The Corrections

to take the bedspread off.”
    Alfred covered his penis with the towel. “Leave that to your mother,” he said. “I told her Philadelphia’s a lot of nonsense. I never intended to involve you in any of this. You have your own life. Just have fun and be careful.”
    He remained seated on the edge of the bed, his headbowed, his hands like large empty fleshy spoons on his lap.
    “Do you want me to start the bathwater?” Denise said.
    “I nuh-nunnunnunn-unh,” he said. “Told the fellow he was talking a lot of nonsense, but what can you do?” Alfred made a gesture of self-evidence or inevitability. “Thought he was going to Little Rock. You guh. I said! Gotta have seniority. Well, that’s a lot of nonsense. I told him to get the hell out.” He gave Denise an apologetic look and shrugged. “What else could I do?”
    Denise had felt invisible before, but never like this. “I’m not sure what you’re saying,” she said.
    “Well.” Alfred made a vague gesture of explanation. “He told me to look under the bench. Simple as that. Look under the bench if I didn’t believe him.”
    “What bench?”
    “It was a lot of nonsense,” he said. “Simpler for everybody if I just quit. You see, he never thought of that.”
    “Are we talking about the railroad?”
    Alfred shook his head. “Not your concern. It was never my intention to involve you in any of this. I want you to go and have fun. And be careful . Tell your mother to come up here with a rag.”
    With this, he launched himself across the carpeting and shut the bathroom door behind him. Denise, to be doing something, stripped the bed and balled everything up, including her father’s wet pajamas, and carried it downstairs.
    “How’s it going up there!” Enid asked from her Christmas-card station in the dining room.
    “He wet the bed,” Denise said.
    “Oh my word.”
    “He doesn’t know his left leg from his right.”
    Enid’s face darkened. “I thought maybe he’d listen better to you.”
    “Mother, he doesn’t know his left leg from his right .”
    “Sometimes the medication—”
    “Yeah! Yeah!” Denise’s voice was plangent. “The medication!”
    Having silenced her mother, she proceeded to the laundry room to sort and soak the linens. Here Gary, all smiles, accosted her with an O-gauge model railroad engine in his hands.
    “I found it,” he said.
    “Found what.”
    Gary seemed hurt that Denise hadn’t been paying close attention to his desires and activities. He explained that half of his childhood model-railroad set—“the important half, with the cars and the transformer”—had been missing for decades and presumed lost. “I just took the entire storeroom apart,” he said. “And where do you think I found it?”
    “Where.”
    “Guess,” he said.
    “At the bottom of the rope box,” she said.
    Gary’s eyes widened. “How did you know that? I’ve been looking for decades .”
    “Well, you should have asked me. There’s a smaller box of railroad stuff inside the big rope box.”
    “Well, anyway.” Gary shuddered to accomplish a shift of focus away from her and back to him. “I’m glad I had the satisfaction of finding it, although I wish you’d told me.”
    “I wish you’d asked!”
    “You know, I’m having a great time with this railroad stuff. There are some truly neat things that you can buy.”
    “Good! I’m happy for you!”
    Gary marveled at the engine he was holding. “I never thought I’d see this again.”
    When he was gone and she was alone in the basement, she went to Alfred’s laboratory with a flashlight, knelt among the Yuban cans, and examined the underside of the bench. There, in shaggy pencil, was a heart the size of a human heart:

    She slumped onto her heels, her knees on the stone-cold floor. Little Rock. Seniority. Simpler if I just quit .
    Absently, she raised the lid of a Yuban can. It was full to the brim with lurid orange fermented piss.
    “Oh boy,” she said to the shotgun.
    As she ran up to her bedroom and put on her coat and gloves, she felt sorriest about her mother, because no matter how often and how bitterly Enid had complained to her, she’d never got it through her head that life in St. Jude had turned into such a nightmare; and how could you permit yourself to breathe, let alone laugh or sleep or eat well, if you were unable to imagine how hard another person’s life was?
    Enid was at the dining-room curtains again, looking out for Chip.
    “Going for a