Chapter 22
"You're chopping something," Lillian said.
"Yes," Wren said.
"Well. Go on, then. Don't stop on my account."
She went on. The knife wasn't sharpened, and the carrots were the fat, crooked kind from the market two blocks over. She had six of them, bought yesterday morning with no plan beyond the fact that they were there and she had a stove.
"What is it?"
"Soup. I have some chicken too."
"In June?"
"It was cold at six this morning."
"It was not. It was sixty-one degrees at six this morning. I know because I was awake. You're making soup in June, little bird, which means either you're sick or you went to a market on a Saturday and came home with more than you can eat. And I don't hear a cold in your voice."
Wren stopped chopping.
She stood with the carrots half done and the rest of it laid out around her—the celery, the parsley she'd bought because it smelled fresh, the chicken resting on its paper in the sink.
"Wren."
"I'm here."
"When did you last cook anything?"
She paused to think. "March."
"March."
"I have made things, though. Coffee, mostly. Whatever was at the counter on the way in." It sounded worse out loud than it had in her head. "It wasn't on purpose."
"No," Lillian said. "It never is."
An electric fan turned somewhere on her end, and through the window, Wren heard a dog out on the street yapping about something
"All right, little bird," Lillian said. "What's going on?"
"It's a work thing." She knew she said it a little too fast.
"All right."
Wren waited for the next question. Lillian, who had all afternoon, didn’t ask one.
"She's selling the company," Wren blurted out. "I just… I can't tell you who it is for privacy reasons."
"I don't need to know."
"It was set up before I ever walked in the door. Years before. And the whole thing I've been building since March, the reason they brought me in—that's what it's for. It's what gets her out."
"When did you find out?"
"April."
"She told you?"
"She tried. Once, in March. She started to tell me, but somebody came into the room and she never tried again." Wren looked at the parsley. "And I let her leave it alone and approach it when she was ready. I kept waiting for her to be ready, but she never was and I never asked."
Lillian gave her space and said nothing.
"I've done this before."
"Done what?"
"This." It didn't come out the way she'd meant it to.
"Well, not this exactly. But there’s always a woman who needs somebody, and I'm very good at being that somebody they need.
And then, when it's finished and they don’t need me anymore, I'm standing there like I didn’t see it coming.
" She heard her own voice go thin. "I do that. On purpose. And I’m always left surprised and disappointed in myself. "
"Wren…"
"I'm in love with her."
She hadn't planned to say it, but it came out anyway. "It would be an easier week if I weren't."
The silence went on longer than she was comfortable with, and she almost filled it. But then Lillian said, "Did Millie ever tell you about her sister?"
"Iris." Wren straightened. "A little. She died before I was born. Millie said she was the pretty one."
"Iris wasn’t. Millie was the pretty one, and it drove her insane that nobody said so.
" She placed the cup on the saucer. "Iris was six years older.
Their mother got sick when Iris was thirty-one.
1964, this would have been. Or maybe it was ‘63.
She started leaving the stove on, then she couldn't find her way back from the corner store, and the doctor called it hardening of the arteries and said she'd want quiet.
That was as much as anyone could tell you about senility in those days.
" She took a breath. "And somebody had to take her in.
Iris was the one with no husband and a job at the telephone company she could quit. "
"So Iris took her in."
"Yeah, Iris took her in and cared for her.
" A pause. "And everybody was grateful. You have to understand how grateful everybody was.
My own mother used to say it at church. ‘That Iris Calloway, what a good daughter.’ Twenty years, little bird.
She never married and she never moved. Their mother stopped knowing her name after about fourteen years, and yet Iris kept going another six after that without leaning on professional support. "
Wren sat down on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinet.
"Where was Millie?"
"An hour up the road, with a job and a husband and a baby.
She went to visit every second Sunday. She'd come back and sit in my kitchen and say she's disappearing, and I'd ask who, and she'd mean Iris.
" Lillian exhaled. "She tried. She offered to take a year of caretaking duties herself.
Iris wouldn't hear of it because she had built a whole system by then. She was the only one who knew the medications, the one who set all the doctors’ appointments, the only one who could get their mother to eat.
She'd made sure there was nobody else to ask.
And the family let her, because why wouldn't they?
Iris would do it. Nobody goes looking for a second person while the first one keeps saying yes. "
The refrigerator kicked on and hummed through a cycle before fading into background noise.
"She said it to Iris," Lillian said. "Near the end, when their mother had gone into the county home at last and Iris was fifty-one, still with no life partner and no house of her own.
Millie sat on her sister's bed and told her, and I know she did, because she called me that night in an absolute state, convinced she'd said it forty years too late.
She said, you don't have to keep doing this, sweetheart. You're allowed to have your own life."
Down on the street the dog had gone quiet.
"Iris died two years after their mother," Lillian said. "Sixty-one. Millie never got over it but never admitted it.
"She said the same thing about you. More than once, when you were twenty-four, twenty-five.
Once when you took the Boston job, and once when you were on the phone about somebody's book at eleven o'clock on a Saturday night.
She'd swear she wasn't going to breathe a word of it to you because you'd only be kind about it. "
"She said it to me anyway. At the end."
"I know. Eventually, she said she was going to." She took another breath. "She was frightened of one thing her whole life, little bird, and it wasn't dying."
They talked another ten minutes about nothing, because that was how the calls ended. Lillian had quit a book at page sixty and wanted Wren to know it. The woman downstairs had gotten a parrot, evidently.
"I'll call Wednesday," Wren said.
"Good. I’ll hold you to it. Make sure to eat the soup, and don't put too much salt in it." And she was gone.
She stayed where she was a few minutes, then got up, wrapped the chicken and put it in the refrigerator, and wiped the board down. She crossed the room to the wall under the window and pulled the packing tape off the nearest box.
Books, mostly. Library discards with the pockets still glued in the back, the paperbacks Millie had read to pieces and rebought and read to pieces again. Wren carried them over four and five at a time to the shelf beside the green chair, which only had a lamp and a phone charger on it.
The photograph was face-down against the side of the box under the last of them.
She knew what it was before she turned it over.
It had stood on the shelf in Millie's hallway for thirty years, at the height of a child's eye and then at the height of Wren's shoulder: two girls on a porch step in white dresses, the taller one squinting, the smaller one laughing at whoever was working the camera.
She had walked past it every day of her childhood and never once asked.
She stood it up in front of the books where she would see it and went back to the kitchen.
The soup was better than it had any right to be, which annoyed her. She ate it standing up at the counter, then washed the pot and put it in the rack. After that, there was nothing left in the apartment that needed doing, and the room started to look like somebody lived in it.
After two weeks of reading through the resignation letter every night, she had decided in the shower that morning that enough was enough. She would muster the courage to send it together and be done with it. Not here, though. It felt too big to do in her home, so she grabbed her bag and locked up.
Despite it being evening, the sky was still light.
She went down toward the water, past the shuttered nursery and the place that sold buckets and rope, and she thought about Iris the whole way.
Iris had been thirty-one, when it started.
She had a job at the telephone company and no husband, which the family had interpreted as an empty life, a life with a clear space in it where a sick mother would fit.
What Wren kept catching on was that Iris had seen it the same way.
Wren had been making the same appraisal of herself and her life since she was twenty-three. She had just never said it to anyone.
Lavender's was almost empty at half past seven on a Monday. Wren took her usual stool, second from the end, and Lavender came down the bar and set a tulip glass filled with amber liquid in front of her. She'd been doing that since April, unasked, and Wren gave the same small nod each time.
She pulled out her phone and opened the letter:
Cordelia, please accept this as notice of my resignation, effective in two weeks. I'm grateful for the opportunity. Full transition documentation will be ready before my last day.
There were another two hundred and forty words underneath it.
She had rewritten it a dozen times and it was, she thought, a very good letter.
It gave Cordelia an orderly exit and asked her to feel nothing.
It mentioned the sale and documentation, and it said nothing personal at all about the last three months.
And halfway down, in a sentence about transition planning, it promised that Wren would spend her last two weeks making certain the woman she loved was not inconvenienced by losing her.
She read that paragraph twice. Then she understood what she had actually written.
She had written this letter to make it as painless for Cordelia when she left.
She had done the same thing in Boston, four years ago, and been proud of how gracefully she'd left.
Tonight, right up until a moment ago, she had believed she was finally standing up for herself.
Wren backed out of the drafts and went into her messages instead, down to the Saturday before last, where the two messages were still sitting with no answer under them.
“You seemed tired this week. Are you all right?”
And, forty minutes later: “Disregard that. Enjoy your weekend.”
She read them both twice. Vivian had never asked her a single question about herself in three years.
None of them had. And Cordelia had asked at the worst possible moment and in the wrong words, then un-asked it forty minutes later, embarrassed.
But she had wanted to know, and she had said so, which was more than the others had ever done.
Two things were true at once: she loved Cordelia and she had spent four months making herself the one person who could keep Cordelia's day running.
She had done the same with the other women before too.
The pattern was real and so was the love, but neither one made the other go away.
Iris had been like that too, Wren thought.
A plate came down beside the glass, full with bread, white bean dip, and three olives. She looked up at Lavender.
“I want to make sure you eat.” Lavender was already wiping the taps and not looking over, which made it easier.
Wren didn't say anything.
"I made too much of it, and I'd only throw it out." The cloth went along the rail. "So you'd be doing me a favor."
Wren laughed. It came out rough, because she hadn't in a while, and it surprised her more than it surprised Lavender.
"That's very good," she said.
"I know."
Wren put the phone face-down on the bar.
The letter would still be in her drafts in the morning.
She had one day left before she was back in the office.
Cordelia would look up and say good morning like it was any other day.
And Wren would have a couple of seconds, standing there, to decide whether she was still going to be the person who made everything easy for her.
She pulled the plate over and ate the bread, then she picked up the glass and drank.