The birthday invitation had been Harrison’s idea. Sixty-five, he said. We should do it right. Poolside. Family. Sloan had offered to “handle the vibe,” which meant linen and white loungers and a gift table that looked like a magazine, and cousins invited by text with an address and a time. Eleanor had agreed because saying no to a birthday felt like admitting she was tired of being celebrated, and she was not tired of that. She was tired of other things.
She had set the gold-framed photograph on the gift table herself that morning, thinking it would be a conversation piece, a small altar to the day the house began. She had not imagined a hip. She had not imagined the water. But she had imagined, somewhere beneath the planning and the pale yellow silk, that something in Sloan’s measuring gaze would eventually require an answer. She had not known the answer would be eighteen hundred dollars learning to swim.
Now the photograph dried on her counter, water spots mapping the glass like a weather system. The watch waited in the freezer. Eleanor made lunch she did not eat and sat on the back steps in the shade of the jacaranda and listened to the neighborhood do its Monday: mowers, a dog, someone’s radio through an open window.
Denise called at three, as promised by the nature of Denise. “You eating?”
“I’m sitting,” Eleanor said.
“Sitting is a start. You want company?”
“Not today.”