Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Margo walked to Eleanor’s the way she’d walked to Eleanor’s for thirty years—three blocks, slightly uphill, Fridays, rain or shine. The street lamps were on by the time she crested the last rise. Eleanor’s porch light was on.
Eleanor answered the door in stocking feet and looked at the Tupperware in Margo’s hands.
“You don’t have to bring food every time.”
“I like making it,” Margo said, handing over the triangles—fig jam and brie, still warm.
“I know you do.”
The living room was already set—the spread on the low table, wine open, the sliding doors cracked an inch for the ocean.
The room smelled like Letty’s lemon bars and the salt air coming through the gap.
Nadine in her corner chair. Letty on the couch with a book in her lap she wasn’t reading.
Vivian coming in from the kitchen with a cheese knife.
“The Jacksons are threatening to sue the city over the pool again,” Vivian announced. “I told Jan at Pavilions if they become plaintiffs I am moving.”
“You’re not moving,” Letty said mildly.
“I could.”
“You’ve lived there forty-one years.”
Margo took her spot—the armchair nearest the window—and Vivian poured her a glass of red with a hand that was generous even by Circle standards.
Vivian topped off glasses while Letty caught them up on the Jacksons, and the Circle settled into itself. Wine came around once, then twice. Margo was quieter than usual, and the Circle noticed.
It was Eleanor who got there first.
Eleanor set her glass on the table. “How are you doing with the Sedona thing?” she asked.
Margo looked down at her wine and swirled it. They already knew. Of course they knew. Eleanor knew everything that happened in Laguna before it happened.
“Bea’s her own person,” Margo said.
“Nobody asked about Bea,” Vivian said.
Margo looked at her glass again.
The ocean came through the crack in the sliding door—steady, distant, the low hum that had been the background of every Circle meeting at Eleanor’s.
“I spent years trying to apologize for Sam,” Margo said. “To the kids. Making them think she was coming back, that this time would be different.” She turned the glass in her hand. “Eventually I gave up. We all did. Anna gave up. Meg gave up. Tyler never started.”
Nadine was watching her from the corner chair, a cracker in her hand. Letty’s hand was on the arm of the couch, near Margo’s chair but not reaching.
“And now Bea has a personal invitation to go to Sedona and meet this woman she barely remembers. And Anna’s letting her go. And I told Anna she was right to let her go.” Margo took a sip of wine. “And she is right. But Bea is going to find out what Sam is. That’s just what’s going to happen.”
“Yes,” Eleanor said. “It is.”
“And I’ve watched this happen before. To Anna. To Tyler. To Meg. I watched them figure it out one at a time and there was nothing I could do about it then and there’s nothing I can do about it now.” She put it on the table. “And I’m terrified of watching it happen to Bea and Stella.”
The room was quiet for a moment. The curtain at the sliding door shifted in the breeze.
“What I keep thinking about,” Margo said, “is Anna. How Anna is handling this. She told Bea it was her decision. She didn’t warn her. She didn’t try to stop her. She just—let her go.”
“That’s hard,” Letty said.
“That’s mothering,” Nadine said.
“That’s what I mean.” Margo looked down at her hands. “I don’t know where Anna learned it. Not from Sam. Sam couldn’t stay in a room long enough to teach anybody anything. And I wasn’t—I did what I could, but I was making it up as I went.”
Eleanor leaned forward slightly. “Margo. We’re not doing the Sam conversation again. We did that. You know what we think.”
“I know.”
“Good. So I’m going to say the other thing.”
“What other thing?”
“Anna didn’t learn from Sam. She learned from watching you show up every single day for years. She learned from you packing lunches and standing at the stove and being there every morning when Sam wasn’t. That’s where she learned it.”
Margo didn’t say anything.
Letty reached across and put her hand on Margo’s arm.
“Anna is what you made, Margo,” Letty said softly. “She’s letting Bea go because she’s secure enough to. And she’s secure because of you.”
Margo closed her eyes.
She’d had a deflection lined up—she could feel it in her throat, some version of that’s kind of you to say. But Letty’s hand was on her arm and the room was quiet and she couldn’t get the sentence out.
“I don’t know what to do with that,” she said.
“You don’t have to do anything with it,” Eleanor said. “You just have to hear it.”
“I’m trying.”
“Then that’s today’s work.”
They sat with it for a moment.
Nadine ate a cracker and said, “You’re different tonight, Margo. And I don’t think it’s just about Sam.”
Margo swirled her wine. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
Nadine ate another cracker and said nothing, which was Nadine’s way of saying she’d bring it up again later.
Then Vivian, who had been waiting, cleared her throat.
“On a completely unrelated note,” she said. “I have to tell you about my physical therapist.”
Margo raised her eyebrows.
“He put his hand on my shoulder blade this morning and I made a noise I am not proud of. He knows me by name now. I can’t go back. I have to switch practices.”
“What kind of noise?” Eleanor asked.
“I will not describe the noise.”
“Describe the noise.”
Vivian sat up straighter. “Absolutely not.”
Letty leaned forward. “Was it more of an ‘ohhh’ or more of a—” She made a low groaning sound that was somewhere between pain and something else entirely. Nadine choked on her cracker.
“It was NOT that,” Vivian said, her face going pink. “It was a dignified sound of physical relief.”
Eleanor reached for the cheese knife and cut herself another slice. “That’s not what it sounds like.”
“It was therapeutic.”
“Vivian,” Letty said, still smiling, “I’ve had the same therapist for six years. Nobody makes a dignified sound when someone finds the knot.”
“I am switching practices and I am not discussing this further.”
“You brought it up,” Nadine said.
The conversation loosened, and the wine went around once more, and Margo laughed when there was a laugh. She took a lemon bar off Letty’s tin. It was tart and sweet and exactly what a lemon bar should be.
On her way home, the street was quieter than it had been on the way over. The lamps along the curb made their small yellow circles and she walked through them one at a time.
She thought about Anna at eight, setting the table at the Shack because Sam was supposed to and Sam wasn’t there.
Anna had set it the way Margo had taught her—forks on the left, knives on the right, glasses above the knives.
Nobody had asked her to learn. She had learned because it was happening in front of her and she was paying attention.
She let herself in. Hung her coat. Put the Tupperware on the counter—Eleanor had sent her home with the leftover cheese triangles, because Eleanor always returned Tupperware.
Anna is what you made.
She lay in the dark with her eyes open and let the sentence sit where the Circle had put it, and she did not move, because she didn’t know what to do with it, and because Eleanor had said she didn’t have to do anything with it.
She had only to hear it.
She was trying.