Chapter 5: What Thirty-Five Years Leaves Behind
I made tea because I didn't know what else to do with my hands.
Greg sat at the kitchen table.
Diane sat across from him, her coat finally unbuttoned.
The overhead light made everything look too bright and too ordinary for what was happening inside it.
I set three mugs down and sat.
"Tell me about her," I said.
Greg looked up.
"Laura, you don't have to—"
"I want to.
Tell me."
He wrapped both hands around the mug.
He was quiet long enough that I thought he might not answer.
"We were young," he said.
"I was twenty-three.
She was twenty-one.
We met at a job — I was doing electrical work on a renovation, she was painting the interior.
We talked every day for six weeks." He paused.
"It felt very large at the time.
The way things do when you're that age and you don't know yet how many large things are coming."
"What happened?"
"I got an offer to work in Pittsburgh.
Good money.
I was going to be gone a year, maybe two.
I asked her to come." He turned the mug slowly in his hands.
"She said no.
She didn't want to leave her mother.
Ruth had just been widowed — her husband died that spring.
Nora felt she couldn't go." A pause.
"I went anyway."
"And you didn't come back for her."
"I came back once.
About eight months later.
But she'd moved on.
She was seeing someone else.
She seemed — fine.
Happy, even." He looked at the table.
"I told myself that meant I'd made the right choice.
That we both had."
"Did you love her?"
He looked at me directly.
"Yes.
The way you love someone when you're twenty-three and don't know what love costs yet."
The kitchen was quiet.
The refrigerator hummed.
Outside, the yard was dark, and somewhere under the flower bed, Rosie was wrapped in my mother's blue blanket.
"Why didn't you tell me?" I said.
"Not about Ruth.
About any of it.
A woman you loved for two years — why was she never a name you mentioned?"
"Because by the time I met you, she felt like someone from a different life.
Someone who belonged to a version of me that didn't exist anymore." He met my eyes.
"And because I didn't want you to think she mattered more than she did.
Or less.
I didn't know how to place her, so I said nothing."
Diane had been very still.
Now she said, carefully, "I'm sorry.
I feel like I've dropped something into your house that wasn't mine to carry in."
"You did the right thing," I said.
"I'd rather know."
She nodded.
She looked tired in the way young people look tired when they've been holding something heavy for older people all evening.
"What's Nora like?" I asked her.
"I've never met her.
I only know what Ruth says." Diane thought for a moment.
"Ruth says she's stubborn.
That she got it from her father.
That she and Nora went three years without speaking once, over something Ruth can't even remember clearly now." She paused.
"But she also says Nora is the person she calls when something is truly wrong.
Even after everything."
I thought about that.
"And she's coming Friday."
"Ruth doesn't know I've told you," Diane said.
"She made me promise to tell Greg.
She didn't say anything about—" She stopped.
"About whether Greg should be there when she arrives," I finished.
"Yes."
I looked at my husband.
He was watching me with the careful stillness of a man who has decided the next move is not his to make.
"What do you want to do?" I asked him.
"Whatever you think is right."
"That's not an answer."
"I know." He set the mug down.
"I don't think I should be there when she arrives.
That's Ruth's moment with her daughter.
It has nothing to do with me anymore." He paused.
"But I think I should tell Ruth that I won't be coming back.
She deserves to hear that from me directly.
Not just — disappear."
"You were going to keep going?
After tonight?"
"I hadn't decided." He looked at his hands.
"Ruth needs someone.
Her wrist is still healing.
Nora being there changes that, but I didn't know Nora was coming until sixty seconds ago."
I turned my mug in a slow circle on the table.
"You could have told me," I said.
"Any of it.
The volunteering.
Ruth.
The connection.
Any single piece of it, at any point in four months."
"Yes."
"Why didn't you?"
He was quiet for a moment.
"Because I didn't know how to explain it without it sounding like something it wasn't.
And the longer I waited, the harder it got to start." He looked up.
"That was wrong.
I know it was wrong."
Diane stood up quietly.
"I should go.
I've done what Ruth asked." She picked up her coat.
"I'm sorry for coming so late.
I didn't know how else to handle it."
"You handled it well," I said.
And I meant it.
I walked her to the front door.
She paused on the step.
"For what it's worth," she said, "I've watched your husband sit with a dying cat for three nights so an old woman wouldn't have to be alone.
I don't know what that's worth to you.
But I thought you should know what kind of man he's been in that house."
She walked to her car.
I watched the headlights come on and move away down the street.
I stood in the open doorway for a moment.
Then I went back to the kitchen.
Greg was still at the table.
He hadn't moved.
"She's right," I said.
"You should have told me.
All of it."
"Yes."
"But I'm glad you were there for Ruth."
He looked up.
"We're not finished talking about this," I said.
"But it's almost four in the morning, and I'm cold, and I want to go to bed."
He nodded.
I picked up the mugs and set them in the sink.
When I turned around, Greg was standing.
"Laura," he said.
"I need to tell you one more thing."
Something in his voice made me go still.
"What?"
"Ruth told me something last week.
About Nora." He paused.
"The reason she stopped calling for eight months." His jaw tightened slightly.
"The reason she's coming home now."
He looked at me across the kitchen.
May you like
"Nora is sick," he said.
"That's why she's coming home."
