You have spent twenty-four years believing you did something wrong. You did nothing.
You are not hard to love, my petit chat. You were the easiest thing I ever did.
And then, near the bottom, in that hard upright hand of hers — a line I have skated straight past every single time.
So cook in my kitchen. Sleep in my house. And stop leaving before people can leave you.
I sit down on the edge of a bed I've been sleeping in alone for three days, in a house a dead woman gave me, and I read it again.
Stop leaving before people can leave you.
She knew.
Sheknew.She watched me do it at twelve years old in the back of my mother's car, and she knew I'd do it again the first time anybody offered me something worth keeping. And she was dying — she had months, and a farm to arrange, and two granddaughters to gamble on — and she still sat down and took the time to write me the one sentence I would need on the exact night I'd need it.
And I have had it in a drawer for three days.
I've been so busy waiting for Iris to leave me that I never noticed.
I'mthe one who left.
I've been gone a week.
I get up.
I don't shower. I don't rehearse. I don't cook anything, which for me is very nearly a religious experience.
I go down the hall. The fourth board creaks. The seventh one creaks.
I stand outside her door with my grandmother's letter crushed in my fist and my heart going like a bird in a box.
Then I knock.
29
IRIS
Somebody knocks on my door at half past ten at night, and I know precisely who it is, because there are only two of us in this house and I have spent three days listening to her not come.
I don't move.
The knock comes again. Then, muffled through the wood: "It's me."
"I know."
"Can I come in?"
I look at the ceiling of the bedroom I slept in for my first three nights in this country. The bad mattress. The good view. I've been in here seventy-one hours and I've spent about sixty of them constructing the speech I intend to give her — in order, with subheadings.
"Yes," I say.
She looks appalling.
That's the first thing. Cat Aldridge, who once produced a four-course dinner after twelve hours in a professional kitchen and still looked like she'd been for a pleasant walk, is grey and hollow and wearing yesterday's shirt, and she has plainly not slept, and she is gripping a piece of paper in her fist like it's the only thing holding her upright.
She stops in the middle of the room and opens her mouth.
Nothing comes out.
