"We saw it on that one, the Brooker? Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"I'll be damned."

"My son, Dean, lives way out in the country. He and his wife, Gaby, have got this dachshund named Zip. It's a nice little thing, but the problem is, their next-door neighbor had a rabbit for a pet that Zip was always trying to get. They let this rabbit run loose in their yard, and it drove the dog crazy. Every time he'd see the thing, he'd bark and scratch at the ground or throw himself at the fence separating them. It caused bad feeling between the two families, but what are you going to do?

"One night, Dean and Gaby were sitting in the kitchen after dinner, drinking coffee. Who comes in covered with dirt from head to toe, carrying the dead rabbit in his mouth and proud as General MacArthur? Zip. The little stinker'd finally figured a way under the fence and killed the poor thing. Well, you can imagine what happened! Gaby had a conniption fit and grabbed it away from the dog while there was still something left. Luckily, Zip hadn't bitten into it. They guessed he'd killed it by shaking it and breaking its neck.

"But what were they going to do now? Both of them could just imagine what the neighbors would say in the morning when Dean and Gaby brought it over and explained what'd happened.

"They talked over all the possible ways out of this, and finally came up with a real long shot. Clever, but a long shot. Gaby took the rabbit and washed it real well. Shampoo and everything. Then she got out her blowdryer, if you can imagine that. Dried and combed the damned body till it looked brand-new and fluffy. Peter Cottontail-fresh. By this time, it was about ten at night, and part two of the plan.

"Dean took the beautiful dead lump, snuck into the neighbors' backyard, where it'd lived in a hutch up on stilts, and put the body back in its home. Then he tiptoed back, and the two of them went to bed with crossed fingers. What they were hoping was, the neighbors'd see it dead out there, and think it'd died of a heart attack or something in the night. Natural causes. But next morning early, they heard this crazy, wild scream next door, and both of them thought the jig's up. A little while later, the neighbor woman, who by the way was very religious, came banging on their door, looking like she had just seen a horror movie. White as a sheet and talking a million miles an hour, she kept saying, 'A miracle! Honest to God, a miracle! Turns out, yesterday morning their poor little bunny died. So she and her husband dug a deep hole in their backyard and buried him. But when she came out this morning to hang laundry, she found it back in its hutch, clean as a cloud and looking like it hadn't spent the night under a foot of dirt. Mr. Resurrection Rabbit! He was still dead, of course, but hey, you take you miracles where you can find 'em!"

The three of us were sitting on the porch. Beenie had finished the attic and had been coaxed by Roberta into telling the story. I had the feeling she was happy to hang around and chat awhile rather than go home to her empty apartment. We knew about her children, her dead husband, a general description of what life had been like for her till now. From what I'd heard, it wasn't a special life, but a good one. She was proud of her children, had her health, enough money to get by, and a sense of humor that buoyed her and made her the center of attention when she wanted to be.

"Well, I gotta go now, but I'm warning you two: next week I'm tackling the garage and shaping it up. That'll take me all day, so I won't have time for much of the rest of the house. But once it's done, the only thing we'll have to do around here is maintenance."

It was futile to argue that, even more than the basement, we never, ever went into the garage other than to park the car in the winter. Secretly, I rather enjoyed the fact that our small world would be shipshape in a week. Looking at what she'd done in the basement and attic silenced both Roberta's and my protests. The places had been transformed from Grimesvilles to a lot of ordered space and certain interesting objects that, like the television set, evoked enjoyable memories and were thus fun to see again. A red sled we'd hauled the kids around on in both Minnesota and New Mexico, a doll that'd once meant the world to two little girls, and, to my own delight and astonishment, the paperback copies of Pierre & Redburn I'd used in graduate school and thought had been lost in a move eons ago. Beenie just kept toting stuff in, looking grim and impatient at the same time. "How about this? was her usual shorthand question for whether or not we wanted what she held. Although even that was abbreviated toward the end to "this?," Roberta and I sat there waiting to see what would emerge next, what part of our history would return to the surface like a periscope up for a look round. It was hard saying good-bye to some of these things, although there was no earthly reason to keep them. Despite being broken or burned or obsolete, they were our past. Small pieces of a shared life that had worked and grown and found its place in the end.

A few days later, I went to the supermarket to do the shopping. It's a chore I enjoy because the abundance of a market heartens me. I grew up the fourth of five children, and, although we had enough to eat, there was never more than enough. To walk into a store, see all that gorgeous stuff, and know you can buy anything you want or two of anything you want, is a pleasure for me even today. Roberta and I had our lean times, but since we came from similar backgrounds, food was something we never scrimped on. The car could be old and dying the roof full of leaks, but meals at our house were always plentiful, and if the kids wanted to have a friend over for dinner, pull up a chair.

Because both of us enjoy cooking, we alternate nights in the kitchen, but the shopping is my job, and I'm glad to do it.

Surprisingly, the argument over what an author really meant in his work had flared again in my Hawthorne class, and the students divided down the middle into those who believed the artist had the final say about his product, and those who felt any interpretation was valid so long as it was appropriate and well supported. I took no sides, but followed the discussion closely after one earnest girl bit off more than she could chew by saying "Look at God, assuming there is one. What did He mean by creating the world? We could say the separate religions are literary critics because each is convinced their interpretation is correct. But are any of them? Isn't God the only one who knows?"

"Yes, but your 'author' is dead, or silent, and won't tell us what He meant. So it's up to us to figure it out, right?' scoffed another.

Smarty-pants theology. Wise guys sneering at the miraculous. I kept quiet, but it irritated me to hear these hermetic twenty-five-year-olds pontificating snidely about something both obvious and important.

Still preoccupied with discussion, I was automatically scanning the shopping list and taking things off the shelves, when, looking up, I saw Beenie Rushforth twenty feet away. My first impulse was to go up and say hello, but she seemed so content with what she was doing that I held back.

She had an open bag of cookies in her hand and was eating one. Nothing special there, except for the look on her face, which was pure bliss. She'd take a bite, close her eyes, and I could almost hear her groan of pleasure. Swallowing, the eyes would open again, look at the cookie as if it were telling her wonderful things, take a bite, et cetera. Either they were the best cookies ever, or she had something else going. Standing there watching, I realized with a shock that I was as bad as my students. I couldn't simply think that here was someone enjoying a moment of their life. No, with all that happiness showing she had to be a little daffy or strange or just plain off . Why are we so suspicious of the good?"