On Sunday morning Iris moved the dining table six inches toward the window.
There was no practical reason for it. The room was the same shape. The chairs still fitted. But she had wanted it closer to the light for years, and Colin had preferred the symmetry of the rug beneath it. Now the rug was off-center and she could see the garden while she drank her coffee.
She sat there until the coffee went cold.
Colin arrived at eleven with his own key. She had intended to ask him to knock and had forgotten until she heard the lock turn.
“Morning,” he called.
“In here.”
He stopped in the doorway, holding a folder against his chest. His hair was damp, and for one disorienting moment she thought of all the Sunday mornings he had come downstairs from the shower asking whether she’d seen his blue sweatshirt.
“Table looks different.”
“I moved it.”
He looked at the rug, then back at her. “Right.”
She did not offer coffee. It felt inhospitable, which annoyed her enough that she almost got up to make some. She stayed seated.
“I’ve brought the mortgage statements,” he said.
“I already have them.”
“I thought it’d help if we looked together.”
He put the folder down and pulled out the chair opposite her. There were occasions when people did a useful thing partly to make themselves feel less guilty. The usefulness did not entirely disappear. Iris moved her coffee to the side.
They owed a little under a hundred and twelve thousand dollars. The house had not been valued; a nearby one had sold for four hundred and twenty thousand, but it had a new kitchen and theirs had cabinets Beth used to hide in as a toddler.
Colin wanted to put it on the market quickly.
“So do I,” Iris said.
He looked surprised.
“What did you think I wanted?”
“I wasn’t sure.”
She could have told him how much that revealed. Instead she asked which agents he’d contacted.
Two. One could come Wednesday afternoon. She worked Wednesday afternoon. Colin said he could take the appointment alone, then saw her face and stopped.
“I’ll find another time.”
“Please.”
He made a note.
The quiet that followed was so familiar she could almost pretend they were discussing a holiday budget. Then he set down his pen.
“I handled Friday badly.”
“Wednesday.”
“What?”
“The bracelet. That was Wednesday.”
“Oh. Yes.” He rubbed his forehead. “I’m sorry.”
She had wanted an apology. Hearing it made her feel neither better nor worse, which seemed an inefficient result after all the waiting.
“What are you sorry for?”
He looked at her quickly.
“I’m not setting a trap, Colin. I genuinely don’t know.”
“For taking it. For bringing it to your work. I wasn’t thinking.”
“You were thinking about the deposit.”
“Yes.”
She folded her hands on the table. His answer had the merit of being true.
“I bought it because I thought you’d like it,” he said. “It wasn’t a plan.”
“I did like it.”
“I know.”
“No. I don’t think you do.”
She looked at his face, the small creases at the corners of his mouth, the old scar under his chin from falling off a bicycle at eleven. She had loved him with a knowledge of his face so complete that she could recognize his tiredness from the way one eyelid sat. None of that knowledge told her what to do now.
“I wasn’t pretending for twenty-nine years,” he said.
“I didn’t say you were.”
“It feels as if everything’s been made into—”
“Don’t.”
He stopped.
She took a breath. “You don’t get to ask me to give the marriage a good review while you’re leaving it.”
His eyes closed briefly.
“I know.”
Perhaps he did. She was too tired to insist that he know it more convincingly.
They agreed to get valuations from both agents, speak to separate lawyers and exchange copies of the main accounts. Iris had already booked a consultation for Tuesday. Colin seemed relieved until she explained that she would be going alone.
“Of course,” he said. “I only thought—”
“I know.”
She pushed his folder back across the table.
At the door he asked whether he could come later in the week for the rest of his clothes.
“Thursday morning. I’ll be here until nine.”
“I could do evening.”
“I’m going out.”
It was the first thing she had said all morning that made his attention sharpen.
“Oh. Where?”
“A dinner.”
“With people from the store?”
“Yes.”
“Good. That’s good.”
She waited by the open door. He had never looked so much like a man who didn’t know when to leave.
“Will you ring the bell Thursday?” she asked.
He glanced down at the key in his hand.
“Yes,” he said. “I can do that.”
After he had gone, she walked around the dining table and sat in his chair.
The view was worse from here. A section of fence, the side of the shed, the neighbor’s plastic owl keeping no birds away. For years she’d let him choose a symmetrical room and then given him the better chair.
She laughed once, without amusement, and went to wash the cups.
Beth called at four.
“How’s your weekend?” Iris asked.
“Fine. Theo tried to make sourdough. We now have a bowl we can’t use.”
“Hot water and patience.”
“We’ve got one of those.”
Iris smiled. She could picture her daughter cross-legged on the worn blue sofa, hair piled on top of her head, one sock disappearing beneath a cushion.
“Dad said you’re selling the house.”
“We’re getting valuations.”
“Right.” A pause. “He sounded upset.”
“So am I.”
“I know.”
The words hung between them. Iris heard herself preparing to say that Colin had made his choices and could hardly expect anybody else to clean up the sadness. She stopped with the sentence still behind her teeth.
“You don’t have to tell me how he sounds,” she said instead.
Beth exhaled. “Thank you.”
“And you don’t have to tell him how I sound.”
“He asks.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want to take sides.”
“I don’t want you to.”
Beth was quiet long enough for Iris to hear water running somewhere at her end.
“I think sometimes you do,” her daughter said.
The hurt was small and precise. Iris let it settle before she spoke.
“You’re probably right. I’m sorry.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too. And I’m very angry with your father. Those are both true, but only one is your job to know about.”
Beth gave a little laugh that sounded suspiciously damp.
“You can tell me if you’re having a bad day, Mom. Just don’t ask me to decide who’s right.”
“Agreed.”
They talked about the museum, where Beth was designing a school workshop around a collection of old household objects. Iris offered Hargreaves’s redundant button samples, then remembered that the estate owned them and said she would ask rather than promise.
“You sound busy,” Beth said.
“I am.”
“Is busy good?”
“Some of it.”
“Are you doing anything nice?”
Iris looked toward the dress hanging from the wardrobe door upstairs, though she couldn’t actually see it from here.
“Dinner Thursday. And lunch tomorrow.”
“With who?”
“The appraiser.”
There was a silence quite different from the earlier ones.
“Mom.”
“It’s lunch.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You said my name in italics.”
Beth laughed properly then, and Iris felt a space open in the afternoon.
On Monday Daniel met her at the counter at twelve-thirty, holding his jacket rather than wearing it.
“I checked with Priya,” he said. “She says you have permission to leave.”
“Did she give you the emergency number?”
“She’s been very thorough.”
They walked to a cafe two streets away. Not the bakery, where people from the store would find her, but a small place with mismatched cups and menus printed on the backs of old road maps. Daniel chose a table by the window, then asked if she’d prefer one farther inside.
“The window,” she said.
“You looked at it.”
“Yes.”
He sat opposite her, seeming satisfied with the simple success of this exchange.
They ordered soup and bread. She learned that he lived in Providence, kept a small rented place there and spent too much of the year working elsewhere. His sister, Grace, lived in Chicago and taught middle-school science. Their father was eighty-one and insisted on gardening in shoes with no backs.
“I have bought him proper shoes,” Daniel said. “He keeps them for occasions.”
“Such as gardening?”
“Apparently not.”
His father had run a dry-cleaning business, which explained the steam brush. Daniel had worked there every summer from thirteen until he discovered employment where people did not blame him for finding melted candy in their pockets.
“Did you want to do this?” Iris asked. “Appraise things?”
“I wanted to be an architect.”
“What happened?”
“I discovered that liking buildings was different from being able to design one.”
“So you chose the things inside.”
“Eventually.”
He tore a piece of bread in half. “My ex-wife used to say I was only interested in rooms after everybody had left.”
Iris looked at him. He was not smiling now.
“Was she right?”
“Sometimes.”
It would have been easy to reassure him. She had a lifetime’s practice in finding a gentler interpretation of somebody else’s behavior. Instead she asked what his wife did.
“Her own work, mostly. After a while, her own life.”
“Are you friends?”
“We’re civil. She’s remarried. I sent a card.”
“I wouldn’t know what to write.”
“I used the words that were already in it.”
She laughed, and he looked pleased without seeming relieved that the difficult subject was over.
The soup arrived. For a little while they ate and watched people pass the window. A woman in running clothes stopped to untangle a dog’s lead from her own ankle. A boy carried a cello case nearly as tall as himself. Ordinary lives doing their best to get through a Monday.
“I moved my dining table,” Iris said.
Daniel looked up. “Where to?”
“Nearer the window. Six inches.”
“Better?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
She traced a fingernail along the edge of the paper placemat.
“Colin and I are separating. That’s what the bad time was, when you arrived Wednesday. He’d just been in.”
Daniel put his spoon down, quietly.
“I’m sorry.”
“Please don’t look as if I’ve brought something fragile to the table.”
His gaze stayed steady. “I was looking at you.”
She felt that in a place she had thought was merely tired.
“It’s very recent,” she said.
“All right.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“I hadn’t assumed you did.”
“That could be insulting in another tone.”
“I’m trying to choose mine carefully.”
A smile began at one corner of her mouth. He saw it and let his own appear.
They did not discuss the bracelet. She told him about Beth’s workshop, the button samples, the strange difficulty of remembering to ask before offering things that weren’t hers.
He told her which estate representative to email, then asked about the dress in the cardboard box.
“I finished it.”
“Are you pleased?”
“Yes.”
“Will you wear it Thursday?”
She looked down at her bowl, then back at him. “That was the idea.”
“Good.”
He said the word very softly. She found herself imagining his face when she walked into the restaurant, and suddenly the dress was more than fabric she had managed not to waste.
When the bill came, they split it. Outside, the wind had turned cold, and she buttoned her coat beneath her chin.
“Thank you for lunch,” he said.
“I thought you were buying as an apology.”
“You insisted on paying.”
“I did.”
“I’ll have to think of something else.”
They stood close enough that she could see the pale scar near his wrist below the jacket cuff. She wanted, with an uncomplicated physical certainty, to put her hand there.
She wanted to know him another afternoon first.
“Thursday,” she said.
“Thursday.”
They walked back to the store together. At the corner, the crossing light changed, and Daniel matched his pace to hers without putting a guiding hand on her back.
It had been years since a lunch felt like something she might remember.