Epilogue
ASTRID
The river was running behind the back fence the way the river was always running.
I had the back door open at six in the morning.
Moose was on the porch with one paw hanging off the top step.
The air was cool in the way Hartsdale mornings were cool in May, with the river and the cut grass in it and the small green of the leaves that had come back on the trees over the rose bed at the fence.
The roses were pink this year.
Easton had been gone for two hours.
The truck had pulled out at four. He'd left for work with his coffee already in his hand, his boots already laced, and a hand on the back of my neck before he'd left, the way he'd been putting his hand on the back of my neck since the water tower.
He'd kissed me on the top of the head. He'd told me he'd see me at seven the next morning. He'd gone.
He'd left my coffee on the counter.
The mug was the one with the chip at the lip. He'd been pouring my coffee into that mug for three months. I had a perfectly good coaster on the side table in the living room. I had told him about the coaster four times. The mug was on the counter.
Some things never changed.
I drank it standing at the back door with my elbow on the frame.
I had Marjorie coming in at eight-fifteen.
Caldwell had been bringing her in once a month since the December morning he had carried her through my door at seven-twenty.
She'd been a healthy cat for five months.
Her labs had come back how labs came back for a senior cat that was doing well.
She didn't need a monthly recheck. Caldwell knew it.
I knew it. Marisol knew it. Joanne at the front desk knew it, and she had stopped charging him for the visits in March, on her own, without consulting me.
He came in anyway.
He would be in the corner chair by eight, half an hour before the appointment, with Marjorie in the carrier on his knee and the coffee Joanne would pour him in his free hand.
He would read whichever magazine was on the side table, regardless of how old it was.
He would talk to whichever client was on the bench beside him about whichever animal was in whichever carrier on whichever lap.
He had been a vet in this town for thirty years.
He knew everyone. He had been to the houses. He had named some of the dogs.
He would stay an hour.
I had figured out, somewhere in the second month, that the appointment was not for the cat.
I smiled at the mug.
I went back into the kitchen and refilled the coffee.
Moose came in behind me and lay down on the rug by the back door where Penny's bed had been.
Steve was on top of the refrigerator. He had come in the night before and hadn't yet decided whether he was a clinic cat this week or a bungalow cat.
I rubbed the top of his head. He pressed against my hand.
The kitchen had its morning shape.
My herbs were on the windowsill above the sink.
Easton's grandmother's recipe cards were in the top drawer.
Her brass lamp was on the side table next to the leather chair in the living room.
My mother's coffee maker was on the counter next to his grandmother's.
Penny's collar was on the hook by the back door next to Moose's leash.
I had come back to Hartsdale to start over.
I hadn't expected this.
I hadn't even known to want it. I'd driven up Route 23 in September with a rental car, a dog in the passenger seat, and the wedding china of a woman I'd stopped being in the back of the trailer, and I'd told myself, in the small, flat voice I'd been using on myself by then, that this was the part of my life that was going to be quiet.
I'd told myself I was going to live in my parents' house.
I'd told myself I was going to open a small practice.
I'd told myself I was going to be no one's, and that no one's was going to be enough, because the alternative had been the brownstone in Boston, the lamps the decorator had picked, and the dinners with a woman who clasped her hands at the front of her waist, and anything was going to be better than that.
Anything was going to be better than that.
I hadn't known the version of better that was waiting for me.
I hadn't known I'd been waiting for it.
Some things you didn't get to plan for. Some things came up on you on a porch with a bath towel slipping at your chest and a yellow lab running circles in another person's grass.
Some things came up on you in a kitchen with a man on your counter, bleeding from a feral cat, and your hip against the back of his hand.
Some things you owed it to yourself to see through.
I had seen this one through.
I was standing in the kitchen of a house I hadn't lived in eight months ago, in a T-shirt of the man I had married three weeks ago, with the coffee he had poured for me cooling in the mug with the chip in my hand, and the river running past the back fence the way the river was always running past the back fence.
Some things you came home for.
Some things came home for you.
The knock came at six-twenty.
I knew the knock.
I had known the knock since the third grade. It was three even raps a beat apart, the kind of knock you did with the knuckle of your middle finger when you were a woman in a hurry. I went down the hall in my socks. I had the door open before I'd checked the peephole.
Audrey was on the porch.
She was in scrubs.
The scrubs were the navy ones she wore on labor and delivery days.
There was a small dark spot on the right thigh that I recognized as the kind of thing scrubs picked up on labor and delivery.
Her hair was in a knot at the back of her head that had loosened in the way Audrey's hair loosened over the course of a twelve-hour shift. She didn't have lipstick on.
She didn't say anything.
She stepped through the door and wrapped both arms around my neck.
"Audrey."
She didn't answer.
"Audrey, what's wrong?"
She didn't answer.
I got my arms around her back and held on.
She was shaking a little against my shoulder, the small shake of a woman who had been holding something through the back end of a shift and had driven across town in the early light to set it down.
Moose came down the hall, sat at our feet, and looked up at her the way he had been looking up at her since he was a puppy.
"Audrey. You're scaring me."
She pulled back.
She had the wet shine along the bottom of her lashes that I hadn't seen on her since the morning Moose had been missing. She drew a breath. She didn't look at me.
She reached into the chest pocket of her scrubs.
She pulled out a pregnancy test.
She held it out to me.
I took it.
The line was the line.
I looked at the test in my hand. I looked at her face. She looked at the floor.
I didn't say his name.
I didn't have to say his name.
"Audrey."
"Astrid."
"How long have you known?"
"An hour."
"An hour."
"I took it in the staff bathroom at the end of the shift. I took two more. They're all the same."
"Audrey."
"I haven't told him."
"Audrey."
"I haven't told anyone, Astrid. I drove here from the parking lot."
I set the test down on the side table by the door.
I put my arms back around her. She let me.
She put her forehead on my shoulder, the way I had put my forehead on her shoulder on a kitchen counter in December, the way I had put my forehead on her shoulder a hundred times in the twenty-two years she had been my best friend, and not once, in those twenty-two years, had she put her forehead on mine.
She cried.
Moose pressed his shoulder against the back of her knee. The sun came up the rest of the way over the trees at the back of the yard.
I held my best friend in the doorway of the house I hadn't known I had been waiting for.
"It's okay," I said.
"Astrid."
"It's okay, Audrey. We're going to figure it out."
"You don't know that."
"I do."
She drew a breath against my shoulder.
I held on.
To be continued in Loving.