The Corrections

neck, the collection of Paul Masson Chablis carafes with spider parts and moth wings at the bottom, the profoundly corrodedbracket for some long-lost wind chimes. She threw away the quart glass bottle of Vess Diet Cola that had turned the color of plasma, the ornamental jar of brandied kumquats that was now a fantasia of rock candy and amorphous brown gunk, the smelly thermos whose broken inner glass tinkled when she shook it, the mildewed half-peck produce basket full of smelly yogurt cartons, the hurricane lanterns sticky with oxidation and brimming with severed moth wings, the lost empires of florist’s clay and florist’s tape that hung together even as they crumbled and rusted …
    At the very back of the closet, in the cobwebs behind the bottom shelf, she found a thick envelope, not old-looking, with no postage on it. The envelope was addressed to the Axon Corporation, 24 East Industrial Serpentine, Schwenksville, PA. The return addressee was Alfred Lambert. The words SEND CERTIFIED were also on the face.
    Water was running in the little half-bathroom by her father’s laboratory, the toilet tank refilling, faint sulfurous odors in the air. The door to the lab was ajar and Denise knocked on it.
    “Yes,” Alfred said.
    He was standing by the shelves of exotic metals, the gallium and bismuth, and buckling his belt. She showed him the envelope and told him where she’d found it.
    Alfred turned it over in his shaking hands, as if an explanation might magically occur to him. “It’s a mystery,” he said.
    “Can I open it?”
    “You may do as you wish.”
    The envelope contained three copies of a licensing agreement dated September 13, signed by Alfred, and notarized by David Schumpert.
    “What is this doing on the floor of the laundry-room closet?” Denise said.
    Alfred shook his head. “You’d have to ask your mother.”
    She went out to the bottom of the stairs and raised her voice. “Mom? Can you come down here for a second?”
    Enid appeared at the top of the stairs, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “What is it? Can’t you find the pot?”
    “I found the pot, but can you come down here?”
    Alfred, in the lab, was holding the Axon documents loosely, not reading them. Enid appeared in the doorway with guilt on her face. “What?”
    “Dad wants to know why this envelope was in the laundry-room closet.”
    “Give me that,” Enid said. She snatched the documents from Alfred and crumpled them in her fist. “This has all been taken care of. Dad signed another set of agreements and they sent us a check right away. This is nothing to worry about.”
    Denise narrowed her eyes. “I thought you said you’d sent these in. When we were in New York, at the beginning of October. You said you’d sent these in.”
    “I thought I had. But they were lost in the mail.”
    “In the mail ?”
    Enid waved her hands vaguely. “Well, that’s where I thought they were. But I guess they were in the closet. I must have set a stack of mail down there, when I was going to the post office, and then this fell down behind. You know, I can’t keep track of every last thing. Sometimes things get lost, Denise. I have a big house to take care of, and sometimes things get lost.”
    Denise took the envelope from Alfred’s workbench. “It says ‘Send Certified.’ If you were at the post office, how did you not notice that something you needed to send Certified was missing? How did you not notice that you weren’t filling out a Certified Mail slip?”
    “Denise.” Alfred’s voice had an angry edge. “That’s enough now.”
    “I don’t know what happened,” Enid said. “It was a busytime for me. It’s a complete mystery to me, and let’s just leave it that way. Because it doesn’t matter . Dad got his five thousand dollars just fine. It doesn’t matter .”
    She further crumpled the licensing agreements and left the laboratory.
    I’m developing Garyitis , Denise thought.
    “You shouldn’t be so hard on your mother,” Alfred said.
    “I know. I’m sorry.”
    But Enid was exclaiming in the laundry room, exclaiming in the Ping-Pong—table room, returning to the workshop. “Denise,” she cried, “you’ve got the whole closet completely torn up! What on earth are you doing in there?”
    “I’m throwing food away. Food and other rotten junk.”
    “All right, but why now? We have the whole weekend if you want to help me clean some closets out. It’s wonderful if you want to help me. But not today