Chapter 4: What Ruth Kept Face-Down
The photograph was old.
The kind printed on thick paper with a white border, the color slightly faded toward orange the way photos from the late eighties go.
A young couple stood in front of a house I didn't recognize.
The woman was laughing, her head tilted back.
The man had his arm around her shoulders.
The man was Greg.
He looked about twenty-five.
Thinner.
Hair darker.
But it was him — the line of his jaw, the way he stood with his weight slightly forward, the particular shape of his smile.
I looked at the woman beside him.
She was pretty.
Dark-eyed.
She looked happy in the uncomplicated way people look happy when they don't know what's coming.
I turned the photograph over.
On the back, in faded ink: *Greg and Nora.
Summer 1987.*
I looked up at my husband.
He had gone very still.
"Who is Nora?" I said.
The porch light buzzed.
Diane had taken a small step back, as if she understood this was no longer her moment.
Greg sat down on the back step.
Not carefully.
His legs just stopped holding him.
"She was someone I knew before you," he said.
"Before everything."
"Before me."
"Yes."
"How long before me?"
He rubbed his face with both hands.
"We met in '86.
We were together almost two years."
Greg and I had met in 1990.
I had known that there were women before me — of course there were, he was thirty when we met — but he had never mentioned a name.
Not once in thirty-one years.
"Why does Ruth have this photograph?"
He was quiet for a long moment.
"Because Ruth is Nora's mother," he said.
The yard seemed to tilt slightly.
"The woman you've been caring for," I said.
"The elderly woman three streets over who lives alone.
Her daughter is in Arizona."
"Yes."
"Her daughter is your ex-girlfriend."
"Yes."
"And you knew this when you signed up to volunteer."
He looked up at me.
"No.
I didn't know.
I swear to you, Laura.
I signed up in September.
I didn't find out Ruth's last name until the second visit.
When I realized — I almost stopped going." His voice dropped.
"But she was alone.
And she needed help.
And it had been thirty-five years.
It didn't feel like it had anything to do with Nora anymore.
It felt like it had to do with an old woman who couldn't manage her stairs."
"Did you tell Ruth who you were?"
"She recognized me herself.
Third visit." A short, tired sound that wasn't quite a laugh.
"She said, 'You're the boy who broke my daughter's heart.' And then she asked me to stay for tea."
I stood there in the cold backyard with the photograph in my hand and my husband sitting on the step looking smaller than I had ever seen him, and I tried to find the shape of what I was feeling.
It wasn't what I'd feared in the dark hours of those nights.
It wasn't betrayal in the way I'd braced for.
It was something stranger.
Something I didn't have a word for yet.
"Does Nora know you've been visiting her mother?"
Greg shook his head.
"Ruth didn't want her to know.
She said Nora would worry, and worrying would bring her home, and she didn't want to be the reason Nora disrupted her life." He paused.
"They have a complicated relationship.
Ruth doesn't talk about it much."
Diane spoke from the porch, carefully.
"I didn't know any of this until tonight.
Ruth told me while I was making the tea.
She said she'd been carrying it and she was tired of carrying things alone."
I looked at the photograph again.
The young woman laughing.
The house I didn't recognize.
"Where was this taken?"
Greg followed my gaze.
"Ruth's house.
The one on Fenwick.
She's lived there forty years."
I turned the photograph over once more.
*Greg and Nora.
Summer 1987.*
"She kept this on her counter," I said.
"Face-down," Diane said quietly.
"She kept it face-down."
I handed the photograph back to Diane.
I didn't know where else to put it.
It didn't belong to me.
"Come inside," I said to Greg.
"Both of you."
He stood up slowly.
"Laura—"
"Come inside," I said again.
"It's cold.
And there are things you still haven't told me."
He followed me up the porch steps without another word.
But at the kitchen door, Diane stopped.
"There's something Ruth said tonight," she said.
"Before she fell asleep.
She made me promise to tell you both." She looked at Greg.
"She said Nora called last week.
For the first time in eight months."
Greg's hand rested on the door frame.
"She's coming home," Diane said.
May you like
"Ruth didn't know how to tell you.
She's arriving on Friday."
