Letty squeezed the arm of Margo’s chair.
“You don’t have to know what you’re doing,” Letty said. “You just have to let yourself know why you’re doing it. That’s the onlypart you’re missing. Not the doing—you’re already doing it. The letting yourself know.”
Margo sat with Letty’s hand near hers and the wine in her glass and the ocean through the door and four women looking at her with thirty years of patience behind their eyes.
“What if it doesn’t work?” she said.
“What if it does?” Eleanor said.
Margo finished her wine. Eleanor poured her another half-glass without asking. The conversation moved—back to the bakery on Forest, back to Nadine’s niece, back to Letty’s granddaughter from Portland. The Circle folded back into itself.
Margo walked home at nine-fifteen. The street was quiet. The lamps made their small yellow circles and she walked through them one at a time.
Coat on the hook. Keys in the bowl. The house quiet around her.
The studio was dark. The canvas was where it had been for weeks. She stood in front of it and didn’t pick up the brush.
Sleep didn’t come for a long time. But the not-sleeping was different tonight—not the restless kind, not the turning kind. The kind where you lie still in the dark and let a thing settle into the place where it’s going to live.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
She didn’t call first.
She drove to his house on Wednesday at three-fifteen because that was when she went to Bernie’s house on Wednesdays, and she had missed one, and the missing had become louder than the reasons she’d given herself for staying away.
She parked at the curb. The porch light was off, which meant he wasn’t expecting anyone. The hedge needed trimming. The wind chimes were still.
She sat in the car for a minute with her hands on the steering wheel and her purse in the passenger seat and no bag of groceries, no jar of soup, no foil-wrapped chicken. She had brought nothing. She was the thing she was bringing.
She got out of the car and walked to the door and knocked.
It took him a moment. She heard the floorboard by the kitchen—the one that creaked—and then his footsteps, even now, unhurried. The door opened.
Bernie looked at her.
He was in a collared shirt and his reading glasses were on top of his head and he had a dish towel over one shoulder and thekitchen behind him smelled like coffee. He looked like he’d been in the middle of something and had stopped.
“Margo,” he said.
“Bernard.”
They stood there, the doorway between them, the porch light off and the afternoon light coming in sideways from the west.
“Can I come in?” she said.
He stepped back and held the door.
She walked into the kitchen. The flamingo cards were on the corner of the table. The tally was still on the fridge—she could see it from the doorway but she didn’t look at the numbers. The mugs were in the cabinet where she’d put them. The coffee maker was on, the carafe half full.
They stood in the kitchen. Margo on one side of the table, Bernie on the other. The afternoon light was on the floor between them—the rectangle she’d watched move across this room for weeks. It was at the table leg. Four o’clock light.
“I didn’t come for cards,” she said. “And I didn’t come because you had surgery.”
She put her hands on the back of the kitchen chair—the one she always sat in, the one across from his. She held the wood and looked at him.
“I need you to tell me what you meant,” she said. “When you said I didn’t need to come anymore. I need to hear what you were actually saying, Bernard, because I went home and I stood in my kitchen and I was angry and then I was something else and I have been walking around for days not knowing which one I am.”
She took in a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling.
