Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Margo got back to Bernie’s at three-fifteen with two paper bags of groceries and a glass jar of soup wrapped in a dish towel.
She’d dropped him at his place at ten that morning, walked him in, made sure he could get to the bathroom and back without help, put the antibiotic and the painkiller on the kitchen counter where he wouldn’t miss them, and then she had driven herself home with the explicit intention of taking a nap.
Instead she had stripped the bed she had not slept in for two days, started a load of laundry, decided the load was going to be larger than that, gone to the hardware store for two new lightbulbs she’d been meaning to replace since November, and then to Pavilions with a list of what she’d noticed wasn’t in his refrigerator that morning.
The list had grown. By the time she checked out it included a loaf of sourdough, a half-gallon of milk, six eggs, a bag of mandarins, a small jar of honey, a wedge of sharp cheddar, two cans of the soup he liked when he was sick, and the ingredients for the one she preferred to make herself.
She drove home, made it, wrapped the jar in a dish towel, and drove back.
When she let herself in, he was where she had left him—his chair in the living room, the afghan over his knees, the walker within reach. The television was off. He had a book open in his lap that he was not reading. His eyes were closed.
“Bernard? Are you asleep?”
He opened one eye. “I’m resting my eyes.”
She put the bags on the counter and came back to look at him.
“Did you take the antibiotic?” she asked.
He shook the bottle. “Yes.”
“And the painkiller?”
“Half of one.” Bernie closed the book in his lap and set it on the table. “They make me sleep too long. I want to be awake when people are here.”
“There’s nobody here.”
“You’re here.”
She smiled and went back to the kitchen and started putting things away.
His refrigerator was the refrigerator of a single man who didn’t waste food.
A jar of mustard, a butter dish with a lid, a half-empty carton of orange juice, a single tomato, and three small Tupperware containers stacked in the back that she had a strong suspicion were leftovers from the Shack he’d brought home.
She rearranged what was there to make room for what she’d brought.
The milk on the inside of the door. The eggs on the second shelf.
The cheese in the drawer with the mustard.
The mandarins in a bowl on the counter because they didn’t need refrigerating. The bread under a clean towel.
The jar went in the fridge, the towel folded next to it.
She closed the fridge and turned around.
Bernie was watching her from the recliner. His eyes had been open the whole time she’d been reorganizing his refrigerator, and he wasn’t watching the television or the book or the window. He was watching her.
She turned back to the counter.
His kitchen was small. White cabinets that had been white for a long time but were still white.
A two-burner stove with one of those pull-out cutting boards underneath that nobody had pulled out since the seventies.
A drying rack with one mug and one plate and one fork in it from his breakfast. A coffee maker—drip, not fancy—with the carafe upside down on a folded paper towel.
It was tidier than she’d expected. The front window was big and the afternoon light was coming through it and falling on the floor in a warm rectangle.
The low bookshelf along one wall was full but not overloaded—local history, atlases, a set of marine biology books with cracked spines, a row of paperbacks that were mostly mysteries.
A small writing desk in the corner with his tablet docked.
A wing chair beside the desk. The recliner where he was sitting.
A coffee table with yesterday’s paper folded in quarters and today’s on top of it.
There were a few plants. Two on the windowsill—one of them a spider plant that had to be older than her grandchildren—and one larger one in a clay pot by the front door, the kind that stayed alive for decades.
A wall of photos covered the small hallway between the living room and the bathroom. She went down the hall to put the hand towel she’d brought on the rack.
She stopped in the hallway.
The photos were in frames. Two boys in matching shirts at what looked like a beach in the nineteen-fifties—Bernie and his brother, she could tell from the jawline.
A wedding photo she didn’t recognize—a bride, a groom, Bernie in a tuxedo standing slightly behind them.
His nephew, maybe. A black-and-white shot of a shaggy dog on a porch, ears up, looking at something off-camera.
The Laguna newsstand from the early eighties, Bernie in an apron in front of it, holding a stack of papers, KLEIN’S NEWSSTAND on the awning.
And in the last frame, two men at a table under a striped umbrella—one of them Bernie, younger, hair still dark.
The other one she recognized from a place so deep she had to stand there for a second before the name came.
Richard.
She looked at all of them for a long time.
She put the hand towel on the rack in the bathroom and came back.
Bernie’s eyes were open.
“You found the photos.”
“I was putting a towel up.” She sat down in the wing chair beside the desk.
He didn’t say anything else about them. Neither did she.
She heated it on his two-burner stove, the kitchen filling with the smell of chicken and rosemary and something that her own grandmother had put in every pot of soup she’d ever made.
She found a bowl in the cabinet above the sink, found a spoon in the drawer to the left of the sink and brought him the bowl on a small wooden tray she found leaning against the side of the refrigerator.
“You’re not eating?” he asked, taking the tray and looking at the bowl.
“I had something at home. Go ahead and eat.”
He did. Slowly. She sat in the wing chair and let him eat while the light through the window moved a few inches across the floor.
“It’s good,” he said, putting the spoon down.
She laughed and shrugged. “It’s the same one I always make.”
“That’s why it’s good.”
He had two-thirds of the bowl, then pushed the tray a few inches away from him on the table and closed his eyes.
“I’m going to sit here for a minute,” he said.
“Sit as long as you want.”
She took the tray to the kitchen, washed the bowl and the spoon and placed them in the rack.
She stood at his sink for a minute with her hands on the edge and looked out the window above it, which faced a small back garden she had not known he had.
There was a lemon tree. There was a wooden bench.
There was a pot of rosemary that was thriving in a way her own rosemary had never thrived.
She got her purse and her keys.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” she said.
“Eleanor has Vivian on the schedule tomorrow.” The afghan had slipped off one knee and he hadn’t fixed it.
“Eleanor will reschedule.” Margo pulled on her coat.
He looked at her from his chair.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome.”
He hesitated a moment. “For more than the soup.”
She stood with her hand on the doorknob. She could hear the refrigerator running in the kitchen behind her.
“Eat the bread tomorrow,” she said. “There’s cheddar in the drawer.”
“Thank you.”
Margo nodded. “Goodnight, Bernard.”
“Goodnight, Margo.”
She pulled the door closed behind her until she heard it click.
The walk home was a few blocks in the cool pale February light.
She passed the houses she’d been passing for years.
The yellow Craftsman with the bougainvillea that needed pruning.
The Spanish on the corner where the woman with the small dogs lived.
The empty lot they’d been arguing about at city council since 2018.
She let herself in, hung her coat, and put her keys in the bowl. She went to the kitchen, filled the kettle, placed it on the stove, and didn’t turn the burner on.
She went to the studio.
The canvas from the night of Bernie’s knee was where she’d left it. Thirty inches by forty. The gray she’d mixed, dried on the palette in a small thick disk she’d have to scrape off and throw away. The brush she’d loaded, washed and dried and put back in the jar.
She stood in front of it.
She didn’t pick up the brush.
After a minute she turned off the studio light and went back into the kitchen. She turned the burner on under the kettle and stood at the counter and waited for the water to boil.