The Doll

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One midweek evening he had sprayed the patch of crab grass, and now, on Saturday morning, it was lurid and twisted with overgrowth. Steve was on his knees, rooting it out. tossing it into a bushel basket. He worked steadily in the heat of the late August sun. hearing behind him the splat-splat of ball into mitt as Paulie played catch with the Quinn boy from the next block. Diana had taken her scrapbook collection of movie and TV stars across the street to the home of her friend. Betty Baker. He could hear, inside the house, the warm humming of the vacuum cleaner, operated by the capable and monolithic Mrs. Chandler. In the driveway next door a heavy young man, too well dressed for the job, was polishing a sleek new black Cadillac sedan.

Steve Dalvin straightened up to rest his back for a moment, and thought that Ellen would be enormously amused if she could see him puttering around during these weekends, manicuring the lawn. It was hard, very hard, to realize she had been dead over a year. It had been such a tragic, useless, pointless death. It had broken him into small random fragments. Paulie and Diana had been sent off to stay with Ellen’s parents for a time. It had taken him six months to learn that no answer could be found in whisky, in the arms of women anxious to comfort him, or even in work that left him exhausted. He had quit his job, done manual labor, and then, doggedly, inevitably, had recreated the family unit. Only it was not the same without Ellen, of course.

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