Chapter 6: Friday
I didn't sleep well.
I lay beside Greg in the dark and listened to him breathe and thought about a woman I had never met who was flying home to her mother because she was sick, and about the photograph face-down on a kitchen counter, and about a cat named Rosie wrapped in my mother's blanket under the flower bed.
By six I gave up and went downstairs and made coffee.
Greg came down at seven.
He didn't say good morning.
He just poured a cup and sat across from me, and we were quiet together in the way that you can only be quiet with someone after thirty-one years.
"How sick?" I finally said.
"Ruth didn't say exactly.
She said Nora had been dealing with something for about a year.
That she'd been handling it alone out in Arizona and not telling anyone." He wrapped his hands around the mug.
"Ruth found out by accident.
She called on Nora's birthday and Nora answered from a hospital room."
"And that's when Nora decided to come home."
"I think so.
Yes."
I looked out the kitchen window at the backyard.
The flower bed was dark, the soil disturbed where Greg had filled in the hole.
I'd have to plant something there in the spring.
Something that would come back every year.
"Are you going to see her?" I said.
"No." He said it without hesitation.
"That's not why I was helping Ruth.
And it's not something I want." He looked at me.
"I want to be clear about that."
"I believe you."
"Do you?"
"Yes." I did.
That was the strange thing.
After the fear of those nights — the empty bed, the whispered words, the missing blanket — the truth was so much smaller and sadder and more human than what I'd imagined.
"I believe you."
He exhaled.
"I'm going to go see Ruth this morning," he said.
"Before Nora gets there.
I want to tell her myself that I won't be coming back.
That she should let Diane's network find her someone else."
"Do you want me to come?"
He looked surprised.
"You'd do that?"
"She's a woman who kept a photograph face-down for thirty-five years," I said.
"I think I'd like to meet her."
We drove to Fenwick Street at nine o'clock.
The house was a narrow two-story with a deep porch and a garden that had gone slightly wild with the autumn.
A wind chime hung by the front door, barely moving.
Greg knocked.
Ruth opened the door herself.
She was small — smaller than I'd imagined — with white hair cut short and eyes that were sharp and a little red at the rims.
She looked at Greg.
Then she looked at me.
She didn't seem surprised.
"You told her," she said to Greg.
"Diane did," he said.
"Ruth, this is Laura.
My wife."
Ruth looked at me for a long moment.
"Come in," she said.
"I'll put the kettle on."
Her kitchen was warm and cluttered in the way of someone who has lived alone long enough to stop caring about surfaces.
There were pill bottles on the counter, a folded newspaper, a pair of reading glasses resting on a crossword.
The space on the counter where the photograph had been was empty now.
She moved carefully, favoring her right wrist.
I watched her reach for the kettle and said, "Let me."
She let me.
We sat at her kitchen table — the three of us — and Ruth looked at Greg with the directness of a woman who had stopped softening things.
"You're not coming back," she said.
It wasn't a question.
"No," Greg said.
"I'm sorry.
I should have been upfront from the beginning about who I was."
"You were upfront enough." She folded her hands on the table.
"You came when I needed someone.
That's more than most people manage." A pause.
"Nora arrives at two."
"I know.
We won't be here."
Ruth looked at me again.
"Are you angry with him?"
"A little," I said honestly.
"He kept things from me he shouldn't have."
She nodded slowly.
"He always did that.
Kept things.
Thought he was protecting people." She glanced at Greg.
"He kept things from Nora too, at the end.
That's part of why she said no when he asked her to go."
Greg was very still.
"She told you that?" he said.
"She told me everything.
Eventually." Ruth's eyes were steady.
"She said she knew you'd come back.
She said she waited almost a year.
And when you came back and she saw you'd already moved on in your heart, she decided she had to do the same." Ruth paused.
"She didn't blame you.
I want you to know that.
She said you were both just young and didn't know how to say the hard thing out loud."
The kettle began to whistle.
I got up and made the tea.
When I set the cups down, Ruth reached across the table and put her hand briefly over mine.
"Thank you," she said.
"For coming.
You didn't have to."
"I wanted to meet you," I said.
She looked at me with those sharp, red-rimmed eyes.
"Nora is going to be all right," she said.
It came out quietly, like something she was saying to herself as much as to us.
"The doctors say the prognosis is good.
She caught it early enough." Her voice held steady.
"But she needs to be home for a while.
And I need her here." She straightened slightly.
"So it works out."
We didn't stay long after that.
Greg shook Ruth's hand at the door.
She held it a moment longer than necessary.
"You're a good man," she said.
"You just need to talk more."
He laughed — a real one, surprised out of him.
"My wife tells me the same thing."
Ruth looked at me over his shoulder.
"Smart woman," she said.
We walked back to the car.
Greg opened my door.
I got in.
He came around and sat behind the wheel and didn't start the engine right away.
"Are we all right?" he said.
I thought about the nights I'd lain awake.
The missing blanket.
The whispered *Daddy loves you too* floating up the stairs and landing in my chest like a stone.
"We will be," I said.
"But we're going to talk.
All of it.
No more keeping things."
"No more keeping things," he agreed.
He started the car.
As we pulled away from Fenwick Street, I looked back at Ruth's house.
The porch was empty.
The wind chime turned once, slowly, in the morning air.
I faced forward.
"I want to plant something over Rosie," I said.
"In the spring.
Something that comes back every year."
Greg was quiet for a moment.
"Rosemary," he said.
"Ruth said that was Rosie's favorite spot to sleep.
Under the rosemary bush she used to have."
I looked at him.
"Then rosemary," I said.
He reached across and took my hand.
May you like
I let him.
We drove home through the quiet streets, and neither of us said anything more, and it was enough.
