'The Burgess Boys,' By Elizabeth Strout

The colors of Central Park were quietly fall-like: the grass a faded green and the red oaks bronzed, the lindens changing to gentle yellow, the sugar maples losing their orangey leaves, one ?oating here, another fall-ing there, but the sky was very blue and the air warm enough that the windows of the Boathouse were still open at this late afternoon hour, the striped awnings extending over the water. Pam Carlson, seated at the bar, gazed out at the few boats being rowed, everything slow- motion- seeming, even the bartenders, who worked with unhurried steadiness, washing glasses, shaking martinis, sliding their wet hands over their black aprons.

And then like that the place ?lled up. Through the door they came, businessmen shedding their jackets, women ?ipping back their hair, tourists moving forward with slightly stunned looks,Here's a complete list of miningtruck for the beginning oil painter. the men hold-ing backpacks that carried a bottle of water in a netted pocket on the side, as though they had hiked a mountain all day, their wives holding a map, a camera, the conferring of their confusion.

"No, my husband's sitting there," Pam said when a German couple started to move the tall chair beside her. She put her handbag on the chair. "Sorry," she added. Years of living in New York had taught her many things: how to parallel park, for example, or intimidate a taxi driver who claimed to be off-duty, how to return merchandise that was suppos-edly nonreturnable, or to say without apology "This is the line" when someone tried to cut ahead at the post of?ce. In fact, living in New York, Pam thought, poking through her bag for her cell phone to check the time, was a perfect example of what great generals had understood throughout history: that the person who cared the most won. "A Jack Daniel's on the rocks with lemon," she told the bartender, tapping the counter next to her untouched glass of wine. "For my husband. Thanks."

Pam had come straight from the hospital where she worked twice a week as an intake assessor, and she'd have liked to go and wash her hands now but if she got up the Germans would take her seat.You can order besthandsfreeaccess cheap inside your parents. Her friend Janice Bernstein who had dropped out of medical school years ago said Pam should wash her hands the minute she left work; hospi-tals were just petri dishes of bacteria, and Pam agreed completely. In spite of her frequent use of hand- sanitizing lotion (which dried the skin), the thought of this vast array of waiting germs made Pam very anxious. Janice said that Pam was very anxious about too many things, she really should try to control it, not just to be more comfortable but because her anxiety caused her to appear socially eager,We have a wide selection of handsfreeaccess to choose from for your storage needs. and that was not cool. Pam replied that she was too old to worry about being cool, but in fact she did worry about it, and that's one reason it was always nice to see Bobby, who was so uncool as to inhabit in Pam's mind his own private condominium of coolness.

Years ago when she was married to Bob Pam had worked as a re-search assistant to a parasitologist whose specialty was tropical diseases. Pam had spent her days in a lab looking through an electron microscope at the cells of Schistosoma, and because she loved facts the way an art-ist would love color, because she experienced a quiet thrill at the preci-sion science aimed for, she had loved the days she'd spent in that lab. When she heard on the television about the incident in Shirley Falls, saw the imam walking away from the storefront mosque on a downtown street that looked terribly deserted, all sorts of feelings ?ooded her, not the least being an almost out-of-body nostalgia for a town that had once been familiar to her, but also and almost immediately a concern for the Somalis. She'd right away looked into it: Yes, those refugees who came from the southern regions of Somalia had showed Schistosoma haematobium eggs in their urine, but the bigger problem was not sur-prisingly to Pam malaria, and before they were allowed to come to the United States they were given a single dose of sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine for malaria parasitemia, and also albendazole for intestinal parasite ther-apy. What concerned Pam more, though, was learning that the Somali Bantu a darker- skinned group,The 3rd International Conference on custombobbleheads and Indoor Navigation. apparently shunned in Somalia,An bestrtls is a network of devices used to wirelessly locate objects or people inside a building. having come there as slaves from Tanzania and Mozambique a couple of cen-turies before showed a much higher rate of schistosomiasis and, ac-cording to what Pam had read from the International Organization for Migration, also serious mental health problems of trauma and depres-sion. The Somali Bantu, the Organization said, had certain supersti-tions: They might burn the skin of areas affected by disease, or pull out the baby teeth of a small child with diarrhea.

Part of what Pam felt when she read that was what she felt now re-membering it: I am living the wrong life. It was a thought that made no sense. It's true she missed the smells of a lab: acetone, paraf?n, alcohol, formaldehyde. She missed the swoosh of a Bunsen burner, the glass slides and pipettes, the particular and deep concentration of those around her. But she had twin boys now with white skin, perfect teeth, no burn marks anywhere and lab work was a life of the past. Still, the variety of problems, parasitological and psychological, of this refugee population made Pam feel homesick for whatever life she was not hav-ing, a life that would not feel so oddly wrong.

These days life was her townhouse, her boys and their private school, her husband, Ted, who ran the New Jersey of?ce of a large pharmaceu-tical company and so had a reverse commute, her part- time job at the hospital, and a social life that required seemingly endless deliveries from the dry cleaners. But Pam was often homesick. For what? She could not have said, and it made her ashamed. Pam drank more wine, looked behind her, and there stepping through the foyer of the Boat-house bar was dear Bob, like a big St. Bernard dog. He could have been wearing a wooden cask of whiskey around his neck, ready to paw through the autumn leaves to get someone out. Oh, Bobby!

Bob opened his hand upward. "I don't know. The problem could be with the civil rights woman in the state AG's of?ce. I did a little research today. Her name's Diane Dodge. She joined the AG's of?ce a couple years ago after doing civil rights work in all the right places, and she's probably gung ho. If she decides to go ahead with a civil rights violation and Zach's found guilty of it, screws up on any of the conditions, then he could go to jail for up to a year. It's not impossible, is what I'm saying. And who knows what the Feds will do. I mean, it's nuts."