The yet was a mistake, or it was the most honest thing Evelyn had said in months. Helen heard it as a clock. She drove home to her own kitchen, where Paul was reading the newspaper with the patience of a man whose heart had been recently reminded of its work, and she said, "Mother is going to do something foolish with that house." Paul, who had married Helen in part for her competence and had learned, slowly, to be wary of it, said, "Or something that isn't foolish, and we won't like it anyway." Helen did not argue. She washed a glass that was already clean. She thought of Seth's tuition and of the kitchen they had been measuring for two years, the one with the island she pretended was for cooking and knew was for proof that her life had a shape she had chosen. She did not yet call Mark. She waited until she was angrier, which did not take long.
Mark's anger had a different source and the same address. He had spent his forties becoming a man other men called when a small commercial lot needed a story. He was good at it in bursts. He was bad at the quiet months between bursts, when the condo fees and the remains of a divorce and the habit of believing the next deal would correct the last one all sat on his chest at three in the morning. A developer named Dale Pruitt, who wore polo shirts even in weather that did not ask for them, had begun to talk about Orchard Street. Not about the Harlan house specifically, not at first. About the block. About how two duplexes could sit where one old frame house sat, if a person were willing to see the lot instead of the porch. Mark had said he would never sell his mother's house out from under her. He had also said, on a later afternoon, that when the time came the lot was worth more than sentiment. Pruitt had smiled in the way of men who collect sentences they can use. He did not offer money yet. He offered attention, which Mark was hungrier for than he would have admitted in any room with his sisters in it.
Lydia, meanwhile, drew pictures of animals who lived in houses that looked, if you knew, like the house on Orchard Street. She illustrated books that sold modestly and paid slowly. She was proud of the work and tired of the pride having to carry so much. She came back to Larkspur when she could, which was not often enough to count as care and too often to count as escape. She slept in her old room under the green light, when it was the season for green light, and she watched her mother and Ruth move around each other with the ease of people who had stopped negotiating the terms of a shared sink. It made her glad. It also made her lonely in a way she could not bring to the kitchen table, because the loneliness was not their fault and would have sounded, if spoken, like a bill.
On one of those visits, in the summer before the stroke, she came down in the night for water and heard them in the parlor. The door was not quite shut. Evelyn was humming, which she rarely did, and Ruth was humming a third above her, the interval so easy it did not seem like a performance. Lydia stood with her hand on the wall. She could have walked in. She could have made a joke and been welcomed. Instead she stepped back, barefoot, careful of the board near the stairs that had always announced a person. She gave them the rest of the song. In the morning she said nothing about it. Evelyn looked at her once, searching, and Lydia buttered toast as if toast were a full account of the night. It was a small loyalty. She would remember it later as the moment she chose a side she had not yet been asked to name.
The stroke, when it came, was small and insulting. January, ice on the back steps, Evelyn going out too early to look at a branch she thought the wind had split. She did not fall. She simply stopped understanding, for a few minutes, how a sentence was supposed to hold together. Ruth got her to a chair and called the ambulance and called Helen, in that order, which Helen would later resent and which was, medically, correct. At the hospital the doctor used words like transient and watchful and lucky. Evelyn, recovering her sentences by evening, said, "I am not a lesson." The doctor, who had met daughters like Helen and mothers like Evelyn before, said, "No, ma'am," and wrote his notes.