Part 2
The drive home took me past a supermarket where I almost stopped for things I didn’t need. I kept going. At the house, I warmed a plate of roast, switched on the television, and watched people laugh at jokes I couldn’t have repeated afterward.
By nine, I was in bed.
The second year ended. Then the third did. I learned which containers stacked well in the freezer and which cracked when I tried to pry off a lid. There were holidays when I put out extra chairs, and birthdays when I made the calls myself because hearing somebody say happy birthday seemed better than hearing nothing.
I still called the room Elaine’s kitchen. Sometimes I corrected myself aloud, although there was nobody there to hear either version. The food accumulated faster than I could eat it.
During those years, I saw a therapist named Dr. Bellamy. She talked about limits and about asking directly for what I needed, while I sat across from her with my hands clasped between my knees.
“I ask them over every week,” I said. “How much clearer can I make it?”
“An invitation can sound like an offer,” she said. “Have you told them what happens to you when they don’t come?”
I didn’t have a good answer.
Around the fifth year, I got Patricia to sit down with me. I chose an afternoon when neither of us had somewhere else to be and resisted the urge to put food in front of her first. I wanted her to hear me before we found something ordinary to talk about.
“Pat, I’m having a hard time in this house. Some days go by and I don’t speak to anybody. I miss Elaine, and I miss having you all around.”
She reached across and covered my hand with hers. Patricia could be wonderfully gentle when she was actually there. That made what followed harder to understand.
“You know how much we care about you. Everybody’s trying to keep up with so much.”
“I’m thirty-five minutes away.”
Her fingers tightened around mine. “You’re right. We’ll make more of an effort.”
I believed her again, though less easily.
Later, I tried with Suzanne over the telephone. I told her I was tired of initiating everything, tired of wondering whether I was doing something wrong. Before I could finish, she drew the kind of breath that meant she had already decided what my problem was.
“Danny, you can’t take every missed dinner personally. We love you. We also have our own lives to look after. You need a thicker skin.”
For a moment, I could hear traffic on her end. Then I said I understood, although I didn’t, and ended the call before she could explain herself again.
Elaine used to rest her hand on my knee while I drove. We could go twenty miles without speaking, and that little contact would tell me she was glad to be beside me. I remembered it that afternoon, sitting at the counter with the phone against my palm.
I opened her folder of Italian photographs. She would have known how to get everyone through the door without making it feel like a request. I had spent five years discovering how much of our family life she’d quietly arranged.
Two years later, Nathan called with a different kind of need.
He had become involved in a business venture that had gone badly. He needed twenty-eight thousand dollars within two weeks, and the embarrassment in his voice sounded real. So did the fear.
“I know I’ve been lousy about coming around,” he said. “I wouldn’t ask if I had another way out of this. Can you help me, Dad?”
I could have answered the first sentence. I answered the last one instead.
I gave him the full amount. He was my son; Elaine would have wanted him helped, and so did I. There was another reason I didn’t say aloud: I thought we might finally have something between us that required him to stay in touch.
He repaid the loan in steady installments over two years. I have never denied him that credit. Every dollar came back, and during those two years he came to dinner and called often enough that I stopped feeling ridiculous when his name appeared on the screen.
He remembered my birthday both times.
The final payment cleared. Once he finished paying, I was back to leaving messages that went unanswered.
Ten summers had passed since Elaine’s death when I turned sixty-seven. My birthday, August sixteenth, fell on a Sunday that year, so I made a roast and asked everybody over. I told them there would be cake if they wanted to bring it, and there would be enough dinner for all of us.
Claire mailed a card. Patricia sent a text. Suzanne called for a few minutes and spent about half the conversation describing an argument over her neighbor’s fence.
Nathan had a birthday cake delivered.
I put out six settings: mine, my sisters’, my children’s, Eric’s. The grandchildren would have eaten at the little table in the kitchen. I checked the driveway through the dining room window until the vegetables began getting cold.
Then I served myself.
The roast was good. I remember resenting that, briefly, as though a meal that tasted right ought to have come with the people I’d made it for. I sat with my knife and fork beside the plate and asked Elaine, under my breath, what I was supposed to do now.
There was the refrigerator motor, and a car passing outside, and eventually I got up to wash the dishes. Five unused plates went back into the cupboard. I covered the cake and turned off the kitchen light.
Over the next few weeks, I reached a decision I no longer needed to rehearse to myself. I kept it private. There had been enough conversations in which I explained a need and waited to find out whether anyone had heard it.
I called a real estate agent whose office was several towns away. She walked through the house, took measurements, and came back with a valuation of four hundred fifty-five thousand dollars. Standing beside the counter where Elaine had rolled out pie dough, I told her to put it on the market.
“Do you want a few days before we start?” she asked.
“You can start today.”
Three weeks later, a young couple made a cash offer. They had a dog, a baby due soon, and reasons of their own for wanting a quick closing. I accepted.
While the paperwork was being completed, I ended the arrangement with my financial adviser and transferred my retirement accounts to another institution. I used my own name on every document.
I arranged a new cell number and canceled the old one, along with the house telephone. I closed the social accounts Elaine had helped me set up. For years, I had kept them partly because they were hers too; now I saved the photographs I wanted and shut the accounts down.
No one in the family received the new number.
Three hours north, in a little lakeside town called Alder Cove, I found a two-bedroom apartment. One bedroom would hold my bed; the other would hold my books and a desk. People went there for fishing, quiet weekends, retirement. Quiet seemed a sufficient reason.
I took Elaine’s photographs, the quilt her grandmother had made, and her family’s old iron skillet. Books and clothes filled the rest of the boxes. The furniture stayed behind by arrangement with the buyers, including the dinner table and the freezer with its stacked containers of meals.
On the last morning, I checked each room. There was a pale rectangle on the bedroom wall where a photograph had hung, and the kitchen sounded different without the clock I’d already packed. I stood by the stove until I was ready to leave it.
Outside, I locked the door. The agent was to collect the keys from a sealed envelope, and I left no message for anyone else. Before another car turned into the street, I pulled away from the curb and drove north…
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