Five days a week, Teej Loring pulled off the Thruway and into the strange shrunken worlds of the very old. From Canastota to Waterloo, these worlds made up half the customer base of ShredRite, the mobile shredding service contained within the truck he drove. It was mostly white-headed women peering from behind picture window curtains. Their male counterparts were either dying in VA hospitals or unable to experience the orgiastic blood-pressure-drop of having ink-printed paper mechanically decimated before their eyes. Every other day Teej was ready to quit, but he had set for himself the goal of buying a house. This precarious balance—the highs of property porn and the lows of old people—had seemed to be marking him for premature death until the day he drove into the strange shrunken world of Lorraine Pankhurst.

He bumped his way down the private road leading into a collection of houses arced around a pond as big as a lake. He knew from his house-hunting that many people lived year-round in these kinds of waterside communities. He arrived at the address just as a volunteer fire truck was trundling away from an old woman standing in the road with her arms folded.

“What kind of fire do you suppose those two could ever put out?” she yelled in Ladder 249’s wake.

She had a refined voice, the kind his Walmart relatives would call “uppity.” She was rail thin with straight white hair, almost chic for such an old gal. When he got out of the truck she told him she’d left the kettle on long enough to burn off the water, scorch the stainless, and trigger a smoke alarm. She couldn’t get the damned thing to stop. A neighbor some distance away had called 911.

“Honestly,” she said, throwing up her hands, “the decline and fall starts here.”

“You’re lucky nothing caught fire,” he told her. “It’s a beautiful house you have.”

“Cottage,” she corrected. “This property has been in my family for seventy-two years.”

After he read her the disclaimer notice, she demanded he call her Lorraine and led him to several towering stacks on the front porch. He told her this part would take twenty minutes and she went inside. He immediately did what he always did in the pre-sort: removed years’ worth of fliers, subscription invitations, and other junk mail. He also took out programs for funeral services and family Christmas newsletters on colored paper. “These we can recycle,” he said when she reappeared. “I have a bin. I’ll take them away for you.”

“I appreciate your professionalism,” she replied.

He laughed. “Shred or haul—that’s what we do.”

The thing that constituted the bulk of the towers troubled him, however—student papers, like the one for ENG 101: “Beowulf in Our Time,” dated February 1989. He hesitated to open that can of worms. He ought to just do his work and go, he knew, but the old lady was paying top dollar for his services—prepaid in fact. He didn’t even have to rub his pen over a charge plate.

“Are you sure you need to shred these old papers?”

She tilted her head upwards to listen but seemed beyond compromise.

He tried to make a joke of it. “Some of these people may not even be alive anymore.”

She sighed wearily. “Technically these documents belong to my students, going back to 1972.” She paused before adding, “I have more in the garage.”

“But can’t we just shred the title pages with the names?”

“The point is annihilation,” she declared. “I owe it to these girls.” She explained that she was a professor at a Catholic women’s college for almost forty years. “They named a chair for me.”

“That’s impressive,” he said, nodding.

“These are all papers I would have given a failing grade to. They were so wrong that I could not even suggest a pathway to salvation.”

“So you kept them?”

“I told the writers to begin again. As for these things, I felt that they needed to be taken out of worldly circulation. But it didn’t seem my prerogative to destroy them.”

He scratched the back of his head. “Your call.”

She looked at him with intense curiosity. “What did you study in college?”

He lowered his head. “I actually dropped out—twice in fact.”

“People your age who tell me they dropped out of college usually add the phrase ‘like Bill Gates.’”

He laughed at her joke before moving decades’ worth of failure into the truck for annihilation. Twenty minutes after the shredding had commenced, Lorraine was back with a bottle of Snapple and a folding chair. She handed him the bottle and unfolded and sat on the chair facing the open doors of the truck. She had on her lap a pretty beaded bag with a clasp.

“So,” he said as he worked, “are you Catholic, because of the college?” He had to shout at her to be heard over the machine.

She laughed. “Horrors, no!” After a moment she added, “But I come from a long line of swimmers.”

He grinned at the absence of logic.

“My parents had a big place on Seneca. We—all of us—buy summer property near water. With my son it’s Saranac Lake, though he has an enormous house and lives there year-round. He manages the rental of another cottage I own on Skaneateles.”

“That’s a real beauty of a lake. Does your son visit you here?”

“Ford wants me to sell this place and buy a condo near him.”

“Ford is your son?”

She nodded. “Named after Ford Madox Ford. A fabricated name, yes, but certainly not a fabricated oeuvre!”

He nodded with her, not knowing what she was talking about. “Any other kids?”

When she didn’t answer he added, “Grandkids?”

She shook her head. “My son is gay. He was a star athlete and is now a vice president at a foundation for sports medicine.”

“You must be proud of him.”

“Sometimes,” she began and then stopped herself. “Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember anything about my extended family. It comes and goes. Don’t ever get old, Teej.”

He laughed in sympathy. “I’ll try to remember that.”

She sighed. “What do you want out of life?”

He laughed again. “Mrs. Pankhurst, I just want to buy a house. The President said that in 2006, every American should be able to own a home.”

“In 2006, every American should be able to go to the doctor.”

“Well, one house isn’t even enough for Americans. Everyone’s buying seconds and thirds—and flipping them. You know, doing some cheap fixup and selling quickly at a markup.”

“Are you intending to flip the house you buy?”

“Oh, no. Just want that milestone. I’ve had a lot of financial detours. Girlfriends who stole money, that kind of thing. I’ve been saving up for a while now.”

“It’s good that you’re saving up rather than taking on some backbreaking mortgage.”

He didn’t want to talk about mortgages. “This looks like a great little community.”

“Oh, the neighbors are perfectly fine,” she said. “Most seem to have a fixation on HG-TV.”

He smiled and nodded.

“But that crew over there,” she said, pointing her finger up in her sight line, like a rifle. “They’re renters, what my son calls rednecks.”

It was hard pretending to be on her side with class. “Well, at least you’ve got the lot between you.”

“People of their ilk should not be here. That house belongs to a family fighting over their parents’ estate. One of the siblings has sought vengeance against the others by renting it out to those kinds of people.”

“Hopefully they’ll settle it up soon.”

“My late husband, Jack, was a descendant of that Pankhurst family.”

“Really?” he said. He had no idea who any Pankhursts were.

“I don’t know why I say ‘late husband,’ ” she added. “He died sixteen years ago.”

“When you miss someone, I bet sixteen years seems like yesterday.”

He was surprised to see that she had pulled a pack of cigarettes from her beaded bag. “You want one?”

He felt himself almost blush. “Oh, no,” he said. “I’m working, plus I’ve never smoked.”

“Go on, take it. There’s a new moon.”

He laughed. “What the moon does is not really a draw for me.”

She told him that she gave up smoking thirty-eight years ago but had a cigarette twice every month: once on the new moon and once for the full moon. “Usually I wait for sundown to have my smokes, but with the new moon you don’t see it anyway, so it’s now or never, right?”

“You’re a funny lady, Lorraine.”

She was still smoking after he’d secured the truck and shut the door. He dallied a bit to be sure she’d finished the cigarette, as a precaution against Ladder 249.

After she turned her small foot in a much larger white sneaker to extinguish the butt on the gravel, she looked at him with intent. “Do you want to buy my cottage, Teej? Because if you do, I can make you a very good deal. It’s a cottage that can do for a year-round home. It has a deck and a dock and I have two fishing boats and a paddle boat somewhere that my son can find for you. I have officially started the divestiture, as you’ve seen. If you’re interested, I’d like to sell it to you. I like you.”

For days, Teej debated buying Lorraine Pankhurst’s cottage. Even with the amazing deal she was offering, it was more than he could afford. House or cottage, it belonged to another social class—the “Pankhurst” class. He wondered what owning a Pankhurst cottage would tell the world about who he wanted to be. His own name had changed several times over three decades. He started off as Tommy, then became Tom, and then T.J., which morphed into Teej. On paper he was Thomas Jefferson Loring II, named after his bastard grandfather. Who but a fuckup goes through that many names?

By the time he returned the following Tuesday to finish Lorraine’s job, he’d decided to accept her offer, mortgage pending. She was both thrilled and ready with her beverages and her folding chair. “What were you studying when you dropped out?” She seemed to him sharper today than any of the old people he’d ever dealt with.

“I was going to be an illustrator,” he told her, “because I was always good at drawing—figure studies mostly.”

“What happened?”

“I started at SUNY Purchase, and that wasn’t good for me because I was never a fine arts type. So I got out and worked a couple years—lineman for a utility company—to figure stuff out. When I broke my wrist, I was in a doctor’s office and all around me on the walls were drawings of muscle and skeletal structure and I knew that that’s what I wanted to do. Somehow I managed to get into a good school—Arcadia outside Philly—where I could get my bachelor’s and go on in the master’s program.”

He stopped to laugh. “I couldn’t even crack the basics, you know? You need medical training to be an illustrator, and that would never fly with me. They let me jump ahead and do some anatomical drawing classes, but I was barely passing biology.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Teej. I’ll bet you were a fine illustrator.”

“I did one independent study project that was so elaborate, with all kinds of overlays. I still have it.”

“I’d like to see it,” she said. “You must bring it with you next time you come. Have you ever been married?”

“Once,” he said, “when I was twenty-three. She lied and used drugs.”

“You’re lucky you got out of it while young.”

“I didn’t particularly love her,” he confessed. “Or care for her.”

She laughed heartily. “Well that’s inspiring!”

He laughed with her. “I’m not saying she’s a bad person.”

“You sound like you have an esteem problem.”

He made a face. “I suppose that’s better than sounding like a creep.”

“You are not a creep.”

“I was in therapy a long time. My mother left us—just ran off—and one of my brothers died when I was a kid.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“A lot of the language I use comes from the state-appointed therapists. They gave me all these words about feelings, like quicksand. That’s been my faulty higher-ed—shrinks telling me what I’m supposed to feel.”

“Well, it’s never too late to start college again,” she said with vigor. “I can write you a recommendation.”

He laughed. “You’d really do that?”

“Absolutely.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m almost forty.”

“You’re young!” she shouted.

She’d made him feel so good about his life that later on his rounds that day he called to thank her. When she picked up, however, he was stunned to hear that she didn’t know who he was. She repeatedly asked if he were Jack’s brother. Then she thought he was someone named Royal. “I haven’t heard from you in so long,” she said. “I need to tell you about Grace. It’s so hard for me, Royal. I wish mother was dead.” Because he’d already spoken with Ford, he called him again to tell him about Jack and Royal. “Yeah, she does that,” her son replied. “But she’ll snap out of it. I need to get her into the right place soon.”

His next visit with Lorraine was a Saturday morning. He’d had a couple normal phone conversations with her, so he arrived hopeful that her dementia could be kept in check until the closing. He brought the book he was reading because it was poems he wanted to show her. He also brought a checklist and a tape measure. She escorted him through every room and talked as if they were turning pages in a photo album. The place was deceptively large. He couldn’t imagine how he would distribute his crude furnishings in the rooms—big-ass flat screen, oversize modular L-sofa, coffee table in some fake wood. The day was fine, however, and he took up her offer to sit on the well-built five-year-old deck.

“You’ve had that book with you this whole time,” she said.

“It’s poetry. It was a gift.”

“A gift from who?”

“My ex, Marty. Someone gave Marty this book, but she ‘re-gifted’ without reading.” He laughed. “Marty don’t do literature.”

“That’s a crap attitude,” she said, “but more important for you, that’s crap poetry.”

He felt his throat sting with shame. The poems had made him cry.

“Sorry, my friend,” she went on. “That’s my philosophy across the board. You need to read Hopkins or nothing at all.”

“That’s harsh, Lorraine.”

“And Donne,” she said, nodding:

Send home my long strayed eyes to me,
Which (Oh) too long have dwelt on thee.

“I like that it rhymes.”

“I despise Harold Bloom, but he was right about one thing: with poetry, there is nothing new under the sun.”

“Well I’m just a shredder.”

“That is not true!” she cried. “You have enormous capacity.”

He laughed. “I’m also a loner.”

“Artistic people often are.” She paused. “See those ducks out there? None of them is alone precisely because they are ducks. Being alone is not in their nature. We have that up on ducks. We can choose to be loners.”

He made a face. “That’s not an uplifting thought.”

She smiled. “So what’s the title of your book?”

“Picnic, Lightning.”

“It seems vaguely familiar.”

“It’s a quote from Vladimir Nabokov.”

“Yes!” she cried. “The thing that killed Humboldt’s mother! Oh, he was clever with words.”

Teej stared at the handful of ducks bobbing so calmly past the end of Lorraine’s dock. “My older brother, Danny, had a real way with words.”

“Did he write?”

“In high school he had bad grades, but he was clever writing jokes. He wanted to be a standup comic like Steve Martin. He got that album Let’s Get Small when it came out.” He stopped to laugh. “He’d go around saying all Vegas-like ‘Sammy Davis Junior, personal friend of mine.’ This annoyed the shit out of my grandfather, the world’s biggest asshole.”

“You lived with your grandfather?”

He regretted bringing it up. “My father got left with three boys. He could never get his act together, so we moved in with my grandfather.” He paused. “Funny thing is, his wife ran off too.”

“What did he do for a living, your asshole grandfather?”

“He colorized.”

She laughed. “Colorized what?”

“People’s lives,” he said, laughing with her. “He tinted family photographs back when everything was black and white. That was way before my time. Thomas Jefferson Loring—I was named after him so I’m the second.”

“What happened to Danny. Is he the one who died?”

He couldn’t answer, still angry at the memory of his asshole grandfather who’d only answer to “Thomas.” He was a tyrant, always yelling commands that began “In my house.” His skills at hand-tinting studio portraits made him some money. He had a big studio with three employees. But with cheap color photography his business died. He was a first-class schmoozer, though, and did telemarketing out of his garage. Teej often heard him on the phone with customers complaining about what he’d sold them. He’d pretend that compassion and understanding were in his nature. If it was a man, he’d say, “I can tell from your voice that you’re a good man. I can sense it. You’re a good man.”

“I’m sorry I brought that up,” she said.

He sighed. “One time it got so bad with Danny fighting with my grandfather that the old man yells, ‘Say that one more time and I’ll blow your head off!’ He meant Danny saying ‘Sammy Davis Junior, personal friend of mine.’ So Danny says it over and over and the old bastard goes down to the basement to get his shotgun. It was a Sunday in August, and I remember when I saw the gun I started to shiver and tears just came. Who knows where my father was. Bobby was watching TV, oblivious to what was happening. My grandfather pointed the gun at Danny saying ‘Out of my house! Out of my house!’ And Danny kept saying the Sammy David Junior line. They started in the kitchen and got out to the driveway. Then the old bastard starts with ‘Off my property! Off my property!’ And then suddenly there was a blast and Danny was lying in the driveway bleeding. He got shot in the chest and he died the next day.”

Lorraine had had her hand over her mouth the whole time. “That’s horrific. I’m terribly sorry.”

He laughed. “ ‘He shoots . . . he scores!’ Bobby and I kept saying that—you know, as a way to cope.”

She looked less capable when distressed.

“At least the old man was a bad aim. He didn’t shoot Danny in the head, blow his brains out in front of me.”

“Who took care of you after that?”

“Aunt and uncle who were really decent. I had lived with them before. The hard part is that I lost touch with Bobby. My mother’s people wanted him because he was cute. He moved to live with them in North Carolina. I never even see him anymore.”

“What happened to your grandfather?”

“He killed himself with another shotgun about a year later, when he was drunk and hunting wild turkey. My father died just last year.”

“Oh dear,” she said. “That’s a lot of tragedy.”

Now the ducks seemed to be drifting backwards because of a motorboat. Lorraine had become fidgety with her hands. “I know what something like that can do to your life.”

“In therapy,” he said, “I always talked about how Danny getting killed should’ve been the base physiology in the drawing, and then you’d have many overlays to complete and enhance the picture, so that it wasn’t so severe. But Danny getting killed kept being the new overlay, the new scrim.”

The next time Teej found himself on Lorraine’s deck, the deal had worked out with his bank and he couldn’t help feeling high from imagining himself a homeowner. She had invited him over for a champagne toast to their deal and was now lifting the layers of his college masterpiece—a vascular illustration of chest wound trauma from a .45-caliber shotgun shell, with five overlays depicting the phases of successful surgical intervention.

“Your family history makes you unique,” she said. “But you do have a fixation on social class. You use the word Walmart quite frequently.”

He smiled. “And you use the word redneck.”

“No,” she said. “I quote my son’s use of that word.” She was lucid, like a flowing stream of water that wasn’t a pond. “So many smart young men are intimidated by the academy,” she continued. “They can’t get in at one point in their lives and they’re sure the door is shut forever. Then they turn into crazy Republicans with roomfuls of guns. You are different, Teej. You don’t lash out.”

“Oh, I did,” he said. “I’m just leaving that part out of my story. You’re seeing me in the phase where I’m the mobile shredder who just wants to buy a house and be left alone.”

“Is that true? Do you want to be left alone?”

He turned his eyes to the pond, which now seemed to him to be there so that people would have something other than people to look at.

“This,” she said, lifting the acetate sheets and letting each drop onto the cardboard mount, “this is beautifully executed but needs to go into the shredder pronto.”

He looked down at his clasped hands. “Yeah, I know.” He smiled. “You’re the professor who gives the failing grades.”

She, too, had found a point of focus on the opposite side of the pond. “One thing you’ll like about this place, Teej, is that you can swim across.”

He didn’t answer.

Her expression had turned blank. “I need to tell you a story.”

“I’m all ears, Lorraine.”

“Oh, it’s a story all right . . . about my family’s legacy as fabulous swimmers. A rite of passage for boys and girls who’ve reached the bar mitzvah and confirmation age—swimming the width of Seneca at its widest. For the girls it was the grandmother who’d coach and oversee the progress in the rowboat. It was always done at the crack of dawn, before the speedboats were up and out. I made the swim reluctantly at fourteen, with my grandmother. Ford was a natural champion and did it at twelve, with my father.” Here she paused and breathed heavily. “My Grace, at thirteen, was terrified and didn’t want to do it—not at all. And I was thankful and relieved. My mother, however—like your grandfather—was a bitch and a bastard rolled into one. She kept on me and on me and made it a humorous scandal within our extended family. She said, ‘That daughter of yours is failing the side.’ ”

Here she sighed again—and stopped talking.

He stiffened. “Don’t say it.”

She was already nodding, looking down at the drawing on her lap.

“She drowned.”

“Oh, she drowned all right,” she said, wiping a tear with the knuckle of her thumb, “with my mother and Jack right there in the boat.”

He knew from group therapy that the silence was supposed to be the place of movement, of gained ground.

“It tore apart my husband,” she continued, “and I guess my marriage. He hated my mother and blamed me for not being there in the boat. He was a lousy swimmer, but he swam for an hour looking. They pulled out her body near the pump station.”

There was not much to say for uplift. “Two peas in a pod, Lorraine. You and me.”

Her laugh was brittle. “At least I stopped smoking after that. But I came down like a harpy on my students.” Again she breathed in and exhaled heavily. “So,” she said, “now that that’s done, I have something I found cleaning that I must show you.”

He helped her out of the chair and waited with his fancy champagne glass and his acetate overlays as she went in the cottage and returned holding an old shoebox that she placed on the table between them. After she fell back into her chair, she said, “Go ahead, open it.”

He lifted the lid to a box full of crumpled money. “Lorraine, are you buying me off?”

“Remember that old slur, as queer as a two-dollar bill?”

“Are you saying I’m queer?”

She shook her head. “These are all two-dollar bills and they’re going the way of that slur and all the old-time thinking like your asshole grandfather.”

“I’m not getting this, Lorraine.”

“Look who’s on the two-dollar bill.”

He took one of the bills and smiled.

“Your namesake,” she said. “And now we need to burn them.”

“Why?”

“Thomas Jefferson in effigy,” she said with a certain degree of pride.

“I don’t get it.”

“To remove evil curses—of your grandfather and my mother. With me it’s too late, but you—you’ve got a fighting chance, Teej.”

He stared down at the box of crumpled money. He looked up and smiled. “You’re a funny one, Lorraine.”

“Go ahead,” she ordered, reaching for her beaded bag on the table. She extracted two lighters and flung one toward his lap. “Take it.”

He walked with the lighter and the open box to the edge of the pond. He put down the box and ignited one bill that burned with abandon.

“Light another one!” she hollered.

He hesitated and looked around. “It’s illegal to destroy currency.”

“Oh, go ahead!” she cried. “Burn the whole damned box.”

And he did, flicking the nearly incinerated bills in different directions over the pond. Like some kind of drunk insect, each floated drowsily to the water’s surface.

He looked up periodically from his task to Lorraine on the deck, smoking her full moon cigarette, and then down the shore to the Walmart cottage, where a small boy with a long branch stood at the end of a ramshackle dock, poking to get a pink ball to come to shore. It was an odd sight, the kid alone with his improvised weapon, assaulting the still water.

When he looked again toward Lorraine she had disappeared, no trace in any direction. When he called after her, his voiced echoed across the pond. When he looked again toward the boy, all he could see was the pink ball. The kid didn’t even shout or scream for help, but clearly he was drowning.

He ran like he hadn’t done in years and made the split-second decision to jump from the rickety dock versus swimming out from shore. The water was warm, thick with seaweed, and didn’t even seem that deep—probably a foot over his head. He felt the immediate terror that he’d forgotten how to swim, but the kid already seemed to be lurching toward him, though still without screaming. All Teej had to do was grab and hold on tight to the slippery little fish and carry it like a case of beer on his shoulder. But the kid was already terrorized and choking, so it was a struggle. Even when he reached the place where he could stop sliding on slime and walk the kid to shore, the silent child panted and wriggled like an eel. Suddenly there appeared on the shore a fat woman in sparkly studded jeans who began yelling bloody murder at both of them.

They got to the point where Teej had set the boy’s feet down so he could walk while Teej held his seemingly fleshless ribs, yet the screaming woman remained immobile on the shore for fear of getting her jeans wet. When Teej handed her the boy, she immediately began pummeling his shivering body, pulling him across the yard and into the house with no acknowledgment of Teej’s existence.

Teej fetched one and then another sneaker to put on and walked slowly across the empty lot to where Lorraine stood on the deck, holding a large white towel. “I saw what you did,” she said. “You’re a good man.”

Teej took the towel to wipe his face.

“But I need you to tell me which one you are,” she added with concern. “I can never tell you boys apart. Everyone is so grown this summer! Royal is already in college.”

As he hooked the towel around his neck, his eyes locked on a gigantic moon that had appeared out of nowhere across the pond.

“Look, Lorraine,” he said as he walked back toward where he had burned through her money, “it’s your smoking moon.”

“Rainbow trout?” she shouted after him. “Do you like that? I know there’s one of you who won’t eat fish—no way no how.”

He still didn’t know what to do with his life as a shredder, but now, suddenly, he was one hundred percent certain that he could not buy Lorraine Pankhurst’s cottage, despite all the negotiations for a stress-free transfer of property, despite the new Crate and Barrel deck furniture she had generously thrown in with the package, despite his feeling like a new man.

“Do you eat yellow perch?” she shouted. “I hope you do because I have a marvelous way of preparing it with sage and lemon and rosemary.”

That look of hopefulness on her old face he could not offend. “I eat every kind of fish there is!” he hollered, lifting his arms like a winning prizefighter.

“Oh, that’s wonderful!” she exclaimed, clasping her hands together. “Absolutely wonderful! Now who did you say you are?” §