business
     
    Cindy Love, proprietor, Showers of Flowers
    Six days after Cindy’s first divorce, the door to her flower shop jangled opened and in walked another man. He wanted flowers, he said. Help me.
    “For your wife?” Cindy asked.
    He laughed. “Hardly.” He drummed his long, ringless, privileged-looking fingers on Cindy’s counter. “Tenure party,” he said, making the words sound dull and obligational, but to Cindy they had a different tang altogether. The college, only forty minutes away by car, occupied a world rarely felt here.
    Bruce Love was his name. He taught studio art, he told her, though he himself was a sculptor. Beautiful teeth, an artistic nose, a shiver of well-cut hair. She recommended something showy—bird of paradise, stargazer lilies—and he went for it, watching as she