He is groggy as he rummages through the pantry, checking behind the cans of asparagus and soup on the top shelf, expecting at any moment to find the stack of rounded little tins. He tries the next shelf, irritation routing out the grogginess. He thinks about how tired he will be at the office the next day, then shoves aside the Chips Ahoy and the Cheerios and backhands a sturdy box of microwave popcorn. It collides with another, which drops to the floor with a thud that jolts the predawn quiet. As he bends to check the third shelf, his search becomes half-hearted. They have vanished, he says to himself. At least a half dozen cans of Clover Leaf, the best sardines on Earth, each tin rich with Omega 3. Gone.
“What are you doing, Ben?” Tara stands at the opposite end of the kitchen and turns down the dimmer on the track lighting. She coughs, her hay fever acting up as it always has during every spring of the five years they have been living together. He rises from his crouch and walks over to her, the hardwood floor of their townhouse creaking beneath his bare feet.
“Do you need some medicine?” he asks, ignoring her question.
“All the noise you’re making woke me up,” she says, ignoring his. She half-stumbles into his arms as soon as he is within reach. “And you know how empty the bed feels for me when I wake up and you’re not there.”
“Sorry,” he says. He holds her, his cheek touching her head just above the ear. “Have you seen my sardines?”
She pulls her head back and looks up at him. He has adjusted to the dim light, notices that her eyes are wide open, and senses that they were closed just moments before. “Your sardines?” She blinks. “You’re in here at four-thirty in the morning looking for sardines?”
“I woke up and couldn’t fall back asleep. And then I got hungry. Have you seen them? I always keep them on the top shelf.”
“Of course. Where I can’t reach them. As if I might want to bust into your supply and slurp down one of those headless delicacies.”
Ben looks at her wordlessly.
“A lot of people just have a warm glass of milk when they wake up during the night. Maybe with a turkey sandwich.” She takes his hands in hers. “They say turkey has tryptophan in it.”
“I’m not hungry for tryptophan,” he says.
“I didn’t do anything with your sardines.”
“I didn’t say you did.”
“Just in case you were thinking it.” She puts her arms around his waist and buries her head sideways in his chest. “Come back to bed,” she says. “You probably finished the last can and didn’t realize it. I’ll pick up more for you tomorrow after work.” She coughs again.
“You really should take something for that,” he says. He wraps his arms around her. “You know that those allergy medicines give me headaches,” she says. “Besides, my mother used to have hay fever every spring. And then, right after she turned thirty-five, it stopped. No medicines involved.”
“Even if you take after your mother,” he says, “that would still mean five more years of sneezing and runny noses.”
“True,” she says. “But it’s nice to have something to look forward to as I get older.”
*
Four hours later Ben is rushing toward the train. When the door chimes sound, he speeds up, like a driver trying to beat a yellow light. He is running late. He makes it inside but his laptop bag gets caught in the closing doors. He yanks the bag but it won’t budge. He pulls as hard as he can, leaning backward with all his weight. The doors open, obeying a command from the invisible train operator. The bag comes free and Ben sails back into a cluster of his fellow commuters. Someone behind him sighs theatrically and someone else laughs.
He doesn’t turn to see the faces attached to these reactions. He takes his newspaper from his bag and checks the headlines, the paper in his left hand, his right arm wrapped around a pole, the bag at his feet. But in two more stops, the train is so crowded that he can’t read the paper any more. He is squeezed like an accordion, his field of vision a sea of navy, the color of the blazer worn by the man in front of him. He has been riding the train every weekday since graduating from college eleven years ago, and it has become more crowded as time has passed.
He disembarks seven stops later. The escalator at the station is broken and he feels as if he is moving in slow motion as his feet pound the ridges of the frozen metal steps. He asks himself why he and everyone else seem to move more slowly when they climb a broken escalator than they do when walking ordinary stairs. Does it have something to do with the angle or height of the steps? Or is it simply an illusion, a trick played by the thwarted anticipation of movement?
He feels his face flush when, twenty minutes late, he approaches the glass doors of the small firm where he works as a trusts and estates lawyer. He walks past the reception area where, to his embarrassment, the firm’s principal partner, Dan Haskins, is standing, explaining something patiently to Stacey, the office’s longtime secretary. He mumbles an apology for being late, adding a few words about a difficult train ride. He walks the dozen paces past Stacey’s desk down the narrow interior hallway until he reaches his office, a small windowless space he shares with a pair of old filing cabinets.
Stacey has left a fresh stack of probate case folders on his desk. Haskins is old school, insisting that key documents be reviewed in hard copy form. Ben’s role is to get the papers in order and issue-spot: he checks whether the bequests are lawful and whether the decedent’s intentions are set out clearly, and he spots tax problems. Then he passes along the files to one of the firm’s three partners. On occasion, he is allowed to handle a small case by himself.
Today, the mere sight of the stack makes his eyes glaze over. He turns to the first folder, pausing every few pages to remove his glasses and rub his eyes or to scratch an imagined itch on his chin, beneath the whiskers of his tidy beard. After he finishes it, he gets himself a mug of coffee from the break room.
With the benefit of the caffeine buzz, he makes good progress through several files. Most of them are straightforward; a few have tricky problems and he moves them to the bottom of the stack, deciding he will tackle them tomorrow, first thing, after a good night’s sleep.
When he breaks for lunch, he walks across the street to the Safeway that serves the apartments and condominiums mixed in with the office buildings. He picks up six tins of sardines – he can’t find any Clover Leaf so he settles for King Oscar, which is almost as good. He also buys a single red rose for Tara and a sixteen-ounce cup of vanilla bean coffee from the café housed inside the store. He stashes the rose in the firm’s refrigerator and hangs the bag of sardines on the hook attached to his door, right in front of his suit jacket.
By four o’clock he is nearly done with the stack, except for the handful destined for tomorrow morning’s review. His intercom beeps – Stacey is calling.
“There’s a gentleman named Leonard Mintz here. He’s interested in a consultation about a will.”
Ben lifts his paper coffee cup and sighs: it is empty. “Please bring him in,” he says.
Leonard Mintz looks about ten years older than Ben. He is in shirt sleeves as he sits in the guest chair in front of Ben’s desk. His belly protrudes over his belt. Ben learns that Leonard – he asks Ben to call him Leonard – and his wife, Eleanor, will be celebrating their seventeenth anniversary later this year, and that they have three children, two boys and a girl, ages fifteen, twelve, and ten. Neither Leonard nor Eleanor has ever made a will and they feel they’ve been remiss.
“Not that we’re at death’s door,” he says, laughing awkwardly. “And we’re not especially well off. But still.”
“Of course,” Ben says. “You have minor children. You need to provide for them, to figure out who would be their guardian if you and your wife were to suddenly become unavailable.”
Leonard furrows his brow.
“If you and Mrs. Mintz were to pass away at the same time, heaven forbid, such as in a car accident,” Ben explains.
“Oh, of course,” says Leonard. “You’re talking about ‘simultaneous death.’”
Ben nods.
“I’ve been reading up on this,” Leonard says. “As a matter of fact, I’ve already drafted something.” He removes an envelope from a soft briefcase and hands it to Ben, who, after hesitating, sets it on his desk.
“From what you’re telling me,” Ben says, “you and Mrs. Mintz sound like candidates for our basic will package. You fill out a questionnaire and we plug what you tell us into a template. When it’s done, you and your wife look it over and Stacey notarizes it while two other members of our staff witness your signatures.”
“I understand from the firm’s website that you charge five hundred dollars for that,” Leonard says.
“That’s right. Or eight hundred for two wills at the same time, like yours and your wife’s. You can have us put together an advance medical directive and durable power of attorney, too. Just $650 per person for the entire package, if you want to go that way.”
“How about this,” Leonard says. “You review what I’ve already written up.” He points to the envelope. “And let me know if I’ve made any mistakes. How much for that?” Leonard smiles, anticipating an answer to his liking.
“We really don’t operate that way, Leonard,” says Ben. “We’ve found it’s more efficient for everyone if we use the questionnaires and templates. If I go through every clause you’ve drafted, it’s going to take longer. We’d have to charge you more.”
Leonard sighs. “I see.” He folds his hands in his lap, then unfolds them and rests them on his thighs. He stands. “Tell you what,” he says. “Just spend fifteen minutes and give it a quick read. It’s only a few pages long. And then I’ll do the questionnaire and sign up the wife and me for one of those packages. Does that sound fair?”
Ben is supposed to tell him no; the firm’s policy against this sort of thing is strict. But Leonard seems so badly to want someone to read the document in the envelope, almost like a penitent in search of a confessor. It seems cruel to turn him down, especially when he’s only asking for fifteen minutes.
“All right,” he says. “I’ll take a look at it.”
“Great.” Leonard stands. “Just send me an e-mail when you’re done.” He grabs a pen from Ben’s desk and scribbles his e-mail address on a sticky note.
*
Ben finds a seat on the train ride home. A pregnant woman boards the train just behind him. He tries to read his newspaper but is distracted when he notices that she is still standing after the train’s first stop. After no one offers her a seat, he guiltily stands and gestures her toward his. The woman, who looks to be in her mid-twenties, mouths a “thank you” as she settles into the seat, and Ben grasps an overhead strap for the duration of the ride, the sardine cans in his bag clanking against one another when the train pulls into each station. He barely suppresses a groan as he realizes he has forgotten Tara’s flower.
When he gets home, Tara is in the foyer; she has returned from work just moments before him. She, too, is a lawyer, a litigator at a nonprofit that handles civil rights cases. “Allow me,” he says, with exaggerated chivalry, as he removes her coat and hangs it in the cramped closet by the door. After they kiss, he spies, over her shoulder, a grocery bag on the kitchen table.
She walks into the kitchen and takes a dozen tins of sardines from the bag. “Here you go,” she says. “I want you to know that this wasn’t easy for me. I mean, are you sure these are good for you?”
“Sure I’m sure,” Ben says.
“What about mercury? Aren’t sardines one of those fish that are supposed to be filled with mercury?”
“As a matter of fact, they’re not,” says Ben. “They get eaten by bigger fish, or caught, before they have a chance to accumulate much mercury.”
“Right. According to who, the Sardine Institute of America?” She shakes her head. “This sardine fetish of yours has been going on for over a year now. They should hire you to be a sardine spokesmodel.”
“Mercury is nothing to worry about anyway. It’s only bad for little kids, or pregnant women, or women who might become pregnant.”
“Well, I suppose I might become pregnant,” says Tara. “You know, if we decide to have kids. Or even get married.”
Ben coughs, even though nothing is irritating his throat. Tara is looking at him. “In that case,” he says, “you better stay away from my sardines. In case we do those things and my information from the Sardine Institute of America turns out to be wrong.” He grabs a handful of the tins and stacks them in the pantry in their usual spot.
Tara glances over toward the foyer, where Ben’s brown paper Safeway bag rests on the floor. “What’s this?” she says. She lifts the bag and peeks in.
“Why did you get these?” she asks. She drops the bag, which clatters onto the floor, each of the six tins making its own separate landing.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I told you I would pick them up. Why did you feel a need to get them when I said I would take care of it?”
“I don’t know.” Ben walks over to the kitchen sink and fills a glass with water. “That Safeway is just across the street from work, so I figured why not?”
As he swallows the water, she strides up to him. “You didn’t trust me to do it, did you?” Her voice is quiet.
Ben swallows his water. “Don’t be silly.”
“I’m not being silly,” says Tara. “And I can be trusted.”
“Of course.”
“Of course? Then why didn’t you trust me to get your stupid sardines?”
“That’s just it,” Ben says. “You call them ‘stupid sardines.’ You don’t like them. So, maybe part of me figured you would forget about picking them up.”
“The same part of you that thinks I threw away your old cans.”
“I never remotely suggested that you threw them away.”
“You didn’t have to remotely suggest it. It was all over your face when you asked me if I’d seen them.”
“That’s not true.” But he knows she can read his face. And her expression right now, her hazel eyes watering just slightly, eyebrows raised just enough to squeeze a slender wrinkle into her forehead, is telling him that this is exactly what she’s thinking. I can read your face, her expression is saying.
At four-thirty in the morning, in his frustration, was he thinking that she had thrown away his sardines? He didn’t believe he’d thought that, but maybe she knew his mind better than he did. To say she could read his face really meant that she could read his mind. She was inside his mind just now, he thought, peering around the way she’d peered into the grocery bag, seeing what she’d discover. It’s awfully crowded inside his head, he thinks, as he breaks eye contact with her and rubs his eyes with an index finger and thumb. A caffeine crash takes a run at him and he sinks into a chair at the kitchen table, his right hand accidentally knocking over the remaining, unshelved sardine cans she’d brought home.
She stands next to him. “I’m sorry you don’t think you can count on me,” she says.
“But I do,” he tells her. “I know I can.” He reaches for her but she steps away and clasps her hands together behind her back. He notices that the sardines she has brought him are Bumble Bee – the Budweiser of sardines. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s not fight about this.”
“Fine,” she says. “Why should I fight about it anyway? I should be happy. Happy for you, because now you’ve got something like twenty cans of sardines. You’re ready for the bomb to drop.”
“And in no small part thanks to you,” he says. “After all, you picked up more of them than I did.” He smiles. Please, he thinks. Let’s make peace.
“So now maybe you can do something for me,” she says. She seats herself in the chair to his left, at the end of the table, and picks up one of the sardine cans, holding it in front of her theatrically, like someone posing in a television commercial.
“Anything,” he says.
“From now on, you can eat these little darlings out on the deck, or next to an open window if the weather is bad, so that I never have to smell them again. You can set up your own special sardine trash can out there so that I never see those bones in the sink any more, or those little black pieces of skin that you scrape away, as if they are somehow any more disgusting than the parts you eat.”
“Anything else?”
“Sure,” she says. She leans into his space. Her eyes smile wickedly, which he finds sexy but unfriendly. “You can take your dedicated sardine-garbage bag out to the trash whenever it gets so foul that even you can’t stand it.” Her voice is low and controlled. “It shouldn’t touch the rest of the trash.”
She stands and walks into their bedroom. In a minute, he hears the shower running. Good, he thinks. The fight is over. And yet he finds himself playing back what she said and how she said it. The wrinkling of her nose when she talked about the bones and black pieces of skin (which anyone should know you don’t eat). The sardines depicted as some heinous non-food unfit for civilization. He tries to wave it all away but keeps coming back to a single conclusion: it’s not so much the sardines that disgust her; it’s what the sardines tell her about him.
*
“It really bothers you that much,” he says. They have been lying in bed watching House. Tara doesn’t answer.
“I didn’t know,” he says. “I’ll stop.”
“Really?” She sits up next to him.
“I’ll throw away the cans we just bought. Or donate them to a food bank or something.” She looks at him dubiously. “I’ll throw them away,” he says. “And I’ll never darken our doorstep with them again.”
She wraps her arms around his waist and looks up at him. “You really do love me.” Her smile seems part playful, part earnest.
“Of course I do.” He kisses her but his heart isn’t in it. So this is what it takes to make peace about the sardines, he thinks as he holds her. He tells her how tired he is, turns out the lamp on his nightstand, and leans back on his pillow, his cheeks tingling with righteous indignation. Before he can scold himself for such a childish feeling, he is asleep.
*
The next morning he moves quickly, determined not to be late for the office again. He shoves the sardine tins away from his spot at the table, figuring he can deal with them later, and eats his Cheerios while Tara is still asleep. When he arrives at the firm at 7:45, he turns on the lights and settles in at his desk, where the tricky files from yesterday that he had postponed sit in a small stack next to Leonard Mintz’s draft will. He should be able to get through all of this by eleven, he figures.
Mintz’s envelope, sealed with layers of scotch tape, opens only after he tears through it with the sharp letter opener that he borrows from Stacey’s work station. The document inside consists of three sheets of paper, filled front and back with single-spaced text broken into thirty-two numbered paragraphs, each of them typed in a font that looks like ten-point courier. Mintz appears to have cataloged every piece of property in his possession and specified where each should go upon his death: his clothes to his two boys, his stamp collection to his daughter, his stocks, bonds, and Volkswagen Jetta to his wife. The document recites that Mintz’s interest in the house is to be transferred to Mrs. Mintz – a mistake, since the house will not even go through probate if the Mintzes own it jointly, as Ben assumes is the case. The same for the securities and the car. He realizes, however, that he will need to confirm this and writes himself a note.
A lucky brother is identified as the recipient of Mintz’s small collection of single malt scotch. This extravagance, which surprises Ben, is the closest the document comes to containing anything worth confessing. Six boxes filled with photos of Mintz’s parents are bequeathed to a sister. Skis and tennis rackets are left to the boys. Mintz’s tour of the miscellaneous comes nowhere close to hitting any of the big points: no guardians appointed for the children if he and his wife both die; no trusts established; no mentions of life insurance (Does he have any? Ben writes on his notepad). No executor is even named.
Ben shakes his head and powers up his computer. A sense of loathing toward his prospective client rises up in him. Mintz, he thinks, is both reckless and a bore, reckless for ignoring what matters, a bore for having accumulated such minutiae, such clutter, and then taking the time to write up an inventory of it.
Then he checks himself. Whether Mintz is a bore, he thinks, is no business of his. And as for Mintz’s recklessness – well, that is why he is here. To help people solve problems, to get them focused on what matters in putting their affairs in order.
*
“Excuse me, Ben.” Stacey is standing at his door. It is one o’clock. “Mr. Haskins is asking for the McCarthy, Watson, and Bergman files.” He sees her gaze fall on the folders resting on his desk. From her angle, she can’t see Mintz’s half-finished revised will on his computer screen.
“Right,” Ben says. “Tell him I’ll have them to him by the end of the day.”
“I have some more to give you, too,” Stacey says. Her arms are cradling a stack bigger than yesterday’s. “I’ll hold on to them for now,” she adds. “I’ll organize them for you – most urgent to least.” She smiles and leaves. Ben stops working on the Mintz will, stands to stretch his legs, and turns to the McCarthy case.
*
He arrives home only a bit later than usual, but starving: he worked through lunch to get Haskins what he wanted, not stopping for a bite of anything or even a cup of coffee. The back of his shirt is untucked and Tara’s rose, which he remembered only the moment before leaving the office, droops in his hand, as if imitating him. Tara has dimmed the lights and lit a candle at the table. Two glasses of wine are half-filled at the places she has set. She greets him with a kiss and thanks him for the flower, which she places in a slender vase that is itself decorated with roses, painted ones, redder and healthier looking than the one he has given her.
He approaches the table but takes a step back when he sees what Tara has put together: sardines lie next to each other on his plate, their tails almost touching one another. They are arranged like spokes on a wheel.
“What have we here?” he asks. “Sardine-fest?”
“I’m making garlic bread with them,” she says.
“Good combination. Drowns out that fishy smell, too.”
“I hadn’t thought about that.” Her eyes break contact with his and she looks down at her feet.
He washes up in the kitchen sink and sits in his chair. There look to be about five tins’ worth of sardines on his plate, and each little fish is intact. She has removed them painstakingly, he realizes, even lovingly, one by one, from their cans. It must have taken her an hour. He wonders if she used her fingers or a fork but decides not to ask.
“This is very thoughtful of you.” She is sitting across from him now, a salad in front of her. They sip their wine. “But you really didn’t have to.”
“I know. I just figured you were entitled to one last sardine hurrah.”
He turns to his plate and digs in. His last sardines, he thinks. And far more than he has ever consumed at one sitting. He looks at them more closely: they are flatter and smaller than those he usually eats. The Bumble Bee cans, he realizes. They are all from the Bumble Bee cans.
No matter, he tells himself. They are delicious anyway. She talks about her day at the office, preparing for trial in an age discrimination case. He tells her about Mintz, his new client.
They are happy as they clean up the kitchen. She has surprised him, he tells her, making a dinner like this. They laugh, and he says that of all the dozens, maybe hundreds of times he has eaten sardines, this one will be the most memorable.
After the kitchen is cleaned up and Ben considerately has brushed his teeth, they open another bottle of wine. They stay up late, the television off, talking and then undressing on the couch. He feels so close to her, closer than ever before, and he can tell it is the same for her, and that she knows everything he is feeling, that their consciousnesses have merged. It’s crowded in here, he thinks again, but not unhappily this time.
*
In the office the next day, he does the best he can to structure Mintz’s document into a draft will, flagging gaps in capital letters (“IDENTIFY EXECUTOR HERE”), inserting standard clauses, and removing language that could put assets into probate that don’t belong there. He even organizes Mintz’s various bequests of personal property into a single section. He cuts and pastes and deletes and then, finally, sends the document to Mintz under cover of a brief e-mail. “Please call me at your convenience so that we can finalize,” he says at the end.
Problems solved, he thinks. Mintz’s life may be a mountain of tedium, but at least his affairs will be in order. Still, he is troubled by the amount of information he has absorbed about Mintz, and even more troubled by the sense that he has learned more about him than he would like – as if he has learned almost everything about the man – and that the most significant thing he has learned is that Mintz is a nothing. He shudders as he considers that this is more than any one person should know about another.
Stacey, as promised, has organized his latest stack of probate files into three groups, each flagged with its own deadline. He finishes the first tranche; the second one isn’t due for another two days. He decides to take the rest of the afternoon off, leaving word with Stacey as he places the completed files on her desk.
He naps on the quiet, uncrowded train ride home and arrives at his front door at four o’clock. He straightens up the house, putting the cushions back on the couch and gathering newspapers into the recycle bins. Tomorrow morning is garbage pick-up, so he fills the kitchen trash bag. Just before tying it up, he dumps in the dozen remaining unopened sardine tins temporarily stored in the pantry.
In the driveway, he lifts the lid off the ninety-six-gallon plastic garbage container. He squints as a ray of sunlight bounces off something inside, and he lowers the kitchen trash bag to the ground. The driveway is slanted and the bag rolls down to the sidewalk. He tilts the container toward him, holding his breath as he sticks his head inside for a closer look at the shiny mystery. One of the trash bags, he sees, is torn, and the slant of sunlight had illuminated what the tear exposed: a sardine can. It must be one of the opened, used tins from last night’s extravaganza, he tells himself. He should pull his head out of the trash can now. But he doesn’t pull it out and finally breathes in the rank air. He will take a closer look, even though he chides himself: Why do this? Doesn’t he trust Tara?
He lifts the torn bag out gingerly, like a paramedic carrying a victim at an accident scene, careful to point the ripped spot up toward the sky so that nothing will spill out. He rests the bag on the slender flat ledge at the top of the driveway. He plucks out one sardine can, then another. When he has finished, he has built a stack of six unopened tins of Clover Leaf.
He tries to come up with an explanation that does not cast Tara as his betrayer. Perhaps he had thrown them out himself, by accident, even in his sleep. Or maybe Tara mistakenly threw them away, thinking they were something else. But he finds none of these persuasive. He nudges each can back inside the hole from which he’d removed them.
As he wheels the garbage can to the base of the driveway, he tells himself that what he’s discovered doesn’t matter. Tara must have felt bad for throwing them out. Hadn’t she replaced them, and hadn’t she prepared a sardine dinner for him, overcoming her own intense dislike? He thinks about last night, how special it was to find that the two of them had become halves of the same whole, how lucky they are. He walks up the little brick path to the townhouse’s front door, trying to forget about the lost sardines, to delete the information from his memory, to erase what he wishes he had not learned about Tara. Because if he cannot, he realizes, then she will discover what he has learned, just as she discovers everything he knows. And he doesn’t want to begin to imagine what that will mean for the two of them.
This story originally appeared in Sou’wester and has been reprinted with permission of the author.
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