It was almost a joke. Eleanor allowed it the courtesy of a small exhale that might have been a laugh. Then she said, “The house stays mine until I say otherwise. When I go, it goes how I decide. Not how a marriage decides. Not how a vibe decides.”
“I know,” Sloan said. And for the first time since the peach dress and the strappy heels and the gold hoops swinging over a sinking frame, Eleanor believed she might.
Harrison joined them with a plate of nothing important and the look of a man who had learned that standing between two women who had survived each other was not a job he had to perform. He stood a little behind them and watched the water. Eleanor remembered him at five, splashing in a plastic pool in this very yard before the real pool existed, before the stone deck, before the white loungers, when the grass was patchy and the fence was chain-link and the dream was still mostly breath.
“Ma,” he said, “you okay?”
Eleanor considered the question. She was sixty-six. Her silver hair was short and hers. Her gold studs were the same ones she had worn the day she made a watch learn the sound of underwater. The photograph watched from inside. The freezer held only food. The tax account held what it needed. Her son was present. Her daughter-in-law was learning. The cousins would gossip for another year about the birthday when Eleanor Whitfield settled a debt in front of God and everybody, and Eleanor found she did not mind being a story if the story told the truth.
“I’m finished with being used,” she said. “I’m not finished with being a mother. Those are different sentences.”