If You Are Lonely and You Know It (Currency)

by Yiyun Li

A dead branch, Rebecca had said of Debbie another time at a dinner party, meaning that she could never sort her life out well enough to offer Rebecca grandchildren. Her other children, the non-runts, the living branches that already extended the family tree, had not been close to her, even less to Gordon. They were total strangers now, who might not even hear about the news of his death. Debbie? She would know, and she would care. She would shed tears for him. Perhaps the runts of the litters could always recognize one another, though Gordon’s mother had never called him that. He was her only child, and he was one too many.

It is not that some footsteps would do any substantial harm, but Gordon would not, had he been a plant, like to be trod upon.)

“Half the world believes the wrong things. The other half doesn’t believe the right things.”

Among the many reasons that Iris was unloved throughout the neighborhood was that she fed the wild turkeys. They had grown big but not domesticated. They hopped onto people’s porches, loitered in the driveways, and behaved aggressively toward pedestrians. The women in the neighborhood always carried umbrellas when they walked their children or dogs: it’s believed that turkeys are so stupid that a stick is not enough to deter them. You have to open the umbrella to their faces to scare them off, the neighbors taught one another the trick. Gordon had received many emails, complaints, and protests about Iris, but she said that she had checked the city laws and regulations, and it was not illegal to feed wild turkeys.

Sometimes he stumbled with a word or delivered a line in the wrong tone, and she would correct him. When she did, he would remind her that a surgery could easily get rid of her cataracts and after that she would not need him to read to her. He knew Iris would not hear his suggestion. Iris was there to give him advice, not the other way around.