Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Eleanor’s porch light was on when Margo arrived for the Friday night Circle.
Margo had the Tupperware in one hand and a bottle of the red wine Letty liked in the other, and she stood at the bottom of the steps for a moment longer than usual before going up.
The street was still. The lamps along the curb made their small circles.
She’d been standing at the bottom of her friends’ steps every Friday for thirty years and she had never once hesitated.
Eleanor answered in stocking feet and looked at the Tupperware. “What is it this time?”
“Cheddar and fig bites. Still warm.”
“You spoil us.” Eleanor took the container—warm through the lid, the fig jam fragrant—and stepped aside. “Vivian’s already into the Sancerre. Nadine brought something in a Whole Foods bag she’s claiming she made.”
“She always claims she made it.”
Eleanor laughed and said, “And we always let her.”
The living room was set—the spread on the low table, the sliding doors cracked for the ocean, the chairs in their places.
Nadine sat in her corner with the Whole Foods crackers arranged on a plate she’d brought from home.
Vivian was on the settee with her wine and her posture.
Letty lounged on the couch and set down the book she’d been flipping through when Margo came in.
“You’re late,” Vivian said.
Margo shook her head. “I’m on time.”
“You’re usually early. Early is your on time. On time is your late.”
“I had things to do.”
Vivian looked at her over her glass but said nothing else, which was Vivian’s way of saying she’d noticed something and was choosing when to deploy it.
Margo took her chair—the armchair nearest the window—and Eleanor poured her a glass of the red without asking.
Vivian poured herself a second Sancerre and started in.
Her physical therapist had committed a new offense—he’d asked about her weekend plans, which Vivian considered an invasion of privacy on par with reading her mail.
“I’m there for my rotator cuff, not for small talk.
The man has no sense of professional distance. ”
“He’s being friendly,” Letty said.
“He’s being familiar. Those are not the same thing.”
Eleanor topped off her own glass. “Did you answer him?”
“I told him my plans were none of his concern and could we please focus on the external rotation.”
“Vivian, that poor man,” Letty said.
“That poor man needs boundaries.”
Nadine took a cracker from her plate and ate it without comment, which was Nadine’s version of an opinion.
Eleanor updated them on the Jacksons’ pool—apparently the permit situation had escalated to a city council agenda item, which Eleanor had attended because Eleanor attended everything.
Letty mentioned that her granddaughter was visiting from Portland next month and she needed restaurant recommendations, and Vivian said “not the new place on Forest, the portions are an insult” and Eleanor said “the portions are fine, you just don’t like the owner” and Vivian said “I don’t like the owner and the portions are an insult, those are separate issues. ”
Margo drank her wine and listened and laughed where there was a need. She ate one of Nadine’s crackers, which were obviously from Whole Foods and obviously not homemade, and she didn’t say so because nobody ever said so.
Letty refilled her glass and sat back down beside her.
“You’re quiet tonight,” Letty said.
“I’m always quiet.”
“You’re usually quiet with opinions. Tonight you’re quiet without them.”
Margo looked at her wine. She turned the glass on the arm of the chair the way she turned her coffee cup at the Shack—slowly, a quarter turn, thinking.
“Bernie said something,” she said.
The room didn’t go completely still. That wasn’t how the Circle worked.
Vivian kept sipping. Nadine kept eating.
Eleanor, across the room, tilted her head a fraction of an inch.
The ocean came through the cracked door, steady and low.
But Margo could feel the attention gather—not a sound, just the air shifting.
“What did he say?” Letty asked.
“He said he’d had a good evening. And that it wasn’t about the chicken.”
“What chicken?” Vivian asked.
“I made him his mother’s chicken. He’d mentioned it weeks ago and I made it and brought it over and we watched a movie and he said—” She stopped. She was doing it again. Saying more than she meant to. The flamingo cards and the pickles all over again.
“You watched a movie?” Eleanor asked.
“Yes, on his couch.”
“You sat on his couch?”
“I sat on the couch. He sat in the recliner. We watched a movie. It was black and white. He had ice cream. Where else was I supposed to sit?”
“Margo,” Eleanor said, setting down her glass. “You made a man his mother’s recipe from memory, drove to his house, sat on his couch, watched a movie, ate ice cream, and he told you the evening was wonderful, and wasn’t about the chicken.”
“That’s what I said.”
“And you’re asking us what that means?”
“I’m not asking what it means. I’m asking if I’m imagining it.”
Letty put her hand on the arm of Margo’s chair. Not on Margo’s arm—on the chair. Close enough.
“You go over there four times a week,” Letty said gently.
Margo turned her glass a quarter inch. “Three. And he had surgery.”
“The surgery was weeks ago.”
Margo took a sip. She didn’t have a response to that. She’d been telling herself the same thing.
“You’re not imagining it,” Nadine said from her corner.
Everyone looked at Nadine. Nadine rarely spoke in full sentences at Circle. When she did, people listened.
“You’re not imagining anything,” Nadine said. She picked up another cracker. “You’re just slow.”
Vivian almost choked on her wine.
“Nadine,” Eleanor said.
“What? She is. She’s been slow about this for longer than I’ve been coming to this group and I’ve been coming for twenty-seven years.” Nadine ate it. “The man sets his coffee cup where you can reach it. He’s not being ergonomic.”
Margo stared at her.
“How do you know about the coffee cup?” Margo asked.
“Everyone knows about the coffee cup. Bernie’s been doing it since before I started coming.”
The room was silent for a second. Then Letty laughed—softly, not at Margo, just at the whole thing—and Eleanor pressed her lips together in the way that meant she agreed with Nadine but was too diplomatic to say so, and Vivian was still recovering.
Margo gripped the arms of her chair. “I’m eighty years old.”
“Yes,” Eleanor said. “You are.”
Margo leaned forward. “What business do I have—”
“All of it,” Letty said. “Every bit of business there is.”
“Richard died so young I never really had—it’s always been the Shack. I don’t know how to do this.”
“Nobody’s asking you to do anything,” Eleanor said. She picked up her glass and held it. “Nobody’s asking you to do anything except notice what’s already happening.”
Margo sat with that. The wine in her glass. The ocean through the cracked door. The women she’d known for decades arranged around Eleanor’s living room, looking at her with the patience of women who had seen it a long time ago.
“What if I’m wrong?” she asked.
“You’re not wrong,” Nadine said, and took another cracker.
Margo finished her wine. Eleanor poured her another half-glass without asking. The conversation loosened—back to Vivian’s therapist, back to the Hendersons, back to Letty’s granddaughter from Portland.
The street was quieter on the way home than it had been on the way over. The lamps made their yellow circles and she walked through them one at a time.
She thought about the coffee cup. She’d noticed it the night of his knee—the night she’d stood in the Shack after close and realized he’d been setting it where she could reach it for decades. She’d noticed and she’d filed it and she hadn’t looked at it since.
She stood in her kitchen.
The house was still. But it was a different stillness than last week, when the quiet had been just quiet. Tonight it had a question in it.
She didn’t go to the studio. She didn’t stand in front of the canvas. She went to bed and lay there and let the question sit where the Circle had put it, which was right in the middle of everything, where she couldn’t step around it anymore.
She was not imagining it.