Spring arrived with a cruelty disguised as flowers.
The tulips Walter had planted along the front walk came up in their stubborn reds and yellows, and Sloan stepped over them in heels on her way to a rideshare without looking down. I spent an April Saturday on my knees in the dirt, weeding the beds, while inside the house Sloan filmed a video for her social media about "living simply" in a cream blouse I had seen the receipt for in a bag she forgot on the counter. Simply, in her dialect, meant other people absorbing the cost of her ease. I pulled dandelions until my knuckles ached. Harrison came out with two glasses of iced tea, handed me one, and sat on the porch step like a man visiting a museum of his childhood.
"She's trying," he said.
"At what?"
He did not answer. A bee moved between the tulips. Somewhere a car stereo thumped and faded. I drank the tea and tasted the particular sweetness of a son who wanted two true things at once and had not yet learned that some truths cancel.
In May, Sloan hosted a dinner party in my dining room for six of her friends. She did not ask. She informed. I stayed in the study with the door closed and listened to laughter that did not include me, to the clink of my own wine glasses, to someone complimenting the "vintage energy" of the house as if I were already a ghost on a brochure. At eleven o'clock I came out for water and found a red wine ring on Walter's oak table, dark as a verdict. Sloan, flushed with hostess triumph, said she would take care of it tomorrow. Tomorrow she slept until noon. I refinished the ring myself on Sunday with a kit from the hardware store, sanding in small circles while my eyes burned, not from the varnish.
June brought heat and a fight about the thermostat. Sloan preferred the house at a temperature that made my utility bill look like a second mortgage. When I adjusted it, she readjusted it. When I mentioned cost, she mentioned comfort. Harrison split the difference in the way of men who think arithmetic can replace courage, and the bill arrived anyway, addressed to me, paid by me, discussed by no one until I put it on the refrigerator under a magnet shaped like a lemon and waited to see if anyone would read it. No one did. I paid it. I took the lemon magnet down and put it in a drawer. Even my metaphors were getting tired.