It was the longest civil conversation we had had in months, and it was about a bank transfer. I took it. I took all of it — the short calls, the careful politeness, the way we were both feeling our way along a path we had never walked, because the old path had led off a cliff.
Mark had found steadier work at a dealership across town. Not selling — he had been honest with me about that, in one of the short calls, saying he didn't trust himself with commissions and spiffs right now, which was the most self-aware thing I had ever heard him say. He was doing something in the service department, scheduling, logistics, the unglamorous machinery that keeps a business running. It paid less than the car sales job. It was also, he said, "a place where nobody's trying to get me to sign anything."
Tina had gone full-time at the dental office. Josh was doing better in school — his grades had actually improved since the move, which Tina reported with the bewildered pride of a mother who had expected the opposite. They had rented a two-bedroom apartment across town, and according to Eleanor's formidable intelligence network, Tina had painted the kitchen yellow and Mark had built Josh a desk from scratch, and the boy had a door that locked, which he apparently used mostly to keep his parents out while he did homework.
I saw them in pieces, not as a whole. Josh came on Saturdays, as he had promised his grandmother, and he and Margaret gardened together, or he did his homework at her kitchen table while she read. Tina came by with seedlings in the spring and stayed for tea. I ran into her once at the grocery store, in the produce aisle, and we stood there for twenty minutes talking about nothing — Josh's grades, the price of tomatoes, whether Margaret's roses would survive the aphids — and it was the easiest twenty minutes I'd spent with anyone in the Keller family in years. She told me Mark had started going to the dealership's Saturday morning training sessions voluntarily, "like homework, Diane, he does homework now," and we both laughed, and then we both got a little teary, there between the lettuce and the lemons, and pretended we didn't.
Mark came less often, and when he did, he was careful — he took his trophies from the front porch without coming inside the first time, and the second time he came in for coffee and stood in the living room looking at the mantel, at Margaret's photographs back where they belonged, and he didn't say anything, but his jaw worked.
"Diane," he said to me once, on the phone, after one of these visits. "Is she — is Mom okay? Really?"
"She's good, Mark. The aide comes twice a week. She's planting things. She's bossing Rosa around about the floors."
He laughed, a short, surprised sound. "That sounds like her."
"It is her," I said. "It was always her. We just — " I stopped. I had been about to say we just didn't see it, but that wasn't quite true, or wasn't quite fair. "She's good," I said again. "Come see for yourself. More often, if you want."
"I want," he said quietly. "I'm just — I'm working up to it."
"Work faster," I said, and he laughed again, and we hung up, and I sat in my little apartment on Willow Street and thought about the boy I had grown up with, who had taught me to ride a bike and stolen my Halloween candy and cried when our father died. He was in there somewhere, underneath the man who had brought papers to a medicated woman and called them insurance. I didn't know if the boy could get out. But the $300 landed on the first of every month, and the calls happened, and I had decided — I was deciding, still, every day — to let that be enough for now.
Chapter 32: Autumn
Autumn in Cedar Bluff was the kind of beautiful that made me understand why my mother had never wanted to leave. The maples on our street turned all at once, as if they had agreed on it in advance, and the air smelled like leaves and woodsmoke and somebody's fireplace. Margaret's garden, which had gone a little wild during the years Mark's family lived there — nobody had weeded it properly, and I tried not to read too much into that — came back under her hands and Josh's Saturday labor.
I had settled into the remote role by then. My days had a shape: up early, coffee, video calls with teams in three time zones from my apartment's little living room, lunch, more calls, then the ten-minute drive to Margaret's in the late afternoon. I told myself I was checking on her. The truth was I liked being there. I liked the way the house felt now — like itself, as I had thought that first week, and more and more like itself every day.