Chapter 23: Claire's Choice
Claire Ellison went home to Phoenix in the second week of August with a trunk full of her mother's tomatoes and a set of instructions about the drip line that she had written down and intended to ignore, and she rearranged her life in increments so small that her sister-in-law accused her of doing it in secret. She was not doing it in secret. She was doing it the way you cross a creek you once fell in: one flat stone at a time, testing each with your whole weight before trusting it.
The first stone was the Sunday call. It began as her idea, proposed with a casualness she had rehearsed in the car โ "I'll call Sundays, Mom, just to check in" โ and it survived because neither of them treated it as a duty either could fail. Five o'clock. Claire cooked while they talked, phone on speaker, and Evie sat in the porch chair Walter built and reported on the roses, the crossword, Hank's opinions, which were unchanged since the Ford administration. They talked about Claire's work at the school district, about Noah's job, about Sadie's classes. They did not, most weeks, talk about the years when they had not talked. The silence about that was not avoidance. It was a room they had already cleaned out together, in a repaired kitchen, in July. You do not keep dusting an empty room.
By October the call had acquired the status of weather. Claire's husband set his watch by it. Sadie joined from her dorm whenever there was family business, appearing on the screen with her hair up and somebody else's sweatshirt on, demanding to be shown the roses, and Evie, who had claimed for years that she did not hold with video calls, held the phone up to the rose bed with the concentration of a news cameraman.
The second stone was Thanksgiving. It was raised on the call in mid-October, by Noah, who had clearly been deputized, and it was settled inside four minutes: the Flats. Claire would drive up Wednesday. Sadie would come from school. There would be a turkey of a size Evie called reasonable and Claire called inadequate, and they compromised on the inadequate one, because the riders on the corridor run would need plates sent down to the clubhouse, a tradition invented that very moment and immediately treated as ancient.
The third stone Claire laid herself, over pie, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, at the kitchen table, with the good dishes still in the rack and the house ticking warm around them. She had been turning it over since October. She turned it once more, and set it down.
"I'm not asking to move in," she said. "I want that on the record before I ask the rest."
"Noted," said Evie. "The record thanks you."
"And I'm not asking because of the roof, or the โ any of it. The house is fine. You're fine. I get regular reports on how fine you are from three separate sources." She cut a sliver off the pie nobody was eating anymore, because her hands needed employment. "I could take the winter term mostly remote. January through March. I could come stay the season. Not to rescue anybody. Just โ I missed a lot of this table, Mom. I'd like to sit at it while it's still โ " She stopped, and did not finish the sentence, and Evie did not finish it for her, which was the whole new arrangement, right there, in the mercy of an unfinished sentence.
Evie looked out the window at the rose bed gone brown and sleeping, at the ramp-less porch and the carport sign, at the lane going down to the road where her husband's name now stood on green metal at mile marker 208. She thought about January in that house alone, which she had survived three times now and did not fear, exactly, the way you do not fear a room you simply no longer wish to sit in by yourself.
"The spare room's got a new roof over it," she said. "Drip line's off for winter. You'd have to share the bathroom with your daughter when she visits, and she steals blankets."
Claire laughed, and then had to look down at the pie for a moment, and Evie pretended the pie required her own full attention too, and Noah came in from the porch at exactly the right time asking where the leftover rolls were, and was informed by both women, in unison, that he had eaten them, which was true.
The question hung there kindly all through December โ in the Sunday calls, in the plan for Sadie's birthday, in the way Claire said "when I'm up there in January" twice before she caught herself, and Evie said, "Mind the ice on the porch step," instead of correcting her. Neither woman called it decided. Both of them let it stay as decided as it was.