The photograph did not answer, of course. But the house around her was warm, and the clock ticked on, and Margaret went to bed in her own room, under her own roof, and slept the deep sleep of a woman who has said everything she needed to say.
Spring came to Spokane the way it always had, with crocuses pushing through the last of the snow and the light lingering a little longer each evening, and Margaret discovered, to her quiet surprise, that she had a routine again — not the routine her son had imposed on her, of pills and locked doors and cancelled visits, but a routine of her own choosing, built one small decision at a time.
She woke when she wished, which was usually early, because old habits die hard and mornings had always been hers. She made her own coffee, strong and black the way Henry had liked it, and she drank it at her own kitchen table, reading the newspaper all the way through, including the parts she did not agree with. She walked to the mailbox herself, with her own keys in her brown purse, and she waved to Ruth Alvarez, who waved back from her porch next door, two old women who had survived the same long silence and now refused to keep it.
Her health improved in ways the doctor could measure and ways he could not. She slept through the night. Her appetite returned. The stiffness in her left side eased, and the bruises Sam had photographed so carefully faded from purple to yellow to nothing, the way storms fade from a sky. Dr. Prescott, reviewing her chart, said her blood pressure was better than it had been in years, and Margaret said that was hardly surprising, since she was no longer being poisoned by fear, and Dr. Prescott, to his credit, did not argue with her diagnosis.
Her weekdays filled, too, with the small dignities she had missed without quite knowing she missed them. On Tuesdays she joined the sewing circle at the library, where the women talked over their needles about grandchildren and gardens and the price of thread, and nobody asked her about the trial unless she brought it up, which she rarely did. On Thursdays she walked to the church she had stopped attending, not for the service at first, but to sit in the quiet sanctuary and look at the stained glass and remember who she had been before fear made her small. Eventually she stayed for the service, and then for the coffee afterwards, and Mrs. Whitfield wept into her handkerchief and said, "We should have come for you sooner, Margaret," and Margaret said, "You came now, and now is what counts," which was true, and which forgave them both at once. On Saturdays she gardened, and Ruth gardened beside her, over the fence, and the two old women competed cheerfully over whose tomatoes ripened first.
But the best part of the week, the part she planned for and looked forward to the way other people look forward to holidays, was Sunday dinner at the clubhouse.
It had begun informally, in the weeks after the sentencing, when Rosa had said, "You should come by on Sunday, we're doing a roast," and Margaret had come, and then come again, and then one Sunday she had arrived early with a pie, and the next Sunday with two pies, and after that it was simply understood: Sunday dinner was Margaret's table, wherever it happened to be set.
The clubhouse on a Sunday afternoon was a different place from the clubhouse on that first afternoon, when the music had stopped and the cards had frozen in men's hands. Now the music played low and steady, and the long table was covered with a cloth Margaret had mended herself, and the men who had once watched her with wary kindness now argued with her cheerfully about whether the gravy needed more salt. Duke always took the chair beside her, and told her about the motorcycles he was repairing, and asked her opinion on matters he plainly did not need her opinion on, which Margaret understood to be his way of saying she belonged.
Rosa ran the kitchen with Margaret like a general with a trusted lieutenant, and Jax set the table and dropped a fork at least once every week, and Benny said grace in a voice that suggested he had practiced it, and Sam told stories about his army days that grew slightly taller with each retelling, and Cole, no longer quite so young a prospect, carved the roast with great concentration and greater pride.
And friends returned to her table. That was the part Margaret had not dared to hope for, and the part that undid her, week after week, in the best way. Mrs. Whitfield from the church came, and then the Hendersons, and then a whole pew's worth of people who had once been told she was too confused for visitors and who now arrived bearing casseroles and apologies and gossip, all of which Margaret accepted with equal grace. Ruth came every Sunday without fail, and sat in the place of honor, and told the same story about the winter of nineteen eighty-three at least once a month, and nobody ever stopped her.
One Sunday, Benny rose before the meal and cleared his throat in the particular way of a man unaccustomed to speeches, and said that the club had a custom, which was to toast absent friends, and that today the absent friend was Henry Bell, who had built a house and raised a family and told the truth when it cost him, and who would have been proud of his wife. The room went quiet, and glasses were raised, and Margaret, who had not expected to be undone by a toast, pressed her napkin to her eyes and laughed through her tears, because Henry would have hated a fuss and loved every minute of it. Duke, beside her, raised his glass a little higher than the rest, and said, "To Henry," and everyone answered, "To Henry," and the words settled over the table like a blessing.