I had not been this quiet inside myself in a very long time.
Spring moved into summer on Whitmore Lane, and I learned the rhythms of a house that was mine. The east-facing sunroom was extraordinary in the mornings. I moved a small table and chair there within the first week and took to eating breakfast in the early light with a book. It became my favorite hour of the day.
Harold, I thought, would have been insufferable about how right he’d been to always advocate for an east-facing room.
I told him so out loud a few times.
The house didn’t seem to mind.
I bought a proper kitchen table, a large oak one from an estate sale, the kind with enough surface area to roll out pie dough and host a dinner and do a puzzle all in the same week. I put Harold’s armchair, kept in storage since selling the Tucson house because I couldn’t part with it, in the corner of the living room by the west window, and it looked as though it had always been there.
I started a garden that was, in the assessment of my neighbor Frank, ambitious.
Frank was 68, a retired schoolteacher, a widower, and a genuinely gifted grower of things. He came over the first Saturday with seedling starts, and we spent the morning talking about soil and drip irrigation. We have since made a habit of Saturday mornings and occasional dinners. He is good company in the quiet way that suits me.
In June, Caroline flew in from Portland. She walked through the house with the expression I recognized from when she was a girl and had been given something she’d hoped for without asking. She sat in the sunroom on the first morning and said, “Mom, this house is you.”
It was the best review I had ever received.
She asked me carefully about the money. Not the amount. Not what it meant for her. But whether I was okay, whether the people I’d hired were people I trusted.
“Yes,” I told her. “Completely.”
She exhaled.
“Then that’s all I need to know.”
I had raised that girl right.
As for Daniel, I will tell this part as honestly as I have told the rest.
We met for coffee in late March, then again in April. The conversations were careful. We were both learning how to talk to each other without the old architecture of resentment and avoidance. It is harder than it sounds. But we were both trying, which is the beginning of something.
What I learned over the following months was this.
Renee had consulted 2 attorneys about challenging my financial decisions. Both had told her there was nothing to challenge. The effort had been expensive and had produced nothing.
Daniel and Renee separated in September, about 6 months after I moved to Whitmore Lane.
I did not feel satisfied by this. Whatever Renee had done, she was the mother of my grandchildren, and a family breaking apart is not something I have ever wished for.
But I could not pretend it was something I had caused.
