"All right," Lydia said. It was not a reunion. It was a tool handed back. She took it.
Winter narrowed the house to its necessary rooms. Lydia worked at the kitchen table on illustrations of a mole who could not find his glasses, a book that would pay in the spring if it paid. Ruth sang under her breath when she thought Lydia was elsewhere, old choir warm-ups, scales that made the radiators seem more intentional. They argued about the thermostat, as people who share a furnace must. Ruth liked the night colder. Lydia, whose cardigan was a philosophy, did not. They met at a number and wrote it on a piece of tape above the dial so that neither of them could pretend the agreement had been vague. Mrs. Adelman brought soup in January and stayed to tell a story about Evelyn in 1983 that was mostly about a stolen hose and was, underneath, about loyalty. The story did not mention deeds. It ended with Evelyn laughing on a sidewalk. Ruth and Lydia both held that ending after the bowls were washed.
In April, a year from the signing, the grape buds showed in their hard, skeptical way. Lydia went out with shears she only half knew how to use. Ruth supervised without taking the shears, which was its own discipline. "Above the bud. Not through your thumb. Your mother cut too timidly and the vines got confused." Lydia cut. A bead of sap rose, startling as a fact. She thought of the unfinished sentence in Penrose's office, the one that had stopped before a name, and of how the name, when it came, had not been a blow so much as a relocation of the center of the house. She had stood up expecting to be either chosen or robbed. She had been neither. She had been asked, by a dead woman's plain handwriting, to stop auditioning for a verdict.
Helen came that afternoon without calling first, which was new. She brought a pot of something green and a little stiff, a plant she had been told would survive neglect. "It can go on the porch if you hate it," she said.