Taxidermy and Cleats

The fox had been dead three weeks when Eleanor brought it to me. Something about the eyes—she wanted them to stay open, staring. 'He was watching me,' she said, and I knew she wasn't talking about the animal.

I'd been doing taxidermy for seventeen years, since the accident. My hands were steady then. They were steady now, but everything else had changed. The shop smelled of formaldehyde and old pine, a scent that had permeated my clothes, my skin, the hollow space where my marriage used to be.

'He knew,' she said, leaning too close. Her wedding ring was gone. 'About the cabin. About us.'

I didn't ask who he was. I just nodded and made notes about glass eyes and mounting techniques.

The bear came two days later. A massive grizzly, or at least it had been. Now it was a rug with a terrifying, pleading face. The note pinned to its ear read: Fix him. Make him look like he did before.

Before what, I wondered. Before the hunt? Before the fall? Before whatever moment had made someone want to preserve death instead of life?

I worked through the night, the way I used to when Tommy was young and I was trying to build something—anything—he could be proud of. We'd played baseball in the backyard until the sun went down, until he was fourteen and decided his father's hands smelled too much like dead things.

He was twenty-five now, working in some city I'd never visited, calling twice a year on birthdays and holidays. The last call, he'd mentioned getting engaged. I'd wanted to ask about her, about his job, about everything. Instead I'd asked about the weather.

Eleanor came back for the fox on a Tuesday evening. She was wearing the same perfume my wife used to wear, something floral and cloying. She brushed against me when I handed her the box—soft fingers on my wrist, lingering.

'Thank you,' she said. 'You saved him.'

'Some things,' I said, 'can't be saved. Only preserved.'

She didn't understand. She never would. The next morning, I found an envelope with too much cash and a ticket to a baseball game tucked under my shop door. The game was this Saturday. Tommy's team was playing.

I looked at the bear's glass eyes, still trying to figure out what expression to give him. Fear? Acceptance? The moment before the end?

Then I picked up the phone and called my son.