It was the kind of dress I wore to family dinners: respectable, quiet, careful. Not so dressy that Marissa could give me one of those thin little smiles and say, “Well, somebody got fancy,” but not so plain that I looked as if I had given up on myself. At seventy-seven, I had stopped chasing fashion years ago. I still believed, though, in arriving neatly where I was expected.
Garrett had said dinner was at seven. I still had an hour.
The house was very still around me, the way old houses get still in the early evening, as if they are listening. Rain tapped lightly against the porch rail. The grandfather clock in the hallway kept time with the same patient tick it had used for thirty years. On the mantel, James smiled at me from a silver frame in the tuxedo he wore at our fiftieth anniversary party. Next to that was Garrett at six, grinning with both front teeth missing and holding up a fishing line with one tiny bluegill on the hook like he had conquered the world.
I looked at James’s photograph a little longer than usual.
“What would you say?” I murmured.
I already knew.
James had been the steady one in our marriage. Kind, but not soft in the wrong places. He used to say there was a difference between helping people and teaching them to lean so hard on you that they forgot how to stand. I had always hated that sentence when it came to Garrett. It felt too harsh, too suspicious, too much like a prediction I didn’t want to hear.
Fifteen years after James died, I still had conversations with him in my head. Widowhood does that. You go on having a marriage in silence.
My phone buzzed on the side table.
I smiled without meaning to and reached for my reading glasses. Garrett, probably clarifying directions to the new house. Or maybe telling me to come a little earlier because Rebecca wanted help setting the table. He had sounded almost boyish on the phone the day before.
“Mom, you have to be there,” he had said. “It’s important. We’ve got a special announcement.”
I tapped the message open.
Mom, plans changed. Marissa is having some coworkers over. We’ll do family dinner another night.
I read it twice. Then a third time.
My smile disappeared.