Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
GRAHAM
I'd been sitting at the kitchen island for an hour failing to write an email. I went to the door in my socks. On the step were a very small Spider-Man, a bigger girl dressed as a strawberry, and a dad holding a flashlight.
"Trick or treat," said the strawberry.
It was October thirty-first. I'd known that the way you know the date on a contract, not the way that means there'll be kids on your steps.
"Hang on," I said. "Hang on one second."
In the kitchen I opened the cabinet where we kept snacks and found nothing but a bag of pretzels.
Then I tried the pantry. On the floor, under the bottom shelf, pushed back against the wall, was a Costco box of full-size Kit Kats, forty-eight of them, with a yellow sticky note on the lid in Naomi's neat, slanting handwriting.
HALLOWEEN. DO NOT EAT, GRAHAM.
I stood in the pantry holding the box. When had she bought them? September, probably. Naomi bought everything early. She'd bought them, put them away, labeled them so I wouldn't find them at midnight and eat six. She'd planned on standing at this door tonight.
I took the box out to the front step, where I gave Spider-Man and the strawberry each a Kit Kat. The strawberry looked at hers, then past me into the house.
"Where's the lady?" she said.
"Sorry?"
"The lady who lives here. She gives the big ones."
The dad put a hand on her shoulder. "Sorry," he said, embarrassed. "Your wife's kind of famous on this street."
"She's—" I didn't know how to finish that. "She's not here tonight."
They went down the steps, and the flashlight bobbed away down the hill.
I sat on the front step with the box in my lap in the cold.
More kids came in waves, parents trailing behind: a pirate, two witches, something that might have been a traffic cone.
At least four of them asked where the lady was.
A little boy in a dinosaur suit told me, very seriously, that the lady always said his costume was scary, even the year it was a duck.
We'd lived in this house six years. Every Halloween I'd been at a work dinner, or on a plane, or stuck at a closing that ran late. I'd figured I wasn't missing anything. Kids came, somebody gave them candy. I'd never once asked who.
By eight the box was empty. Before I put it in the recycling, I peeled off the sticky note and stuck it on the fridge. I didn't want to throw it out.
That week, before the doorbell, I'd started making a list.
On Tuesday night I opened the notes app on my phone and typed NAOMI at the top.
Under it I started with things I knew. Blue mug.
No sprouts. Lemon. Short ribs. Cabernet.
Then things I didn't. What she eats now.
What she's reading. Does she still— and I stopped, because I didn't even know how to finish the question.
I could text Tess, I thought. Tess would know. Or I could call Joanne. I had my thumb over Joanne's name.
Then I thought about a legal pad on the floor of an apartment on Pine Street, Lila's round handwriting, Beets. Sea bass. Sancerre. Me nodding along. Me copying it down in block capitals like a homework assignment.
I deleted the note.
What I did instead felt stupid. I started looking. Not at her phone or her email or in her drawers. I'd never do that. Just at the house, the house she'd been living in by herself every night I was somewhere else.
In the refrigerator door, next to the ketchup, was a half-empty bottle of green tomatillo hot sauce.
I'd never bought it, never seen her use it, and I'd assumed it came with takeout.
On the shelf there was a carton of eggs from a farm in Lancaster County, the kind with feathers still stuck to the shells.
A tub of white miso. A jar of kimchi with a spoon still in it. Three clementines in the crisper.
In the pantry, next to the coffee, was a tin of loose rooibos, with a little mesh strainer beside it that still had dried red leaves inside. For months I'd been finding a mug in the sink in the morning with a brown ring in the bottom. I'd thought I made myself tea and forgot about it.
I don't drink tea.
Upside down in the dish rack was the blue mug. She'd washed it the morning of her birthday, before she left the house, before any of it, and set it upside down, careful of the crack.
I went upstairs to our bedroom. I hadn't slept in there since the fifteenth.
There were three books stacked on her nightstand.
I didn't touch them, just read the spines.
Planting in a Post-Wild World. A novel with a woman in a red coat on the cover.
A paperback on native grasses of the Mid-Atlantic bristling with yellow sticky flags.
On top was a pair of reading glasses. I hadn't known she needed reading glasses.
When had she started needing reading glasses?
I sat on the edge of the bed with my hands between my knees.
She'd had a whole life in this house, a daily, ordinary, specific life. Tea. Hot sauce. Reading glasses. Candy for the strawberry kid. She'd been living it six feet away from me, and I'd walked past it every day without seeing any of it, because none of it was on fire.
I went back down, put on my coat, took the big flashlight from the mudroom, and went out into the garden.
The cold went straight through my sweater, and the grass was wet. I walked to the back fence and switched on the flashlight.
The hydrangeas were gone.
The whole length of the fence was something else now. Tall tawny grass gone copper in the cold, moving a little in the wind. Clumps of something gray-green that smelled like mint when I brushed it. A few last asters, the purple gone papery, the centers brown.
Along the edge of the bed, little metal plant tags were pushed into the soil. I crouched down and shone the flashlight on them. Latin, in her slanting handwriting. I couldn't pronounce half of it.
Then I remembered June.
Three weekends in June, before Lila ever showed up at my office.
Naomi coming in through the mudroom at dusk with her gloves stuffed in her back pocket and blisters on both palms. I'd been home those weekends, on the couch with the Phillies on or at my desk.
I'd figured she'd been at the nursery, or out with Tess.
I'd seen the dirt on her knees and thought, huh, she's been gardening.
In September, I'd stood in our bedroom in a towel, right after lying to her about a barn in Norristown, and asked her whether the landscaper had fixed the fence line.
I'd been drying my hair. I'd barely looked at her.
Yes, she'd said. He did.
I sat down on the wet grass without deciding to, and the cold soaked through my jeans.
When my father left, I was thirteen. That winter the pilot light on the furnace went out, and my mother sat at the kitchen table crying because she didn't know how to relight it.
I figured it out from the diagram on the panel and a box of kitchen matches.
She hugged me so hard my ribs hurt and called me her man of the house.
Lila had a furnace out, a big one. For three months she called me every day with another piece of it. I fixed each piece, and every time I fixed one I got that feeling back. I was the guy who drove to Pine Street at midnight.
And the whole time, the woman who never called me about anything had been out here on her knees in June, putting in a meadow with her own two hands.
She hadn't needed me to fix anything. She'd needed me to look out the back window.
I stayed out there in the wet grass until I couldn't feel my legs, the little bluestem whispering in the wind all around me.
When I went back in, I didn't text her. I didn't write down the Latin names. I just turned on the porch light, so it would be on if anybody came home.