“You don’t need to keep coming,” he said.
Margo didn’t move.
“I’m not saying I don’t —“ He stopped. Started again. “I’m saying I’m fine. The surgery is done. The recovery is done. I can make my own tea and cook my own dinner and walk to the Shack and walk home. You set up a system to take care of me and the system worked and now I’m better.”
“I know you’re better.”
“Then you know you don’t need to come three times a week.”
She picked up her mug. The tea was too hot. She drank it anyway.
“I didn’t say I was coming because you needed me to,” she said.
“Why are you coming?”
She didn’t have an answer. She had several answers — the cards, the tea, the routine, the kitchen with the light that moved, the lemon tree in the garden, the tally on the fridge — but none of them were the answer to what he was actually asking and she knew it.
“I’m not asking you to stop,” he said. “I’m asking you to think about why you come. Because if it’s because I had surgery, the surgery is over. And if it’s something else, then I’d like to know what it is.”
Margo stood up.
She didn’t plan to stand. Her body stood. She picked up her mug and took it to the sink and set it in the basin without rinsingit, which she never did, and she stood at the sink with her hands on the edge of the counter and looked out the window at the lemon tree and the bench and the rosemary in the pot.
“Margo, that’s not what I —”
“I heard you.”
“I’m not trying to —”
“I said I heard you, Bernard.”
She turned around. He was still in the chair. His tea in front of him.
“I have to go,” she said.
“You just got here.”
“I have to go.”
She got her coat from the hook and her purse from the table by the door. She didn’t look at the tally on the fridge. She didn’t look at the flamingo cards. She went to the door and opened it and stopped.
She wanted to say something. She didn’t know what it was. It was in her chest, behind her ribs, pressing against something she didn’t want to come out in Bernie’s kitchen on a Wednesday afternoon.
“Goodbye, Bernard,” she said.
“Goodbye, Margo.”
She pulled the door closed and walked to her car.
She drove home. It was six blocks. She could have walked but she’d driven today because she’d had groceries in the car that she’d planned to bring in, and she’d forgotten the groceries, which were still in the back seat, which she realized when she pulled into her own driveway and saw the bag and sat there looking at it.
She brought the groceries inside. Put them away. Stood in her kitchen.
She was angry. That was the first thing she identified. She was angry at Bernie for saying what he’d said in the specific wayhe’d said it, which was calm and reasonable and true, and she was angry at herself for leaving, and she was angry at the leaving for feeling like something she hadn’t meant to do.
Underneath the anger was something she didn’t want to name.
She’d been hurt.
