Chapter 5 - The Room She Was Given
The guest room had been decorated, once, with someone else's taste in mind.
A quilt in dusty rose. A framed print of lavender fields that had come with the house, that nobody had ever bothered to take down or put up on purpose — it simply persisted, the way certain objects persist in other people's homes, neither loved nor removed.
Eleanor sat on the edge of the daybed.
Her hands rested in her lap, palms up, the posture of someone waiting for an answer to arrive in them.
On the nightstand: a lamp, a glass of water gone lukewarm hours ago, and a photograph in a small brass frame.
Frank, thirty years younger than he'd been the day he died, squinting into the sun on a beach in a state they no longer visited, one arm slung around her shoulders, both of them laughing at something the photograph could no longer explain.
She picked it up.
Traced the edge of the frame with her thumb, an old habit, worn smooth into the metal from a year of exactly this motion.
"You'd have said something," she told the photograph. Not aloud, exactly. Just shaped the words with her mouth, silent, the way she'd taken to doing lately, in rooms where nobody else could hear her talking to a dead man.
Frank would have said something.
Frank, who had once told off his own brother at a Thanksgiving table for a joke half this cruel, who did not believe in letting children learn manners by watching adults excuse cruelty as a joke.
Frank was not here.
Frank had not been here in fourteen months, and the version of this family that existed without him in it had rearranged itself, slowly, into shapes she did not recognize and had not agreed to.
She set the photograph down.
Stood. Crossed to the closet.
Her suitcase was on the top shelf — the good one, hard-shelled, that Frank had bought her for their fortieth anniversary, back when they still had trips ahead of them they hadn't taken yet.
She pulled it down.
It was heavier than she remembered, or she was weaker than she used to be. Possibly both.
She set it on the daybed and opened it.
Empty. Waiting.
Her hands moved to the dresser — the one that had come with the room, that held, in its three drawers, the reduced version of a life she had once kept in an entire house. Cardigans. A few blouses. Underthings folded the exact way her mother had taught her sixty years ago, a fold that had outlived that mother by three decades now.
She did not begin packing.
Not yet.
She sat back down on the edge of the bed, suitcase open and empty beside her, and looked at it the way a person looks at a decision rather than a task.
If she packed tonight, she would be doing it out of anger. And anger, she had learned across seventy-one years of living, made excellent kindling and terrible foundations. Whatever she built while angry, she would spend the calmer version of herself, later, quietly dismantling.
But if she waited —
If she waited, she knew exactly what would happen. She had watched it happen a dozen small times already, in fourteen months. Claire would apologize in a way that wasn't really an apology — I'm sorry you felt that way — and Daniel would hug her, relieved, grateful the discomfort was over, and life would fold itself back down into the same shape it had been in before dinner, and nothing, nothing at all, would actually have changed.
She reached over and picked up one cardigan. The grey one. Frank had liked her in grey, said it made her look like she was keeping secrets.
She folded it.
Set it in the suitcase.
One item.
Not a decision, not yet. Just a beginning, the kind that can still be undone in the morning, the kind she left herself room to undo, because seventy-one years had also taught her the value of sleeping on a thing before you let it become permanent.
Down the hall, faintly, she could hear the sounds of dinner ending. A chair. Water running. Nora's laugh, high and easy, entirely untouched by any of it.
May you like
Eleanor looked at the single folded cardigan sitting alone in the wide empty suitcase, and did not cry, and did not pack a second item, and turned off the lamp, and lay down in her clothes on top of the dusty rose quilt, staring at a ceiling that was not hers, in a house that was not hers, thinking about a man who was not anywhere anymore at all.
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