Chapter One
The Photograph
The photograph Ruth mailed from Tampa has been in the drawer since January. I have not looked at it since the afternoon it came, and I am not going to pretend that was anything other than a choice.
The drawer is in the kitchen. Second one down, left of the stove, the one that sticks in summer and slides open too easily the rest of the year. I put it there because the kitchen is the room I use most, and because there is a particular kind of cowardice in hiding a thing from yourself and a particular kind of honesty in putting it where you have to reach past it every time you want a spatula. I have reached past it for three months. I know exactly where it is. I know exactly what it shows.
A man I used to know, standing beside a woman named Helen, in a photograph Ruth clipped from the Asheville library newsletter. A fall dedication of some kind. Ruth still gets the newsletter because leaving Asheville did not mean leaving the library, and Ruth still reads everything the way she always did, cover to cover, including the alumni notes and the donor pages nobody reads. She clipped the photograph, put it in an envelope, and mailed it to me without a note, because Ruth has never in her life needed a note to make a point.
Paul is in the photograph. I know this the way I know the drawer sticks in July, which is to say I know it with my whole body and I have not let myself stand still with it yet.
I sat on the porch that Tuesday morning and looked at the yard and thought about the drawer. The herb garden was coming in. April did what April does in Virginia, which is make promises it only half intends to keep, and the rosemary was already thick and the lavender was starting. Across the low hedge, Cassie’s house sat where it always sat, white clapboard and green shutters and a porch that creaked in a pattern I could identify by ear. It was Elspeth’s house first. Then it was empty. Then Cassie moved in, and the house remembered how to be alive, because Elspeth’s houses always did.
Cassie was on her own porch, pretending she was not watching me. She was drinking coffee and reading something on her phone and glancing over every thirty seconds or so with the casual precision of a woman who thought she was being subtle. She was not being subtle. Cassie has never been subtle. I walked into her kitchen five years ago with a casserole and found a singed ceiling, a summoned Scotsman, and the kind of chaos that made me tired just standing in it, and she has been pretending not to watch me since.
I appreciated it. I have always appreciated it. But appreciation and permission are not the same thing, and I was not ready to let anyone in on what was in that drawer.
