A week after the oophorectomy and she was rolling up her driveway in a chair rented from the Princeton hospital, her ex-husband’s son, Huck, at the helm. He pushed the chair over inside-out caterpillars, and when he bisected one with a wheel, it curled at both ends. She had expected it to slice right through. Sun soaked through the turmeric-dyed cotton of her caftan and made her thighs look jaundiced, until the shade of a cottonwood tree up the drive reblanched her skin and backlit the bumps that puckered from her hair follicles. She tugged the hem over her knees. When she let go, the cloth shrugged up her thighs and flashed the white of her new briefs. She adjusted her hem, crushed the cotton into her knee, and hoped to Jove that her ex-husband’s son failed to catch a glimpse from his eagle-eyed view at the handlebars. She had awakened that morning to find her morphine button missing and a bronze stilts walker of a man hovering at the door, his neck bent to fit the frame like that giraffe from the Santa Barbara Zoo with a ninety-degree spine.
