He was not wrong about the alone. Walter had been gone three years by then — a Tuesday of his own, a phone call from the hospital, a silence in the master bedroom that still sometimes woke me at three in the morning looking for the shape of a shoulder that was no longer there. The house on Maple Court was three bedrooms and a study and a kitchen Walter had remodeled the year before he died, as if he had known someone would need the counters to lean on. I had filled the quiet with gallery work and book club and the careful cultivation of a life that did not require permission. I had not filled it with tenants.
But Harrison was my son. The only one. Born in a rainstorm in March thirty-five years earlier, delivered into my arms with a cry that sounded like the beginning of every story I would ever care about. I had packed his lunches. I had sat through his baseball games in folding chairs that left stripes on the backs of my thighs. I had watched him marry Sloan in a vineyard ceremony where the wine was better than the vows and I had smiled for the photographs because that is what mothers do when they have doubts they are not yet allowed to name.
"A few months," I said.
Sloan kissed my cheek. Her perfume was something floral and expensive that would, over the following year, colonize every curtain and pillow in the house until I could no longer smell my own laundry detergent without smelling her.
"You're an angel, Eleanor," she said. "Truly. We won't be any trouble."
I believed her the way people believe weather forecasts — with hope, and against experience.
By November the few months had become a season, and the season had begun to rearrange the furniture of my days.