"I know about Tuesday," she said. "The list on the fridge."
"Then you know it's not every day. Don't make it every day. If you make it every day you'll build a facility out of Tuesdays, and he'll smell it on you."
He went to his room. Ruth locked the back door and checked the side door, the one that stuck, and lifted it out of habit though it was already latched. In the den Arthur slept with his mouth a little open, a man without a signature. She turned the lamp off and left the hall light on, the compromise Caleb had invented, dark enough for sleep, bright enough for a path. She went upstairs and this time she slept, hard, the way a person sleeps when the body has been holding a trial and the court has recessed.
In the night she dreamed of Helen, not as a ghost, as a woman at the kitchen table with a pen, editing a grocery list. Helen looked up and said, "You cannot both be the reasonable one. It offends the arithmetic." Ruth woke with the sentence so intact she wrote it on a receipt from the rental car and then felt foolish and kept it anyway.
Helen had been a reference librarian, which meant she had spent her working life telling people that the information they wanted was real and that their way of asking for it was making it harder to find. She had loved Arthur with a practical ferocity. She had loved her children unequally in the way of mothers who are honest in private and fair in public, and she had tried to correct for it by giving Caleb the longer share of her patience and Ruth the longer share of her standards. The correction had not produced peace. It had produced two adults who could each claim they had been loved less.
The illness had started in her hands. A cup set down too hard. A card catalog of her own recipes that she could no longer trust, sugar where the salt line was. She had hated the drama of announcement, so she had announced over meatloaf, in a single paragraph, the way she would have answered a patron. There was a tumor. It was in a place that did not invite heroics. There were options that were not cures. She intended to take the one that let her read for as long as reading was reading. She did not intend to be spoken about in the third person while she was still paying the electric bill.
Ruth had flown in for the appointments and flown out for the fundraisers and told herself the flights were the shape of devotion available to her. Caleb had taken leave from the high school and then, when the leave ended and Helen did not, he had resigned. He had told Ruth on the phone, flat, "They can get another teacher for the Constitution. They can't get another person who knows how she likes the pillows." Ruth had said he shouldn't give up the job. He had said he already had. The argument lasted months and never once improved the pillows.
There had been a woman, Marisol, who taught art at the middle school and who had stayed through the first winter. Ruth had met her once, at Christmas, and had liked her, which she had not expected to do. Marisol brought oranges and did not rearrange Helen's kitchen. In February she had ended it, not cruelly. She had told Caleb she could be a girlfriend or she could be a second nurse, and she was not good at the second thing, and pretending was making her mean. Caleb had told Ruth this only after the funeral, in one sentence, and had refused the follow-up. The sentence had been enough for Ruth to build a guilt out of, and she had built it, and she had not known where to send the finished product.