Christmas when Sanders was six his parents took him to New York. They admired the tree in Rockefeller Center; they gaped at the lights and the toy store windows; they ice-skated in Central Park. They saw the Rockettes, Joan Sanders’ dream since her own childhood. In half-embarrassed whispers she had shared memories of seeing the Rockettes on television, of wanting to be a Rockette, herself, when she grew up. Young Bunchanan didn’t see what was the big deal, but he understood that it was a big deal, and he, the dutiful son, listened politely, recognizing even at his tender age that his mother, all things being equal, would rather have had a daughter. “You probably don’t understand,” she said, laughing it off, and he shrugged and smiled to indicate that he sort of did, maybe, that at least he wished he did.

But the Rockettes scared him. He couldn’t have said why, but sitting in the darkened theater he began to cry. When it became clear that he couldn’t or wouldn’t stop, his father offered to take him outside, and Joan — Buchanan would never forget her face at that moment — Joan nodded in agreement, smiled at her son to tell him it was all right, but he saw the sadness in her eyes. He saw the disappointment of someone who, convinced that what she has is really too good to be true, is almost relieved to have it taken from her. And — for an instant — a flash of anger at her husband, as if he had planned his escape from the beginning, coaching the boy to cry and practicing his look of patient regret in the mirror, while shaving. Then she turned back to the show, and Paul Sanders led his sniveling son down the row of people who turned their knees to let them pass but arched their necks to keep their eyes on the action. They found the spectacle cheery and Christmas-y and not a bit frightening; little Buchanan Sanders sobbed all the harder in embarrassment. Read on

“What you got going on this weekend?” Amit asked Britney through a mouthful of noodles.

“Nothing much.”

“No hot date?”

Britney smiled and, to Sanders’ relief, merely shrugged. His own puerile interest in Britney’s love life was dwarfed by his horror of Amit’s.

“What are your plans?”

“I was invited to go hunting,” Amit said. Read on

When Buchanan and Suzanne Sanders split up he left her with the photo albums — not from magnanimity or disinterest or the anticipation of one day returning, but from weariness at the thought of another argument. But while she was occupied with Maddie he slipped two photos from their sleeves and hid them inside the cover of a book Suzanne couldn’t possibly want to keep. In one, he and two year-old Maddie crouched in the grass, the child pointing out a dandelion, turning to her father with a look of glee and fascination unelicitable by any bouquet. On moving into his new apartment he placed it in a frame on his dresser.

In the other photograph Buchanan and Suzanne posed with a turkey. The year they were married they made excuses to family and cooked Thanksgiving dinner for friends, and so proud were they of the bird, crisp and browned and fragrant, that they asked one of their guests to take their picture. They stood on either side of the stove in the tiny kitchen of their apartment; Sanders smirked at the camera — the wine had been opened early — while Suzanne posed politely with her hand in an oven mitt on the handle of the roasting pan. As the shutter snapped she glanced at him out of the corner of her eyes, the hint of a smile about to cross her face. The cat, meanwhile, had leapt onto the counter, and his head protruded from behind Sanders’ left arm, leaning in toward the bird, eyeing it hungrily.

The second photo was taped to the inside of one of Sanders’ kitchen cabinets, where he saw it every time he reached for canned tomatoes, or bourbon. A double reminder: He once was loved, and you never know what is looking over your shoulder.

From the hotel there was nowhere to walk. After a morning’s prostration before his cinema display Sanders craved movement, but he had few options. Conveniently located minutes from the airport, a short drive from three major universities and a professional hockey stadium, the Belmont RTP Resort and Conference Center was unreachable on foot, bounded by an interstate, a state-numbered divided highway, the golf course, and a private business campus. On two sides an escapee risked being flattened; the others were heavily guarded. The hotel’s brochure boasted a walking trail, but it was a narrow strip of macadam that looped around a small pond a few hundred yards from the lobby before returning to circumnavigate the parking lot. The pond itself Sanders found pleasant enough, but the same pond, the same geese, the same short path — Sanders and Amit, between clients, once measured it at precisely 583.6 meters — wore on him after four and a half years. A walk or two a day adds up: Three, four hundred walks a year, over a thousand since the brother of Amit’s ex-girlfriend became the Belmont’s manager and consented to rent them his extra conference space. A thousand identical walks. It might as well have been a habitrail. Read on

A shout and a clang from the parking lot woke him and the long silence that followed kept him awake. At night, which is when he missed Suzanne, he thought of odd things, little things. Her frown, reading the newspaper. Twisting a cowlick in her fingers. The soft line of her calf. When they were married he would wake in the dark and though feeling her presence in the bed, hearing her breathing, seeing the twin arcs of her silhouette against the window’s faint backlight — not trusting that in sleep she remained real, alive, he would run a toe along her calf. Only a toe, gently, so as not to wake her. The soft yielding of her skin, the nap of stubble where, overslept and hurried, she had missed with the razor. Gently until he reached the ticklish spot by her ankle bone, until she stirred and in half-sleep shrugged irritably away from him. Then he knew she was there, and knowing, could sleep.

Experimentally he touched his toe to a crease in the sheet, ran it along the length of the fold. The sheet, not surprisingly, failed to calm him.

He wrapped the blanket around him in the manner of a post-coital actress protecting a PG rating and padded to the living room, sat on the couch, flipped on the television. Rachael Ray beamed sunshine and culinary confidence. He settled in. She prepared meatloaf, turkey meatloaf, veal meatloaf, meatloaf with mushrooms, meatloaf muffins, a great recipe for the whole family but Madison would not eat anything containing ground meat; she picked it apart with her fork or her fingers until it scattered like topsoil on the surface of her dinner. Maddie’s tastes ran to the esoteric, the expensive, the salt-fermented and strongly flavored. Sheep’s milk cheese, Vietnamese food. Rachael’s groaning board would be twelve inches’ loam across his dining table, uneaten, a delish dish for the cat.

Back in bed he dreamed of Rachael in his own kitchen, concocting meatloaf muffins incongruously from broccoli. She grinned, narrating the dish, her smile growing larger until her nose, eyes, ears disappeared into the happy maw. The broccoli giggled apppreciatively even as she chopped it, forming a studio audience on the cutting board, each new-sliced floret sprouting its own grinning puss, the giggles multiplying and becoming higher-pitched. Until they recognized their fate: Rachael opened the oven door, stilly chatting toothily, oblivious to their terrified cruciferous screams. Sanders, though he hated broccoli, struggled to save them, but his limbs were pinned to his chair and the tiny kitchen had grown suddenly vast, the oven a mile away. Then he woke, the pillow clammy under his head, and missed Suzanne.