“That’s not what we meant,” she said.
“Then you should have chosen different words.”
For once, neither of them answered quickly.
The house seemed to pause around us. The little flag magnet on the refrigerator, the one Gavin had brought home from a school trip to Washington when he was ten, held up a grocery coupon near the handle. I remembered him standing in that same kitchen, proud of his souvenir, telling Warren he had seen the Declaration of Independence through glass.
Now my son stood in the doorway of the room where he had grown up, unable to meet my eyes over a shirt.
The furnace technician arrived that afternoon.
His name was Bob, and he had been coming to the house for so many years that he remembered when Gavin was in college. He came in through the side door with his clipboard and a polite nod.
“Mrs. Baxter,” he said, “looks like the burner assembly needs attention before winter. Nothing urgent today, but I wouldn’t let it sit.”
“How much?”
He gave me the estimate.
In another life, the one from Monday morning, I would have written the check immediately.
Instead, I smiled gently. “You’ll need to give that to Gavin. He’s handling the property now.”
Bob hesitated. “Your son?”
“That’s right.”
“He home?”
“Upstairs.”
A few minutes later, I heard footsteps overhead, then Gavin’s voice, low and strained. Sloan’s voice followed, sharper than his. I could not make out every word, but I heard my name once, then “responsibility,” then the soft thud of a door closing.
I sat in my reading chair and looked at Warren’s first edition of The Old Man and the Sea lying in my lap. I had not read a single page.
That evening, I packed the books.
Not all of them. The shelves were too many, and some belonged to the house now in ways I could accept. But Warren’s favorites came with me. So did my grandmother’s china, the good silver, the quilt my mother made, Gavin’s baby blanket, and the carved wooden box from our twenty-fifth anniversary.
I labeled the boxes DONATIONS in thick black marker.
Sloan walked past them twice and never looked closely.
It is strange what people fail to notice when they are certain they already understand you.
Friday brought Sloan’s mother.
Mrs. Davis arrived in a cream SUV and oversized sunglasses, carrying a tote bag and the faint scent of expensive perfume. She was not unkind exactly, but she had always treated me like part of the house’s equipment: useful when operating smoothly, inconvenient when making noise.
They sat on the small back patio, where the last of Warren’s mums bloomed in clay pots. I was upstairs folding sweaters when Sloan called through the screen door.
“Elaine? Could you bring out some wine? And maybe that baked brie you make? Mom hasn’t eaten.”
I walked downstairs slowly.
The patio door was open. Sloan sat with one leg crossed over the other, smiling in a way that suggested she expected an audience. Mrs. Davis looked up pleasantly.
“Hello, Elaine,” she said.
“Hello, Marianne.”
Sloan glanced toward the kitchen. “The wine?”
“I didn’t open any.”
Her smile faltered. “The brie?”
“I didn’t make brie today.”
Mrs. Davis adjusted her sunglasses.
Sloan’s voice dropped. “Elaine, please don’t make this uncomfortable.”