The bridge club wanted chicken, no potatoes, and a dessert without fruit.
“We have a dispute about fruit,” Janet told me over the phone. “It’s best not to invite it.”
“Chocolate?”
“Always.”
I wrote it down. January nineteenth, fourteen people, the meeting room behind the library. There would be access to a refrigerator but no oven, and one woman was allergic to walnuts. I asked about other nuts. Janet said she would check rather than guess.
After I hung up, I sat looking at the order.
One small lunch in January. It would not pay the mortgage or buy back my place in Laurel’s kitchen. It was work somebody wanted me to do because I could do it well. I put the sheet in a fresh folder and wrote the date across the tab.
Then I went out for a walk.
It was Sunday, and I had spent too many hours sitting beside a telephone waiting for other people to decide what happened next. The air was cold enough to make the inside of my nose hurt. Along the river, the water had risen over the low steps where children fed ducks in summer. A man stood on the path trying to persuade a wet spaniel not to shake beside his trousers.
My phone rang halfway across the footbridge.
Nicky.
“Are you at work?” she asked.
“No.”
“At home?”
“Walking. What’s wrong?”
“I need to go to the station. I wondered if you’d come with me.”
I stopped in the middle of the bridge. The boards beneath my shoes were dark with damp.
“Yes.”
“I don’t want you to talk for me.”
“All right.”
“Just—be there. So I go.”
“Where are you?”
She was in the municipal lot, sitting in her car. She had driven there and spent twenty minutes looking at the entrance. I told her I could be there in fifteen.
I hurried home, changed my shoes and drove over. Her car was parked beside the shrub with the broken guard. She looked up when I tapped on the window, then opened the door as if she’d been holding her breath until somebody arrived to tell her she could stop.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Don’t.”
She stood in a padded jacket with one cuff turned back. Her hands were red with cold.
“You could have turned the heater on,” I said.
“I know.”
Neither of us moved toward the building.
“Are the boys all right?”
“With Adam. Football practice, then lunch. I said I was going shopping.”
“Does he know why you’re here?”
She shook her head.
“I haven’t lied to him. I mean, I have. I said shopping. But this isn’t about him. Not just him.”
“You don’t have to explain it to me.”
She made an impatient little sound.
“I need to say it to somebody before I go in.”
I shut my mouth.
She leaned against the car, looking past me toward the road.
“Adam keeps saying we have to stick together. That we don’t know what happened. And we don’t. I don’t. But he talks as if not knowing means we have to help Noah tell it.”
I thought of him on the phone, saying he was there all evening. The reassurance he’d given me, as if it were a thing I could put in my pocket and carry home.
“Did you see them together?”
“No.”
A car turned into the lot. We both looked toward it. An older man got out carrying a folder and went into the municipal offices without noticing us.
“Have you made an appointment?” I asked.
“I called this morning. Reed said to come.”
“Then he’s expecting you.”
She nodded, once, hard. Took her bag from the passenger seat and locked the car.
I walked beside her to the entrance. At the desk she gave her name, then sat with her hands clasped so tightly her knuckles looked pale. I took the chair beside her. A poster on the opposite wall warned about fraudulent phone calls. There was a child’s glove on the windowsill, one red finger pointing upward.
Reed came out after a few minutes. He looked at me, then back at Nicky.
“Mrs. Morrow?”
She stood.
“I don’t need Diane in there,” she said. “She just came with me.”
“That’s fine.”
He took her through the door. I went outside to my car.
There were things I could have done while I waited. A supermarket across the road. A pharmacy. My insurance renewal was still lying on the hall table. I stayed where I was.
When Martin was having treatment, Laurel used to wait in hospital parking lots for me. I would come out not knowing whether I was hungry or sick, and she would hand me a coffee and ask whether I wanted to talk. Sometimes I hadn’t. Sometimes she had driven me home without saying a word.
I didn’t want to lose that part of her. I couldn’t make it belong to somebody else. She had been kind when I needed kindness, and she had lied when a woman died. Both things remained true, sitting on opposite sides of a table I could not clear.
Nicky came out after almost an hour.
She had been crying. Not much now, but the skin beneath her eyes was shiny and she held a folded tissue in one hand.
“Could you drive me?” she asked.
“Where?”
“Home first. I need my things. Then my parents’. I’ll get the car later.”
I unlocked the passenger door. She sat, pulled the belt across and held it away from her body for a moment before letting it click into place.
“Are you all right?”
“No.”
“Do you want to sit a minute?”
“No. Please just drive.”
I drove.
At the first light she said, “He went on his own.”
I kept my eyes on the road.
“Adam. The night of the show. He left home on his own.”
“What time?”
“Quarter to seven. About then. He’d promised the boys he’d help finish a model, and they were still doing the glue. He was cross because he was late. Not terribly. Just normal. He said Noah would meet him there.”
The light turned green. I moved forward with the rest of the traffic.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve told Reed.”
“Yes.”
I didn’t ask anything else. Nicky looked down at the tissue, smoothing it across her palm.
“He said they traveled together,” she said.
“He told me that.”
“I know. He told the police. I made him tell me exactly what he’d said last night, after the class. Before that I kept telling myself it was only talk about a picture, not something he’d actually given them.”
“Did you ask him?”
“He said he might have gone to collect Noah. That he’d had a lot on his mind. I said I remembered what he told me at the door. He said I hadn’t been paying attention.”
At her house she sat without reaching for the belt until the engine stopped.
“I don’t need you to keep us from having an argument,” she said.
“I couldn’t.”
She looked at me, then gave a small, reluctant laugh.
“I know. I need to make sure I say what I came to say.”
Adam opened the door before she could use her key. He had an old sweatshirt on and a dish towel over one shoulder. Behind him the television was playing something with music too cheerful for the faces in the hallway.
“Where’s your car?” he asked.
“At the station.”
He looked past her at me.
“Right.”
Nicky went inside. I waited until she turned and beckoned me through. There were two pairs of muddy cleats on newspaper by the radiator. A box from the baking class sat on the kitchen counter, one blue star left inside.
“Boys upstairs?” Nicky asked.
“They’ve just had lunch.”
“I need to talk to you.”
He took the towel off his shoulder.
“Go up for ten minutes,” he called toward the living room. “Mom and I need the kitchen.”
The boys came past, greeting her, then asking whether I had more cookies. I said I had not brought any. Max looked frankly disappointed. They went upstairs.
Adam shut the kitchen door.
“Could we do this ourselves?”
“Diane’s giving me a lift,” Nicky said. “She can wait here. I’m not asking her to talk.”
I sat beside the back door, away from the table. I could leave if she asked. I could not make being a witness comfortable by pretending to be somewhere else.
“I told Reed you left on your own,” she said.
Adam stood with the dish towel in both hands.
“You don’t know that.”
“I know you said Noah was meeting you there. I know you were in the basement with the boys, and when you came up you were cross because you were late. I know what I saw.”
“You didn’t stand at the door and watch me drive away.”
“No. I was clearing the glue off the table. I didn’t know I needed to treat an ordinary evening like an inspection.”
He dropped the towel beside the sink.
“So he asked you something and you decided to tell him I lied.”
“He asked me what happened. I told him. He can compare it with what you said.”
“You know what people will do with that.”
“I’ve spent a week thinking about what you’ll do with it.”
Her voice shook. He looked at her as though that was a reason to doubt the words rather than a cost of speaking them.
“I asked you not to make this about us.”
“It is about us. I let you tell me it didn’t matter what time you said you’d collected him. I told Diane I didn’t remember the evening well enough. When Reed called, I thought if I waited another day, you might correct it yourself. Then I let there be another day.”
She put her bag on the table.
“I did that. You didn’t make me. But I’m not doing it again.”
Adam looked at me.
“Did you tell her she had to?”
I could feel the answer waiting in my mouth, all the things I wanted to say about what I had and hadn’t done. Nicky spoke before I did.
“Look at me. She didn’t remember what I remember. She couldn’t tell it for me.”
He turned back to her.
“He’s my brother.”
“Yes.”
“There are things you do for family.”
“You can tell them what you did. You drove to the show. You met him. Nobody’s asking you to stop being his brother.”
“It isn’t that simple.”
“I know it isn’t.”
She went upstairs. He stood beside the sink with his back to me. Above us a drawer opened and shut, footsteps crossed the landing. I heard Nicky speaking to the boys, quiet words I couldn’t distinguish.
Adam picked up the blue star from the box. Its icing had cracked across one point.
“They had a good time last night,” he said.
“They did.”
He held it in his palm for a moment, then put it back.
When Nicky came down she carried a small overnight bag and a tote with her work things. Not all her clothes. Not a suitcase that explained the rest of her life. Enough to make the next morning possible somewhere else.
“I’ll be at Mom and Dad’s tonight,” she said. “I’ll come over tomorrow to work out the boys’ week.”
“You’re leaving because I helped Noah.”
“I’m going because you keep asking me to say I don’t know something I do know. I’ll talk when we aren’t trying to get a different answer from each other.”
He looked toward the stairs.
“What did you tell them?”
“That we’re angry about something grown-ups need to sort out. That they’ve done nothing wrong. That they can call me.”
He said her name. Not loudly. For the first time since we’d arrived, he sounded as if he wanted her rather than her agreement.
She stood with the bag against her leg.
“Correct it, Adam.”
He did not answer before she opened the door.
I followed her out to the car. She put the bag at her feet, not on the back seat, and held it there with both hands while I started the engine.
We drove past the school where her boys went, the gate chained for the weekend, leaves piled against the fence. Nicky watched it until we’d passed the corner. She did not ask me whether she’d done the right thing. I was glad I didn’t have to give her an answer big enough to last the night.
At her parents’ house June opened the door before Nicky rang. She stood looking past her daughter toward my car, one hand against her chest. Nicky went into her arms. Neither of them said anything I could hear.
I waited until the door closed.
Then I sat very still, looking at the empty path.
Adam had been the person who could put Noah somewhere else. The brother. The ticket. The photograph in front of the arts-center sign.
He had left home alone.
Across town a police officer was writing down what his wife had seen. In my passenger seat lay the tissue she had forgotten, folded into a little damp square.
I put it in the trash bag by the gearshift and drove home.