The Souvenir Museum, Elizabeth McCracken [bill gates best books .txt] 📗

was still cold. The lukewarm water was velvet in her mouth, the mirror too high for her to see anything other than her forehead. She went to join the men.

Had he made his bed, or had somebody made it for him, the white sheet folded with precision over a sky-blue blanket, white pillows that had been plumped and smoothed. Sadie herself had not made her own bed in years: it was one of the most liberating things about being a grown-up. Jack, though, was a maker of beds, a love letter you mailed to yourself in the morning that arrived at the end of the day. They never should have married, probably. They couldn’t know all the ways their marriage would be mixed: she was punctual, he was late; she would never willingly drink a gin and tonic, she had a sweet tooth, he liked bitter greens and smoked haddock and oversalted his food. He didn’t drive, and she didn’t like to; he was (he would have denied it) gregarious, she was a misanthrope of the purest kind, one who didn’t let on but cloaked her misanthropy with manners. He didn’t mind a bit of thievery—restaurant salt and pepper shakers he took a fancy to, flowers from other people’s gardens—while she was a rigid moralist about ill-gotten gains, returned every extra bit of money, corrected sales clerks who rang her up wrong. They were both cowards. She was an only child, he had three sisters. He liked horror movies, she liked dirty jokes, he was deep down a prude, they were both bad with money. All the dives where they drank in those days are gone, that’s how old they are now.

Sadie pulled the covers back, and Jack helped their drunk into bed.

“Should we put him on his side?” she said. “So he doesn’t choke.”

“Choke on what,” said Samuel Beckett.

Sadie waited a moment before she said, “Your own vomit.”

He opened his eyes, which drunkenness and gravity had pulled so far apart they seemed in danger of sliding off opposite sides of his head. “I don’t get sick.”

“I think we better,” she said to Jack.

“If not tonight then another,” he answered, and even he did not know whether he meant He’ll choke another night or We’ll sleep together another night. “Heave-ho,” he said to Samuel Beckett, who allowed himself to be turned.

They had delivered him home, they had saved him, they went to go. “Where’s Dorothy Parker?” whispered Sadie. But the photo was nothing like she’d imagined, a giant group shot, and she said, “Where?” and Jack said, “There and there,” but they were so far apart! and she wasn’t convinced, honestly, that it was either one of them.

The Souvenir Museum

Perhaps she should have known that she would find her lost love—her Viking husband, gone these many years, on the island of Funen, in the village of his people. Asleep in the hut of the medicine woman, comforted by the medicine woman, loved by the medicine woman, who was (it turned out) a podiatrist from Aarhus named Flora. The village itself was an educational site and a vacation spot where, if you wanted, you could wear a costume and spin wool for fun. As for Aksel—was he Joanna’s common-law ex-husband, or ex-common-law husband? Eleven years ago they had broken up after living together for ten. “Broken up”: one summer Aksel had left for Denmark and she never heard from him again.

Not never. He sent an apologetic postcard from London. But never after that, nothing for eleven years. She’d married, been made a mother, lost a mother, been legally divorced, finally was fully orphaned by her father’s death. Her father, who had been heartbroken when Aksel disappeared, for his own sake. Who else would breakfast with him on white wine and oysters? Who would discuss the complexities of savory pies, pork, kidney, the empanada versus the Cornish pasty? They had adored each other. Enormous and bearded, condescending and fond, ravenous, sad-eyed, the pair of them. Mortifying, when Joanna thought about it, how alike they were: her friends commented on it. It was her father who referred to Aksel as a common-law husband, when he was in every way a boyfriend, including the way she thought about him, years later: with a lechery untouched by having to legally untangle.

After the funeral, her father’s cluttered bedroom was like the tank of an animal who perhaps had died or perhaps had fallen asleep behind the greenery: she looked and looked for him. Nothing felt definitive. The watch was in the nightstand drawer beneath an expired passport, heavy and silver, a steam locomotive on its case, a yellowing sticker on the back: PLEASE BRING TO AKSEL. She read and reread the sticker. Leo, her son, was like his grandfather drawn to long-ago things, though nine-year-old Leo particularly loved weapons and had nearly every morning for two years drawn in pencil an armory. He liked blades best: swords, bayonets, the occasional flail. He was not allowed toy weapons, though they came into the house the back way. That is, in Lego boxes: bow and arrows the size of safety pins, pistols that snapped into the tense and insatiable hands of Legomen.

She turned the watch over in her palm. Perhaps Leo could get interested in horology. She pictured him hunched over a watchmaker’s bench and thought about tossing the note and keeping the watch. Instead, she transferred it from her father’s nightstand into her own. Bring, he’d written. Not mail, not get. The sticker was as close to a will as he’d left, goddamn him. She should probably—she thought, aware of the daft expression already on her face—attempt to honor it.

It took a year to settle the estate, sell the condo, come into the little bit of money that would allow them for the first time to travel abroad. Joanna bought Leo the bunk beds that she had wanted as a child. When she went to wake him up for school in the morning, she never