The Corrections

information about the event ever reaches the outside world. It’s a perfectly silent collision.”
    Robin reappeared in a black one-piece swimsuit. With a gesture just short of rude, she gave Denise her water.
    “Thank you,” Denise said.
    “You’re welcome!” Robin said. She took off her glasses and dove into the deep end. She swam underwater while Erin circled the pool and emitted shrieks appropriate to a dying M-or S-class star. When Robin surfaced at the shallow end she looked naked in her semi-blindness. She looked more like the wife Denise had imagined—hair pouring in rivers down her head and shoulders, her cheekbones and dark eyebrows gleaming. As she left the pool, water beaded on the hemming of her suit and streamed through the untended hairs of her bikini line.
    An old unresolved confusion gathered like asthma in Denise. She felt a need to get away and cook.
    “I stopped at the necessary markets,” she told Brian.
    “It doesn’t seem fair to put our guest to work,” he said.
    “On the other hand, I offered, and you’re paying me.”
    “There is that, yes.”
    “Erin, now you be a pathogen,” Sinéad said, slipping into the water, “and I’ll be a leukocyte.”
    Denise made a simple salad of red and yellow cherry tomatoes. She made quinoa with butter and saffron, and halibut steaks with a color guard of mussels and roasted peppers. She was nearly done before she thought to peer under the foil coverings of several containers in the refrigerator. Here she found a tossed salad, a fruit salad, a platter of cleaned ears of corn, and a pan of (could it be?) pigs in blankets?
    Brian was drinking a beer by himself on the deck.
    “There’s a dinner in the fridge,” Denise told him. “There’s already a dinner.”
    “Yikes,” Brian said. “Robin must have—I guess when the girls and I were out fishing.”
    “Well, there’s a whole dinner there. I just made a secondwhole dinner.” Denise laughed, really angry. “Do you guys not communicate?”
    “No, in fact, this was not our most communicative day. Robin had some work at the Garden Project that she wanted to stay and do. I had to kind of drag her over here.”
    “Well, fuck.”
    “Look,” Brian said, “we’ll have your dinner now, and we can have hers tomorrow. This is totally my fault.”
    “I guess!”
    She found Robin on the other porch, cutting Erin’s toe-nails. “I just realized,” she said, “that I’ve been making dinner and you already made it. Brian didn’t tell me.”
    Robin shrugged. “Whatever.”
    “No, I’m really sorry about this, though.”
    “Whatever,” Robin said. “The girls are excited that you’re cooking.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Whatever.”
    At dinner Brian prodded his shy progeny to answer Denise’s questions. Each time she caught the girls staring at her, they lowered their eyes and reddened. Sinéad in particular seemed to know the right way to want her. Robin ate quickly with her head down and declared the food “tasty.” It wasn’t clear how much her unpleasantness was aimed at Brian and how much at Denise. She went to bed soon after the girls, and in the morning she had already left for mass when Denise got up.
    “Quick question,” Brian said, pouring coffee. “How would you feel about driving me and the girls back to Philly tonight? Robin wants to get back to the Garden Project early.”
    Denise hesitated. She felt positively shoved by Robin into Brian’s arms.
    “Not a problem if you don’t want to,” he said. “She’s willing to take a bus and leave us the car.”
    A bus ? A bus ?
    Denise laughed. “Sure, no, I’ll drive you.” She added, echoing Robin: “Whatever!”
    At the beach, as the sun burned off the metallic morning coastal clouds, she and Brian watched Erin veer through the surf while Sinéad dug a shallow grave.
    “I’ll be Jimmy Hoffa,” Sinéad said, “and you guys be the Mob.”
    They worked to inter the girl in sand, smoothing the cool curves of her burial mound, thumping the hollows of the living body underneath. The mound was geologically active and was experiencing little quakes, webs of fissure spreading where Sinéad’s belly rose and fell.
    “I’m just now putting it together,” Brian said, “that you were married to Emile Berger.”
    “Do you know him?”
    “Not personally, but I knew Café Louche. Ate there often.”
    “That was us.”
    “Two awfully big egos in a little kitchen.”
    “Yuh.”
    “Do you miss him?”
    “My