Beth arrived on Saturday carrying cleaning supplies and a packet of croissants, which Iris considered an excellent balance of intentions.
“We can’t go into the room until Monday,” she said.
“I know. You told me three times.”
“Did I?”
“Yes. We’re preparing the things that go into the room.”
“Right.”
Beth put the croissants on the table. “First, these.”
They ate while Iris described the last day. Not all of it. The missing keys. The cake. The man buying the lamp. When she came to leaving the store keys with Joan, her voice changed, and Beth reached across the table without saying anything at all.
After breakfast they went upstairs to the spare room, where Iris’s sewing equipment had expanded into a small territory she had been pretending to regard as temporary.
Machine, iron, boxes of thread, tape measures in three separate drawers. Fabric she had bought because it was good, because it was reduced, because she had once known exactly what she would make with it. Some lengths still carried neat little tags in her handwriting.
Beth held one up.
“What was this going to be?”
“A jacket.”
“For who?”
“Possibly somebody much braver about orange.”
Her daughter laughed and put it in the keep pile. Iris moved it to the consider pile. Then, after looking at it again, she moved it back.
They packed slowly enough to do the work properly. Supplies checked, old needles discarded, fabric measured. Beth wrote labels while Iris decided what the room actually needed. Not every possibility. The things she could use this month.
At noon, the table held four boxes instead of nine.
“I feel as if I’ve lost an argument,” Iris said.
“With who?”
“Several earlier versions of me.”
Beth smiled. “They can keep the orange.”
Iris went to the bedroom for a tin of fastenings and saw the bracelet box in the open drawer. She had moved it while looking for thread. Now it sat on the scarves with its lid slightly crooked.
She picked it up.
Inside, the bracelet curved around the velvet cushion. Her wedding ring lay beside it. Two circles of metal, neither capable of explaining what she ought to do next.
She took out the bracelet.
Beth appeared in the doorway.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
She turned the clasp between her fingers. It had never been faulty. Not when Colin gave it to her, not when he wanted the money back.
“I think I’ll sell this.”
Beth looked at it, then at her.
“Today?”
“Perhaps.”
“Would you like company?”
“Yes.”
The jeweler on the square was open until three. Iris had bought a watch strap there once and otherwise considered it a shop for people with more reasons than she had to handle precious things.
The woman behind the counter examined the bracelet, checked the mark and weighed it. She offered sixty-eight dollars outright, or the possibility of more on consignment without any promise of when it might sell.
Iris had thought it would be worth more. For a second she felt foolish. Then she realized she had confused the price Colin paid with the amount someone would pay her now.
“The cash, please.”
The woman wrote out a receipt.
“Would you like the box back?”
“No, thank you.”
The wedding ring was at home in a little dish. Iris had moved it before they left. Selling one thing did not require selling the other to make a point.
Outside, Beth asked what she would do with the money.
“Buy blue fabric for the chair.”
“That’s nicely specific.”
“I’ve had enough of possibilities for today.”
They walked to the fabric shop, compared three shades of blue and bought the one Iris liked first. It cost less than the bracelet brought. She added strong thread, a packet of upholstery needles and a length of plain cotton for the underside.
The receipt from the jeweler remained in her bag. The money had paid for cloth she knew how to use.
At lunch Beth told her that Theo had asked her to move in.
Iris put her fork down carefully.
“Do you want to?”
“I think so.”
“But?”
“No but. A great many little questions.”
“About teaspoons?”
“Among other things.”
They smiled. Then Beth looked down at her plate.
“It’s strange thinking about it now. With you and Dad.”
“I imagine.”
“I don’t mean I think it’ll happen to us. I just keep thinking you must have been this sure once.”
Iris felt the old ache, the part no new happiness could entirely remove.
“I was happy,” she said. “Not every day. Enough that I wasn’t pretending.”
“I know.”
“And I would still have chosen to share a kitchen. That part wasn’t foolish.”
Beth nodded slowly.
“You’ll have different things to decide,” Iris said. “I can listen. I don’t think I can promise you a map.”
“I’d rather have someone who knows where all the teaspoons are.”
“Then I may disappoint you as well.”
Her daughter laughed, and the conversation moved forward without requiring either of them to settle the future.
On Sunday, after Beth left, Iris covered the chair seat at the dining table. The delivery company had agreed to bring it to the house first for the same fee, then Hugh would take it with the machine on Monday. It meant one extra movement and gave her a task she could finish before she had to look at another empty room.
The old floral cloth came away reluctantly. Beneath it, the padding was sound. She cut the blue fabric carefully, allowing enough to draw around the edges, and worked until her hands were tired.
At dusk she turned the seat over.
Plain blue. Firm, comfortable, no longer apologizing for the shape of its own usefulness.
She sat down in it with the adventure novel. The woman in the book had acquired two enemies, a horse and a reason to keep going. Iris read until the light went too far to see the page.
Then she got up and switched on a lamp.