I lay back on the bed, my head beside my tiny overnight bag. “It’s too much.”
“I want to scream at her, but she’s dead. She’s old and she’s dead.”
“Listen to me. Remember when I said you should take a trip with Bea? Start planning it now. Call the service that comes and takes it all away. Have them come three days from now. Spend three days going through things, and if you don’t look at all of it, well, you don’t. Otherwise you’re going to go out of your mind.”
“Oh, too late for that. Everything in my bedroom is still there, all the stuff in the desk drawers, the closet, under the bed. It’s like Pompeii. I feel like I’m going to get stuck here, like I’m going to fall into the past and it’s never going to let go of me.”
How interesting to think of two married people falling into their own separate pasts so far away from one another but at the same time. “Where does Bea want to go? Rome? Prague?”
“Norway,” he said.
I closed my eyes. I saw my husband and his sister on a ship looking out over the fjords. I told him I loved him.
“I love you, too,” he said. “I love you so much that I’m glad you’re not here. Have you called Eddie Triplett?”
“Not yet.”
“You should call him. He’s probably waiting to hear from you.”
“Probably,” I said. Lying had never felt like such an act ofkindness. Jonathan didn’t need one more thing to worry about, especially when there was nothing to worry about.
After we got off the phone, I found the shoes I’d bought for the retirement party, stashed away in their box. They were both sparkly and low to the ground. I gathered up the makeup I never wore and tossed that in as well. Once I had everything together, I locked up the house and walked to the train station.
My nephew Henry ate the second half of a meatball hero whilehis mother ran a flat iron through my hair. Her plan was to curl my straightened hair and pin it up, a complex grooming skill acquired from her daughters. I was wearing Leda’s bathrobe at the kitchen table. When she finished, I would step right into my dress without messing up her work.
“I never thought about the discrepancy of the days,” Leda said when I laid out the order of events between her appendectomy and Eddie’s banishment.
“So let me get this straight,” Henry said, licking his fingers. “When the two of you were little kids, Grandma had this wonderful husband you were both in love with, then she divorced him for no reason.”
“Well, there must have been a reason,” Leda said.
“No reason you know of,” Henry said.
I clarified. “She told me it was because he had almost killed me in a car accident, but he didn’t almost kill me.” Henry was a beautiful kid who had his mother’s empathetic nature and his father’s head for math. Whenever Henry was in the room, I believed in the survival of our species.
“And she married Mr. Positive after that?”
We nodded, newly mystified by a fact that had stymied us decades before.
“So Eddie isn’t your stepfather. Mr. Positive is your stepfather.”
Leda shook her head. “Eddie Triplett is our stepfather, ‘stepfather’ being an honorific bestowed or withheld by the stepchild.”
“Did you just make that up?” Henry asked his mother.
“I did,” she said, “but I’m also right.”
“She’s right,” I said.
“So do you think Eddie had an affair with one of the nurses in the hospital?” Leda asked.
“Either that or Grandma found out he was a spy,” Henry said, finishing off his sandwich.
I turned my head to smile at him and barely missed getting my ear burned off with the flat iron. “That’s what I said.”
“Hold still,” my sister said.
Steve leaned into the doorframe of the kitchen. “Is there time for me to go for a run?”
