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by food spilled on the front of your dress or shirt while feeding the baby, turning left when your spouse is certain you should have turned right: This Marriage Is Dead or sometimes known as The Marriage Is Dead and sometimes, when it has been reduced to a folk song, is called Husband Left Her , when asked about it in this way: “What now, young Heracles, for your life was such a wreck, but now it must look like an accident, a bunch of stuff all over the place, seen in the rearview mirror”; and the young Heracles, without pause, replied, “Yes, but objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.”
    And so too, without pause, then and now, the dead marriage grew into a loud, beastly entity that could be seen dancing on the lawn just within view of Mr. Sweet as he sat in the room above the garage, writing and rewriting the nocturne itself, its arms touching the tops of the Taconic range in the west, its legs mixing freely with the boreal forest in the east, hovering above the various waterways named Hudson, Battenkill, Walloomsac, Hoosic, Mettowee, that lay in between. The dead marriage occupied each empty space that was innocently bare in that village in which the Sweets lived, even in the post office, where the postmistress looked at Mrs. Sweet with pity and scorn before handing her a notice of an overdue bill; so too, it was alive in the country store, for when Mrs. Sweet entered the premises all conversation stopped, and everyone looked at her with pity and scorn and perhaps were sorry that none of them had an overdue bill to hand to her, and perhaps were happy that none of them had an overdue bill for her and Mrs. Sweet purchased some cheese and yogurt made by Mrs. Burley.
    That nocturne This Marriage Is Dead or The Marriage Has Been Dead for a Long Time Now , or the popular folk song Husband Left Her , brought such joy to Mr. Sweet and he felt, for the first time in his life, fulfilled; his whole life had been lived, all his suffering for his whole life had ceased just then, for he had suffered much: the life of a prince, when he was a child and lived in an apartment across from that specially arranged plantation of greenness in New York City, Central Park, overwhelmed his whole being and he reached into the pocket of his tweed jacket, which bore the label of J. Press, a haberdasher on Madison Avenue and East Forty-sixth Street and he found a piece of paper, a note and he read it with the surprise of the new and he read it with the familiarity with which you say to yourself, in whatever incarnation you find yourself: child, adolescent, twenties, thirties, middle age, old, in a hospice hours before your heart becomes still, yes! Tell now, Tell then, the note had nothing written on it and the note had this written on it: This is how to live your life, and it was signed, Your Father.
    Her hands now holding a pencil, Mrs. Sweet began to write on the pages before her:
    “It is true that my mother loved me very much, so much that I thought love was the only emotion and even the only thing that existed; I only knew love then and I was an infant up to the age of seven and could not know that love itself, though true and a stable standard, is more varied and unstable than any element or substance that rises up from the earth’s core; my mother loved me and I did not know that I should love her in return; it never occurred to me that she would grow angry at me for not returning the love she gave to me; I accepted the love she gave me without a thought to her and took it for my own right to live in just the way that would please me; and then my mother became angry at me because I did not love her in return and then she became even more angry that I did not love her at all because I would not become her, I had an idea that I should become myself; it made her angry that I should have a self, a separate being that could never be known to her; she taught me to read and she was very pleased at how naturally I took to it, for she