I told myself that on the drive up. I told myself that on the bank when I handed him three doors. I told myself that for three weeks in a kitchen that was the wrong shape.
I wasn't telling myself that anymore.
The relief was bigger than I'd been ready for. It was the relief of a woman who'd been carrying a thing without knowing its weight, and who had set it down on a trail behind her house with a dog at her hip and a man's hand in hers, and who had found out, in the moment of setting it down, what the weight had been.
I let my shoulder bump his.
He didn't say anything.
He didn't have to.
Up ahead through the trees, I could hear the voices coming back in toward the road. Halsey. Mendoza. The Bishops. Audrey's voice cut clean through the others. They were going to be at the road when we got there. They were going to see us coming down the trail together with the dog ahead of us.
The town was about to find us already found.
CHAPTER 25
Easton
The morning of the wedding, I was at the kitchen sink in my grandmother's house, looking out the back window at the chairs in the grass.
I'd been up since five.
The chairs were the folding kind the firehouse used for the annual pancake breakfast on Main, and Mendoza had hauled them over in the bay truck at six. He'd set them up in rows, eight across, twelve deep, with an aisle of grass down the middle that ran from the back porch to the rose bed at the fence. The roses were pink this year. I hadn't fed the soil. I'd let her have her say.
Penny was under the biggest one.
I'd stood at the back window most mornings since the snow came off the ground in March, looked at the rose, and let myself feel what I felt about her being there. The feeling had a shape now, the same shape it had been for my grandmother, which was that the missing didn't stop being missing, and the rest of me was allowed to keep going.
It had been five months since I'd driven a truck back from Queens with one box unpacked and a slot I didn't want.
We'd driven down to Queens the week after I'd come home.
Astrid rode shotgun in the truck with Moose in the back seat and her hand on my thigh through the part of Route 23 that ran along the river. She'd never seen Queens. She'd told me at the kitchen counter the night before, chin on the back of her hand, that she'd been to New York maybe four times in her whole life and never gotten further than the island.
We did the apartment in a weekend.
The boxes that took me eighteen months to pack the first time, and a single morning to pack the second time, came back to Hartsdale in the back of the truck in one trip. Astrid labeled them with the Sharpie she'd brought from her kitchen. She wrapped my grandmother's brass lamp in a sweatshirt of mine because the bubble wrap was cheap. She made me sit on the floor of the kitchen with her on the Saturday night, eating Thai food from the place on the corner, and she watched me look around the apartment one last time. She didn't ask me if I was alright.
She'd known.
I took her to 295 on the Sunday afternoon. Shane hugged her at the bay door. Maya, Sloane, and Ava pulled her in at dinner that night like they'd been waiting on her since September. Brian's new baby slept on Astrid's chest through the whole meal, and she looked like a woman who had been at a thing like this her whole life.
We moved into the bungalow the second week in February.
Astrid moved across Maple in pieces.
Her mother's coffee maker came to the counter in the bungalow's kitchen, next to the one that had been my grandmother's, and Astrid picked her mother's because hermother's had a timer. Her herbs came to the windowsill above the sink, the rosemary, thyme, and sage in the small terra-cotta pots she'd carried up from Boston in September. Her veterinary journals came to the table in the hall by the leather chair. The Diane Ackerman went on the second shelf of the bookcase under the window, between my grandmother's hardcover Tasha Tudor and a paperback of mine that had been on the shelf since I was nineteen.
Moose's bed went by the back door where Penny's had been.
I put it there on a Sunday afternoon in February. Astrid came into the kitchen behind me with a box in her arms and stopped at the threshold and watched me set it down. She didn't say anything. She came over and put her hand on my shoulder, left it there a beat, then carried the box down the hall to the bedroom that had become ours.
My grandmother's recipe cards stayed in the top drawer of the kitchen, where they'd lived for forty years.
The brass lamp went back to the side table next to the leather chair.
The cast iron went on the stove, where I'd taken it down to make pot roast on a Saturday in November, and where I'd been taking it down on Saturdays since.
