Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Eleanor’s living room was the same as it always was on a Friday. Wine on the low table. The sliding doors cracked for the ocean. Nadine in her corner chair. Letty on the couch. Vivian in from the kitchen with a plate of something she’d bought and was passing off as homemade.
“These are from Whole Foods,” Nadine said, examining a cracker.
“They are from my kitchen.”
“Your kitchen doesn’t have a Whole Foods sticker on the bottom of the plate, Vivian.”
“I transferred them. That’s preparation.”
Margo took her spot—the armchair nearest the window. Vivian poured her a glass of wine with the usual generosity. Margo drank half of it before the room had finished settling, which was not something Margo normally did.
They talked, as they always did. AboutNadine’s niece in Portland who was already regretting it, a new bakery on Forest that Eleanor had opinions about, Letty’s granddaughter coming for a visit.
Margo was quieter than quiet, and by the time the wine went around a second time, the room had stopped pretending not to see it.
Letty peered over her glasses. “Margo, what happened?”
“Nothing happened.”
“Last time you told us you weren’t imagining things. Now you look like you stopped sleeping.”
“I’m eighty. I always look like I stopped sleeping.”
Eleanor leaned forward. “You drank half your wine before anyone sat down. In thirty years I’ve seen you do that twice. Something happened.”
Margo looked at her glass.
“Bernie told me I don’t need to come anymore,” she said.
The room was quiet.
Nadine set her thermos down. Vivian stopped chewing. Letty’s hand came back to her lap.
“Tell us what he said,” Letty said. “The actual words.”
“He said the knee is good. The doctor cleared him. He’s walking, he’s cooking, he went to the hardware store and bought a hose nozzle.
” She picked up her glass and set it down without drinking.
“He said I set up a system to take care of him and the system worked and now he’s better.
And that I don’t need to keep coming three times a week. ”
“Those were his words,” Letty said, leaning forward. “What else?”
“He said if I’m coming because he had surgery, the surgery is over.” Margo smoothed a crease in her pants. “And if it’s something else, he’d like to know what it is.”
The room was quiet.
“Say that last part again,” Letty said.
“What?”
“The last thing he said.”
Margo looked at her wine. “If it’s something else, he’d like to know what it is.”
She heard it this time.
Nadine made a sound from her corner.
“Don’t start, Nadine.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
Vivian reached for the wine bottle. “What did you say to him?”
“Nothing.” Margo looked at her hands. “I put my mug in the sink and I got my coat and I left.”
“You left,” Eleanor said.
“Without answering?”
The room sat with that. Vivian poured. Letty was watching Margo with steady attention.
“Are you angry?” Letty asked.
“I was. At him, for saying what he said. At myself, for leaving.” Margo picked up her wine and took a sip. “Now I don’t know what I am.”
Letty looked at her wine glass and turned it slowly on the table.
“When I met Larry,” Letty said, “I’d been on my own for twenty years. Twenty years of making my own dinner, fixing my own sink, watching whatever I wanted on television without asking anyone.”
“Letty,” Vivian said gently, “we’re talking about Margo.”
“I know we are. Let me finish.” Letty took a sip. “Larry liked hot fudge sundaes and college basketball. His kids sent Sanders hot fudge from Michigan—the real stuff, in the glass jar—and the only time we ate it was during the tournament, sitting on his couch.”
Margo’s hand tightened on her glass. Sanders. The dark brown label with the gold lettering. The jar Bernie had pulled from behind the ice cube trays.
“I hate college basketball,” Letty said.
“But his kids sent that hot fudge and it was the best hot fudge I’ve ever had, and if I had to watch Duke play to eat it, that was the price.
” Letty smiled, and something in her face went soft.
“But that’s not what it was about, of course.
At the end of the day it was just someone to hold hands with.
After twenty years. Just someone who wanted to hold my hand on the couch. ”
The room was quiet.
Margo was looking at her own hands in her lap.
“Margo,” Eleanor said. “Why are you hurt?”
“Because he’s right,” she said. “He doesn’t need me to come.
He’s fine. He’s been fine for weeks. And I’ve been going anyway and telling myself it was about the surgery and the food and the cards, and he just—he took that away.
He took away the reason I was giving myself and there was nothing behind it. ”
“There’s nothing behind it?” Letty asked.
The room was very quiet. The ocean came through the crack in the door.
“Margo,” Eleanor said, uncrossing her arms and leaning forward. “He wasn’t sending you away. He was asking you to come back for the right reason.”
Margo looked at Eleanor.
“Nobody said anything about—”
“I did. Just now. You are allowed to let him in. You have been allowed for a very long time. And he has been waiting for you to know it—not for him, Margo. For you.”
Vivian set her glass down. “He asked you to dance at the wedding. With that knee.”
“That was—”
“That was a man who could barely stand asking you to dance with him at Meg’s wedding. In front of your whole family.” Vivian’s voice was quieter than usual. “And then you both went home separately and nobody said a word about it.”
Letty squeezed the arm of Margo’s chair.
“You don’t have to know what you’re doing,” Letty said. “You just have to let yourself know why you’re doing it. That’s the only part you’re missing. Not the doing—you’re already doing it. The letting yourself know.”
Margo sat with Letty’s hand near hers and the wine in her glass and the ocean through the door and four women looking at her with thirty years of patience behind their eyes.
“What if it doesn’t work?” she said.
“What if it does?” Eleanor said.
Margo finished her wine. Eleanor poured her another half-glass without asking. The conversation moved—back to the bakery on Forest, back to Nadine’s niece, back to Letty’s granddaughter from Portland. The Circle folded back into itself.
Margo walked home at nine-fifteen. The street was quiet. The lamps made their small yellow circles and she walked through them one at a time.
Coat on the hook. Keys in the bowl. The house quiet around her.
The studio was dark. The canvas was where it had been for weeks. She stood in front of it and didn’t pick up the brush.
Sleep didn’t come for a long time. But the not-sleeping was different tonight—not the restless kind, not the turning kind. The kind where you lie still in the dark and let a thing settle into the place where it’s going to live.