We ate at her kitchen table, the same one we had sat at a thousand times. The same scratched surface. The same slightly wobbly leg that she fixed with a folded napkin. The same window above the sink that looked out at her backyard, where the bird feeder hung from the same hook it had hung from for thirty years.
Everything was the same.
Except I knew something now that I hadn’t known the last time I sat here. And I could feel the weight of that knowledge pressing against the inside of my chest, making it hard to breathe normally.
She asked about Renee. I answered. She asked about Marcus. I answered. She asked if I had been sleeping okay. I said yes, which was not entirely true, but not entirely false either.
Then she put her spoon down and looked at me.
“Dot,” she said. “Can I tell you something?”
I felt my heart shift. Not speed up. Shift. The way a car shifts gears when you’re going uphill.
“Of course,” I said.
She looked down at her bowl. Stirred her soup without eating any of it. Looked back up at me.
“I’ve been thinking about Raymond a lot lately,” she said. “More than I probably should be. More than is probably appropriate.”
I waited.
“He was a good man,” she said. “You know that. You lived with him for forty-three years. But I don’t think you know how good he was to other people. To people who weren’t you.”
My throat closed. I forced myself to take a sip of water.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Nothing specific. Just. He was the kind of person who showed up. You know? When things were hard. When people needed someone. He showed up.”
I did know. That was the worst part. I knew exactly what kind of person Raymond was. I had married him because of that.
“He showed up for me once,” Gloria said. “A long time ago. When Curtis left. When I was a mess. He showed up in a way that I didn’t expect and didn’t know how to ask for.”
My hand was shaking. I put my spoon down.
“What way was that?” I asked.
She looked at me for a long moment. Her eyes were wet, but she wasn’t crying. Not yet.
“He just sat with me,” she said. “He didn’t try to fix anything. He didn’t tell me it would be okay. He just sat there. For hours. And I never forgot that.”
I wanted to ask: Was that all? Was that really all? But I didn’t. Because I already knew the answer. The letters had told me. The third row had told me. The careful deletion of messages had told me.
That was not all.
But I couldn’t prove that, and even if I could, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
“That sounds like Raymond,” I said. My voice came out steady. I was proud of that.
Gloria nodded. She picked up her spoon again. She ate a bite of soup.
“I miss him,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t say that to you. I know he was your husband. But I miss him too. Is that terrible?”
