Margaret's eyes filled again. A tear tracked the soft map of her cheek and disappeared into the collar of the burgundy cardigan. When she spoke, the words were almost gentle, which made them worse.
"Ask your wife."
The sentence hung between them like a coat left on a chair — still warm with the shape of the person who had worn it, already wrong for the room.
Daniel did not ask his wife. Not yet. He stood in the foyer of the house he had bought with Allison twelve years earlier and watched his mother look at her suitcase as if it might apologize for existing. Allison did not speak. The children's shoes near the door seemed suddenly accusatory — evidence of a life that had been proceeding in its ordinary rhythms while, across town at Cedar Ridge Assisted Living, someone had cancelled a room and left a seventy-two-year-old woman with a winter coat and a taxi receipt and nowhere else to go except here.
"Come inside," Daniel said finally. "Please. Mom. Come in."
Margaret stepped over the threshold. The suitcase followed with a soft plastic rattle that sounded, in the foyer, like a verdict being wheeled into evidence. Allison moved aside to let them pass into the living room. She did not offer to take Margaret's coat. She did not offer tea. She stood near the staircase with her arms still folded and watched Daniel help his mother sit on the beige sofa as if she were watching a play she had written and no longer wanted to see performed.