“You told her enough,” Eleanor said, and the words were not unkind but they were not lenient either.
He stopped. Looked around the room, which was clean and quiet and entirely itself again. Looked at his mother, standing at the sink, drying her hands on the dish towel she had made from an old flour-sack fabric she had bought at an estate sale because it reminded her of her own grandmother’s kitchen.
“I’m sorry,” he said, quieter now.
Eleanor dried her hands and hung the towel on the hook by the sink where it had always hung.
“I know,” she said.
She turned and looked at him. Her son, thinned out by too much work and too many accommodations, standing in the house he had once said smelled like peace, looking at her with the expression of a man who understands he has allowed something to go on longer than he should have.
“I need you to understand something,” she said.
He nodded.
“I changed the trust. The house will not be coming to you when I die. I have made other arrangements, and they are final.”
His face moved through something complex. Not anger. She had not expected anger from him and did not see it. What she saw was pain and a kind of deflation, as though something he had been holding up at a slight remove had fallen closer and proven heavier than anticipated.
“Okay,” he said after a moment.
“I am not telling you this to punish you,” she said. “I am telling you because you deserve honesty, and because I have been providing less of it than I should have for some time.”
He looked at the floor. At the scuff near the door. At the hallway lamp with its crooked neck.
“She said things to you,” he said. “Tonight.”
“She said things tonight and she has said things before. Tonight she said them in my home to my face with an audience present.”
“I’ll talk to her.”
“Yes,” Eleanor said. “You will. And more than once. But what you do about your marriage is your business, and I am not inserting myself into it. What I am telling you is that my house and what happens to it is my business, and I have handled it.”
He looked up at her.
“Do you still want me here?” he asked. “This weekend.”
She considered the question as seriously as it deserved.
“Yes,” she said. “But quietly. And alone. Megan can join us in the fall, after we’ve had some time. Right now I need this weekend to be what I came for.”
He nodded. “I’ll sleep in the guest room.”
“You always did,” she said. “It still has the yellow quilt.”