I AM NOT MOST PLACES

At eight on Saturday morning Max Nazreen came by Colin's in the rental truck, and they drove first to Max's brokerage to get some boxes of personal effects. Max's hair, still black, was returning in soft, wispy patches.

As he unlocked the office door, Max said, "Of all the people she knows, Chandra will miss you and Beth the most. She wanted me to ask Beth not to come today. Did you know that?"

"Nothing would have kept her away, Max."

"Oh, I know, and I told her that. She was adamant, though. I asked her if she felt it was just too hard to say goodbye, take too much out of her. She said no, it wasn't that exactly. She said she was afraid that if she saw Beth again she might not be content to go.

She said something about it being messy, her wanting to drag a piece of this world away with her. Funny."

Colin did not think it was funny at all. Max grew quiet and his breathing labored as they carried cartons down the corridor from the office to the elevator. The upper level of the mall was beginning to fill with shoppers.

When they arrived at the house, Colin got out of the truck and began to direct Max down the steep drive. The slope and design of the laneway demanded three tight turns, a difficult enough maneuver in a car, and Colin had to keep stopping Max, sending him back up to make new approaches. He could see Max becoming bewildered as if he had just been awakened by Colin's tentative voice only to find himself not in bed but seated at the impossible wheel.

Max had hired a man with a back-hoe to line the entire driveway with large boulders, and these now stymied the truck's progress. Colin said as much to Max. What he said -- and he knew as soon as he said it that it was a poor choice of commentary -- was that he wondered what had possessed Max to make the approach to his house impassable. Max climbed down from the cab, leaving the driver's door wide open and the engine running, brushed by Colin, stomped down the pavement, and slammed his way into the house. A man named Tim, who was married to Angela, one of Max's clerks, brought the truck the rest of the way down.

Beth was sitting with Chandra on her bed, helping her sort through various piles of papers. Beth asked him what he had said to Max, and when he told her, she said that the best thing he could do for the moment was to mind the children, the Nazreens' three as well as two who belonged to Tim and Angela. Max's brother-in-law, Gary, who had flown from Colorado to drive the truck once it was loaded, was trying to keep the children occupied in the living room. A large blue cartoon genie was singing and changing shape every few seconds to an inattentive audience. Tim and Angela's youngest decided then that he wanted to see his mother, and began to cry inconsolably when Gary wrapped his arms around him to keep him out of the kitchen. Manny's wails triggered a similar response in two of the little Nazreens, who darted past Colin in an end-run around the couch. This pulled the women, Angela wrapping china plates in newsprint, and Beth sifting bills, wills, and homemade Mother's Day cards, away from their work, the exasperation wry on their faces.

Hearing the heavy rear door of the U-Haul roll up, Gary left to help Tim load boxes, and Colin ducked down the stairs to the basement. Midway down sat a shallow box containing a dozen each of seed packets and empty, plastic medicine bottles. He picked it up and brought it with him into the basement. Max was hunched over a red tool box open on the floor.

"What do you want done with these, Max? I thought someone might trip on them."

"I know exactly where those are going," he said, taking the box and placing it beside the tools.

"Tell me where to begin, then."

Max told him that everything stacked against one wall was to be loaded onto the truck, while all else was garbage. Armed with this distinction, Colin began carrying the larger items, a floor lamp, a set of four kitchen chairs, a child's bicycle, upstairs. The children were coloring on large sheets of newsprint spread on the kitchen floor while Angela and Beth put cookware into boxes and dry goods into plastic grocery bags. Beth told him that there was an empty chest of drawers in the main bedroom ready to be taken outside, and he said that he would see to it on his next pass.

Chandra was asleep on her back on the wide bed, the stacks of envelopes and manila files arranged on either side. She was able to concentrate only for short stretches now before having to rest. The papers around her were barely disturbed by the rise and fall of her breathing. Colin sat gingerly on the foot of the bed, and watched her sleep. Her deep olive skin that had glowed, regally, beneath black eyes and a noble nose, so arrogant, always so right, was now like parchment. Her mane of thick black hair, tossed at him more than once in teasing condescension, was now a cropped white cloud. The pupils of her eyes seemed visible through onion-skin lids.

He heard Beth say, "Colin, Tim says he has room for that dresser now. Do you want help with it?"

He stood abruptly and the room grew dim. When she saw his white face she got him to bend down on one knee and lower his head.

"You've been going at it too hard, mister. Why don't you loosen that?" She unbuttoned his collar. "I bet it's pressing on your carotid sinus."

After a few minutes he regained his head and set out to prove his fitness, despite Beth's warning, by moving the dresser out to the truck by himself.

The rest of the day passed as if he were watching a grainy film of it, including his own efforts, projected onto the bare walls of the house. The family renting the house arrived in the midst of the upheaval to swim in the lake, and changed into their suits in the bathroom. When they announced that they had forgotten their towels, Max dug through already packed boxes to find some. During this time a woman arrived to look at the kitchen table and chairs Max was selling.

"I really like the set," she said, "but I have no way to get it home. Can you deliver it?"

"No, I'm sorry, I can't," said Max.

"Most places deliver."

"I am not most places."

"Well, I just thought when I saw that big truck parked outside..."

"Madam, you go outside and look in the back of that truck. Look at how much bloody room there is in there. If I had room enough for a table and four chairs, I would be sending them on to Mile High City, now wouldn't I?"

The woman left without purchasing anything.

Chandra called Max into the bedroom to chastise him for his rudeness. Max absorbed her censure patiently. Nothing she said, whether it was that he had tied an antique serving board closed so that it was in danger of being scratched by the cord, or that he was being a tyrant for not having arranged lunch yet, or that the flight to Denver he had booked for her was all wrong because it left in the morning and she would never be able to nap on the wretched airplane in the morning, diminished his attention to her.

Nor did he reduce himself in obsequiousness. Never did Colin hear him reply that bond-destroying utterance, "Yes, dear."

When he saw him again, Max was holding a glass filled with a thick, brown liquid that resembled chocolate milk. The drink, Chandra's Sludge as Max called it, was a bitter concoction that came in the form of a brown powder in a small plastic bottle, the same type of container Colin had found with the seed packets in the box on the stairs. The cure was a combination of four wild roots and barks, all common and native to North America, dried and pulverized. To mix the solution, the powder first had to be boiled in water for a number of hours, strained through a clean cloth, boiled again, and then cooled. Its name derived from that of a Canadian nun who had adapted a native Indian recipe to cure a number of her colleagues of breast cancer early in the century. Each 28 gram bottle cost fifty dollars and lasted about a week. Until recently, the Sludge had also been a point of contention between Beth and the Nazreens.

Colin had heard her say into the telephone, "If you keep ignoring my advice I can't be your doctor anymore." Chandra kept drinking the Sludge and Beth kept driving out to the lake every evening to see her.

Because the renting family was bringing in its own refrigerator, Max and Chandra's had to be moved into the basement as the final act of the day. This news came not from Max but Gary who seemed to be just waking up while the rest of them leaned, sweat-stained and drooping, against various counters and doorjambs in the kitchen. Angela was down on the sand beach with the children. Beth closed the vertical blinds against the early evening sun, and then stood with her arms crossed watching Gary work with a large screwdriver.

"There's a good part of your weight right there," he said, leaning the door against the sink. All the food had been removed and either thrown away or placed in plastic bags with the two families' names on them. Beth and Colin's, the smaller, contained the food the children would never have eaten: jars of chutney, curry mixes, cans of mushrooms, sardines, pungent cracker spreads. The other, Tim and Angela's, contained breakfast cereal, cookies, bread, four boxes of lasagna noodles, jelly mixes, juice boxes, raisins, and chicken noodle soup. Colin wanted none of it.

Gary marshalled the four men around the empty shell and they shuffled with it to the top of the basement stairs. Gary and Tim took the heavier bottom end and proceeded down backwards. At the bottom of the stairs the doorway was not wide enough for two to pass through at once. Tim took the weight as Gary crawled under the refrigerator and through the door. During this transfer the pair grunted and swore and laughed through gritted teeth as if this were the activity they had hoped to be doing all day.

Tim then had to wait until Max reached him on that side before he could take any of the load again.

"You'll have to let me take it the rest of the way, Max."

"No," said Max, "you are my guests. This is my burden. I have to... "

Gary swore at him to give up his place.

"I'm trapped here until you move," said Tim. "Gary can't hold that whole back end much longer."

He let Tim take the weight and he stepped back up the stairs. Expecting another step, but finding none, Colin on the other side stumbled and sidestepped quickly to regain his balance. As he did so, he stepped onto the edge of the box of seeds and empty medicine bottles. The contents flipped out, the seeds rattling snake-like, the plastic bottles bouncing with hollow pongs around his shoes. His arms gave out and his side of the appliance toppled slowly. As Tim tried to correct the imbalance, Gary sang out new profanity, and the whole thing crashed to the floor.

"How did those get back there? I moved them out of the way," said Colin.

"I know exactly where they're going."

"No, you don't. You haven't a clue where those are going. Somebody could've been hurt. Wake up, Max. Just wake up."

Tim and Gary righted the appliance and pushed it into a corner of the basement. Beth came downstairs and helped Max pick up the scattering of seeds that had burst from their packets.

"They're to go all around the property. Around the boulders. Soften the rocks a bit. For memory and luck. I've known for a long time now where I want them to go. I just haven't found the time to plant them."

After that they wandered around the house in the falling darkness, picking up toys and crayons and bits of paper, looking for more to do. The truck could hold no more. Chandra's rocking chair would not fit, and so she gave it to Tim and Angela. Max told them all to feel free to take anything that had been destined for the trash, but there was now a quickly descending sense that they had only a little time left in which to depart, that to stay would be to risk being locked inside something dark and airless. They said their goodbyes quickly as if they were going to see the Nazreens the next day, and then walked up the driveway past the moving van to the street where the cars were parked.

Colin got in, moved the driver's seat back, and reached across to unlock Beth's side. She opened the door but did not get in.

"Wait for me, please. I won't be long." He assumed she wanted to say goodbye to Chandra again. He rolled his window down and listened to the sound of her receding footsteps. From the dark came amplified sounds: water lapping at a dock, a dog barking from across the lake, pine branches rubbing overhead. The screen door opened and slapped shut. He listened for the same sound that would signal her return.

Finally he got out of the car and walked down the driveway, feeling his way more than seeing from one of Max's boulders to the next. Around the final turn the truck loomed, grinning with dim eyes. No lights were on in the house, but from a point beside and just below it, on the slope to the lake, came an irregular flash, and he walked around the house towards it.

Max's landscaping plans had included an extension of the line of boulders along both sides of a wide path that led from the front corner of the house diagonally down through a series of terraced sections to the beach. Max and Beth were moving up from one rock to the next. Beth held the shallow cardboard box and a flashlight which she kept trained on the ground where Max sliced open a mouth of soil with a shovel. Beth handed him one of the empty Sludge containers which he dropped into the hole and tamped down with the toe of his shoe. After she sprinkled in some seeds, he removed the blade of the shovel and stomped twice to close the gash.

Colin knew they were doing it all wrong. Those seeds were much too deep. Max's technique was better suited to the planting of seedling conifers than to perennials. It would take a miracle for any of those flowers to show themselves in the spring. This furtive attempt carry out Max's plan by darkness was comical but salvageable. Colin opened his mouth to alert them to his presence and to set them right. But all he could get out of his mouth was, "Beth. I was worried."

"About me?"

"Yes, I..."

"You shouldn't be. Do you want to help?"

"I don't know," he said, and he saw everything that she was then, everything that he loved about her: her capacity for love, her discontent with things as they were, her will to do right, her patience. "I think I'll just keep watching."

When the last of the packets was emptied, Beth hugged Max, and the three of them cried together. Colin apologized for yelling at Max. Max said that he would miss them and that he wished they could move to Denver. They said that they wished they could, too. They would come to visit him as soon as they could.