“He used to ask me where I was going,” Claire said. “You know, years ago, he’d ask, and I’d tell him, and he’d say, ‘Oh, have fun.’ Now he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t ask where I’m going. He just asks when I’m coming back. There’s a difference there.”
Nina understood the difference. One indicated interest, and the other just indicated someone taking inventory. One said, I care about your life. The other said, I need to know when my life goes back to normal.
“What do you want to do about it?” Nina asked quietly.
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”
The way she said it, quiet and honestly bewildered, told Nina this was the truest thing Claire had said about her marriage in years. She didn’t seem angry or sad.
She just seemed genuinely confused, because she was a woman who had spent twenty-six years building something and was now starting to realize she didn’t know what she’d built or even how strong it was.
They dropped Harper at her building in Charleston. Then Claire drove Nina to Edisto, and the road narrowed to two lanes. Nina got out of the car with her containers, but she leaned back through the window.
“Claire?”
“Yeah?”
“You know what Señora Morales said about the tortilla? That you don’t want to think, that it wants you to feel?” Claire just looked at her. “Well, anyway, maybe that’s not just about the tortillas.”
She didn’t wait for Claire to respond. She just squeezed her arm through the window and walked up the porch steps, the marsh singing its night song as Nina walked into her kitchen and put the mole on the counter.
She called Elena. She answered on the first ring, which meant she had been sitting there waiting.
“So how was it?” Elena asked.
“I made the mole, Elena.”
A silence settled. Nina could hear Elena’s shallow breaths, imagining her in her modest house surrounded by little saints on the shelf and photos of David adorning every wall.
“Was it good?”
“Señora Morales said David taught me something after all.”
Elena made a noise that was neither quite a laugh nor a cry. It was the sound of a mother hearing her deceased son’s name spoken with affection by someone gradually learning to honor his memory.
“I’ll bring you some tomorrow,” Nina said.
“Bring Lucia,” Elena said. “We’ll eat together.”
“Okay.”
“And Nina?”
“Yeah?”
“Good girl.”
Elena hung up because she didn’t believe in long goodbyes.
Nina stood in her kitchen holding her phone, next to the mole on the counter, feeling like she was finally in the right place for once.
CHAPTER 7
The confrontation, when it eventually appeared, wasn’t truly a fight. It was just an ordinary Tuesday. Claire was preparing dinner because that was her usual routine.
Over twenty-six years of marriage, the division of labor became an unspoken arrangement that nobody explicitly agreed to, yet everyone adhered to.
Claire cooked.
