Ellen walked us to our cars, and before we got in, she put a hand on Margaret's arm. "You did beautifully in there," she said. "I want you to know — most of my clients never get to say what you said today. They settle on paper and the words stay inside them. You got your words out. That matters more than the deed."
Margaret nodded, tears still drying on her cheeks, and said, "Will he be all right? Mark?"
Ellen glanced at me, and I answered, because it was my question to answer. "He'll be all right, Mom. He's got Tina. He's got Josh. He's got sixty days and a fresh start, which is more than a lot of people get."
It wasn't entirely true — I didn't know if Mark would be all right — but it was the truest thing I could offer her in that parking lot, and she accepted it the way she'd accepted everything that morning: with quiet courage and both hands.
Chapter 24: Sixty Days
Sixty days is not a long time to move a family out of a house, and it is a very long time to live in one where everyone knows the ending has already been written. The house on Chestnut Lane settled into a strange, suspended rhythm. Tina packed with grim efficiency, filling boxes in the evenings after her shifts at the dental office, labeling everything in her neat handwriting. Josh retreated to his room or, more and more, to the garden, where he helped Margaret with the weeding and the watering, saying little, as if the two of them had made a silent agreement not to talk about what was happening inside the walls.
Mark was the hardest to be around. He swung between a brittle cheerfulness that fooled no one and a sullen silence that filled the rooms like smoke. He started coming home late, and some nights I heard him out on the porch long after everyone else was asleep, and I told myself it wasn't my problem anymore — that the papers were signed, the terms were set, and my job now was my mother. But sisters are not project managers, and some problems don't stay in their assigned lanes.
There were arguments, of course — small, sharp ones, the kind families have when they're living on top of each other with an expiration date. Tina accused Mark of hiding a box of his father's tools in the garage instead of packing it; Mark accused Tina of giving away his good jacket to the donation pile on purpose. I stayed out of it, mostly, working remotely from the porch with my laptop, watching my mother reclaim her territory inch by inch — her cookbooks back on the shelf, her quilt back on her bed, the little brass lamp she'd always loved returned to the side table where it belonged.
One afternoon I found Josh and Margaret in the garden, planting garlic together for the fall, his big hands careful with the cloves, her voice low as she showed him how deep. "Your grandmother taught me this," she told him, meaning her own mother, a woman dead thirty years. "And now I'm teaching you, so that's four generations of Kellers who know about garlic, which is probably more than we've ever known about anything else." Josh laughed — a real laugh, the first I'd heard from him in weeks — and I stood at the kitchen window with my hands in dishwater and thought about how the garden didn't care who owned the house. It just kept growing for whoever tended it.
Chapter 25: The Porch Talk
It was a Thursday night, three weeks into the sixty days, when I finally went out to him. I had been lying awake listening to the murmur of the television downstairs — some late show Mark wasn't really watching — and then the front door opened and closed, and the porch boards creaked, and I knew he was out there alone again. I put on my robe and went down, and the hallway was dark, and the living room was dark except for the television glowing at nothing, and I pushed open the screen door and sat down on the top step beside my brother.
He had a bottle, mostly empty, and he didn't look at me. "Come to gloat?" he said.
"No," I said. "Come to sit."
We sat. Somewhere down the street a dog barked once and then thought better of it. The porch light threw a small yellow circle around us, and beyond it the whole dark street, the neighbors' houses with their windows out, Eleanor's porch light on next door like it always was, like a nightlight for the whole block.
For a long time neither of us spoke. I thought about us as kids on these same steps — Mark teaching me to tie my shoes out here because our mother was on the phone, Mark daring me to eat a June bug, the two of us waiting for our father to come home from work, racing to the curb when we heard his car. I wondered if Mark was thinking about any of that, or if the past was a country he'd stopped visiting.