Chapter 5
Shannon was angry for seven minutes.
Erin knew because she watched the clock on the stove, which was a thing she would not have admitted to under oath.
"Six years."
"Six years."
"Four books."
"Four."
"And you sat in my kitchen in — when was it, the summer Wyatt was two — and you told me you'd been thinking about maybe taking a class." Shannon put her glass down hard enough to slop. "A class, Erin. You'd already published two."
"Three."
"Three." Shannon made a noise like a kettle. "Get out of my sight."
"It's my house."
"Get out of my sight in your own house."
Erin waited.
And at the end of it Shannon went quiet and stared at the middle of the table for a while, and then said, in a completely different voice, "Was any of it any good?"
"Some of it."
"Don't do that. Don't do the thing." Shannon looked up. "Is it good?"
Erin thought about lying. It would have been so easy — the reflex was right there, warmed up, five years old and in excellent condition.
"Yes," she said. "The third one's very good."
"Right." Shannon picked her glass back up. "Then I want it, and I want the other three, and I'm going to read them all and I'm going to say something about them at some point, and you're going to have to sit there and take it like a person."
"Shannon—"
"Like a person, Erin."
So that was how it started.
The whole month afterward Erin would think of it that way, as a thing that had started, though nothing had happened except that a woman in a kitchen in Rockland had gotten angry at her for seven minutes and then asked to read her books.
October went by, and it was the strangest month of her life, because there was nothing in it.
No dinners. No calendar sent through by somebody in Boston with her own weekends on it.
No dress laid out. No four-hour Saturday at a foundation lunch making pleasant conversation with a woman whose name she had memorized in the car.
No standing at the end of a room at ten at night waiting for a man to finish a conversation so they could leave.
She had not understood, in five years, how much of her life had been waiting to be finished with something.
Now the days just sat there, empty, and she had to fill them herself.
She was extremely bad at it for about two weeks.
Things that came back, in the order they came back:
The harbor at six in the morning, which she had loved before she ever met him and had somehow not been to in five years, though it was a forty-minute drive.
Shannon's boat, which was not a boat so much as an argument with the sea that Shannon was slowly losing, and on which Erin was made to be useful.
Cooking. Actual cooking, badly, for two people, which she had not done since a rented cottage — because there had been a woman at the Point house whose entire job was that, and it had taken about six months for Erin to stop apologizing for being in the kitchen and about a year after that to stop going in.
The library on Union Street, where she got a card with her own name on it and the woman at the desk did not react to it in any way whatsoever, which Erin thought about for the rest of the afternoon.
Walking. She walked enormously. Four, five miles, in weather, and came back wind-burned and hungry, and one day near the end of the month she caught herself in the glass of the shop window on the way in and did not immediately check what was wrong with how she looked.
Wyatt started at the school on Union Street on a Monday.
Erin had braced for it. She had a whole speech ready about how it would be different and how different was fine, and she had rehearsed the speech in the car, and she had, in a very quiet part of herself, expected him to be miserable and to ask for the other one.
He came out at three o'clock holding a paper crown.
"There's a boy called Casey and he has two dogs and one is deaf."
"Is that so."
"He said I can come and see them."
"Maybe we'll see."
"Also we don't have a person here."
Erin, buckling him in, stopped. "A person?"
"At the other school there was a person in the car." He was already looking at the crown. "For if we go home. Here everyone's mom is in the car."
He said it the way children say things — with no case attached, no complaint, filing a report on the world.
Erin got into the driver's seat and sat with her hands on the wheel for a second.
Five years old. Five years old, and he had understood the whole architecture of it — that there was a class of person whose job was to be in the car — and had understood that it was over, and had not once asked why.
"Yeah," she said. "Everyone's mom is in the car."
"Can we have the crackers?"
"We can have the crackers."
She saw the paragraph's aftershocks all month, and they were mostly small and mostly kind, which was worse.
A woman she did not know reached past her at the market to get the last carton of something, and said, "You take that, you've had a week," and Erin had to go out and sit in the car.
At the chowder supper at the church on the twelfth — she went; Shannon had been right — three separate people put a hand on her forearm and said nothing at all, which was, she came to understand, the local version of an enormous amount of speech.
And an older man at a folding table said, "You're the one up over Owen's," and when she said yes, said, "Good. He's a decent one," and went back to his chowder.
That was all any of them wanted from it. They weren't collecting either.
She had spent five years in rooms where everything anybody said to her was an instrument.
The handovers were the part nobody warns you about.
They had settled it inside a week, through Colleen, without a single direct word between them.
Wednesday afternoons and every other weekend.
Neutral ground, which in practice meant the parking lot of the Y in Rockport, because it was halfway and because it had a lot of cars in it and nobody looked at anybody.
Erin did not do them.
She had said it to Colleen on the phone in a flat voice — I'm not going to be able to do the car park — expecting to be argued with. Colleen had said, "Then don't. That's what friends are for and it's what I'm for," and it had been arranged inside a day.
So Shannon did them.
Every Wednesday at four, Shannon drove Wyatt to Rockport with a backpack and a dinosaur book and brought back an empty car seat, and every Wednesday at seven she brought him home again, and every single Wednesday she said the same three words coming through the door: "He was fine."
She never volunteered anything else. Erin never asked.
That lasted five weeks, and then, on a Wednesday near the end of the month, Shannon came in and put her keys on the table and stood there with her coat still on.
"I'm going to say one thing and then I'm never going to say anything again, and you can be angry."
"Shannon."
"He gets there forty minutes early." Shannon's jaw was doing something. "Every week. Every single week, Erin. He's in that car park at twenty past three for a four o'clock, on his own, and I know because I came early once to get gas and he was already sitting there."
Erin didn't say anything.
"And when we pull in he doesn't get out until I've got Wyatt's belt undone.
He waits. Because the first week he came over too fast and Wyatt got shy and he saw it.
" Shannon finally took her coat off, roughly, like it had offended her.
"And at seven he hands him back and says thank you to me, and he says it like — " She stopped.
"He says it like I'm doing him a favor. Which I am. But that's not how those men say it."
"Are you finished?"
"No." Shannon hung the coat up. "He's lost weight and he looks like hell and I hate that I noticed, and I want it on the record that I'm still on your side, and if you tell me to keep driving and shut up I will drive and shut up until the day I die."
Erin stood in her own kitchen with a dish towel in her hands.
Here is what she wanted to say: forty minutes early is not the same as five years. Here is what she also wanted to say: he never once in five years came home forty minutes early.
Both were true. That was the trouble with all of it.
"Keep driving," she said. "And thank you."
"Yeah."
"Shannon." Erin put the towel down. "Does Wyatt talk about it?"
"He talks about the dogs. He talks about a deaf dog constantly." Shannon's face changed. "He asked me once whether Dad lives at the big house on his own now. I said yes. He said, 'That's a lot of house,' and then he asked for the radio."
Everything else came through Colleen, and there was almost nothing of it.
That was the discipline of it, and Erin knew exactly whose discipline it was, because it wasn't Graham's. Graham had called fourteen times in one morning. Graham had sent flowers, a car, a plane, a fortune, all in the first six days. Left alone, Graham would have been on Main Street inside a week.
Somebody had sat him down.
So instead there were four emails in seven weeks, from an attorney's address, all four of them under a hundred words.
Confirming Wednesdays. Confirming the school transfer paperwork.
Confirming that no position would be taken on anything.
Confirming — this was the fourth one, and it was the one she read twice — that the trust documents had been re-filed with a correction to Wyatt's middle name, which had been spelled wrong on the original, and that no acknowledgment was expected or required.
No acknowledgment is expected or required. It was in every single one. Somebody had put that line in a template.
She saw exactly what it was. It was a wall, built at the same time she was building hers, from the other side, by professionals.
And she caught herself — this was the second Tuesday, in the car outside the school — feeling something about it that took her a full minute to identify, because she had not expected to feel it at all.
She was insulted.