The Corrections

isn’t.”
    “And there’s probably no point in going to Philadelphia,” Enid said, “if he can’t follow instructions.”
    “You’re right. There probably isn’t.”
    “Denise, what are we going to do?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “I knew something was wrong this morning,” Enid said. “If you’d found that envelope three months ago, he would have exploded at me. But you saw today. He didn’t do a thing.”
    “I’m sorry I put you on the spot there.”
    “It didn’t even matter. He didn’t even know.”
    “I’m sorry anyway.”
    The lid on a pot of white beans boiling on the stove began to rattle. Enid stood up to reduce the heat. Denise, still kneeling, said, “I think there’s something in the Advent calendar for you.”
    “No, Gary pinned the last ornament.”
    “In the ‘twenty-four’ pocket. There might be something for you.”
    “Well, what?”
    “I don’t know. You might go check, though.”
    She heard her mother make her way to the front door and then return. Although the pattern of the rag rug was complex, she thought she would soon have it memorized from staring.
    “Where did these come from?” Enid said.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Did you put them there?”
    “It’s a mystery.”
    “You must have put them there.”
    “No.”
    Enid set the pills on the counter, took two steps away from them, and frowned at them severely. “I’m sure whoever put these there meant well,” she said. “But I don’t want them in my house.”
    “That’s probably a good idea.”
    “I want the real thing or I don’t want anything.”
    With her right hand Enid herded the pills into her left hand. She dumped them into the garbage grinder, turned on water, and ground them up.
    “What’s the real thing?” Denise said when the noise subsided.
    “I want us all together for one last Christmas.”
    Gary, showered and shaved and dressed in his aristocratic style, entered the kitchen in time to catch this declaration.
    “You’d better be willing to settle for four out of five,” he said, opening the liquor cabinet. “What’s wrong with Denise?”
    “She’s upset about Dad.”
    “Well, it’s about time,” Gary said. “There’s plenty to be upset about.”
    Denise gathered up the Kleenex balls. “Pour me a lot of whatever you’re having,” she said.
    “I thought we could have Bea’s champagne tonight!” Enid said.
    “No,” Denise said.
    “No,” Gary said.
    “We’ll save it and see if Chip comes,” Enid said. “Now, what’s taking Dad so long upstairs?”
    “He’s not upstairs,” Gary said.
    “Are you sure?”
    “Yes, I’m sure.”
    “Al?” Enid shouted. “ AL? ”
    Gases snapped in the neglected fire in the living room. White beans simmered on moderate heat; the registers breathed warm air. Out in the street somebody’s tires were spinning on snow.
    “Denise,” Enid said. “Go see if he’s in the basement.”
    Denise didn’t ask “Why me?” although she wanted to. She went to the top of the basement stairs and called her father. The basement lights were on, and she could hear a cryptic faint rustling from the workshop.
    She called again: “Dad?”
    There was no answer.
    Her fear, as she descended the stairs, was like a fear from the unhappy year of her childhood when she’d begged for a pet and received a cage containing two hamsters. A dog or a cat might have harmed Enid’s fabrics, but these young hamsters, a pair of siblings from a litter at the Driblett residence, were permitted in the house. Every morning, when Denise went to the basement to give them pellets and change their water, she dreaded to discover what new deviltry they’d hatched in the night for her private spectation—maybe a nest of blind, wriggling, incest-crimson offspring, maybe a desperate pointless wholesale rearrangement of cedar shavings into a single great drift beside which the two parents were trembling on the bare metal of the cage’s floor, looking bloated and evasive after eating all their children, which couldn’t have left an agreeable aftertaste, even in a hamster’s mouth.
    The door to Alfred’s workshop was shut. She tapped on it. “Dad?”
    Alfred’s reply came immediately in a strained, strangled bark: “Don’t come in!”
    Behind the door something hard scraped on concrete.
    “Dad? What are you doing?”
    “I said don’t come in!”
    Well, she’d seen the gun and she was thinking: Of course it’s me down here. She was thinking: And I have no