Chương 2
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened.”
“Mom.”
“They looked better in the store.”
Claire had closed her eyes.
“Is Ryan there?”
This pause had been longer.
“Yes.”
“Put him on.”
“No, no. He’s outside.”
“You just said he was there.”
“He’s around.”
Claire had heard something scrape in the background.
Then Eleanor whispered, “When are you coming next?”
Not whether.
When.
Claire looked down at the phone screen after the call ended and saw that the conversation had lasted three minutes and forty-seven seconds.
She had driven south without changing clothes.
Ryan opened the front door forty minutes later.
He looked surprised, then pleased, then annoyed, all in the time it took him to say, “Major Whitmore.”
Claire had never liked when he called her that inside the family.
He had been doing it since her promotion.
“Ryan.”
He leaned against the frame.
“You know normal people send a text before appearing in ceremonial uniform.”
“I was nearby.”
“You’re never nearby.”
“I am today.”
He smiled.
“You look like Dad.”
That nearly made her leave.
Instead she stepped past him.
The house had belonged to their parents for thirty-four years, although Claire still thought of it as the newer house because the one before it had been a cramped military rental where the furnace failed every January and their father swore at it with inventive precision.
This house had been renovated repeatedly after his retirement. Eleanor changed things in stages: dark wood became pale oak, yellow walls became white, brass fixtures became brushed nickel. The kitchen was the last major project. Elegant white cabinets, pale marble, a wide island their father called “the aircraft carrier.”
Ryan had installed half of it.
That fact mattered to him.
He mentioned it whenever money or inheritance came up, even before there had been an inheritance to discuss.
Claire entered the kitchen and saw her mother on the floor.
Eleanor was sitting against the island with one leg folded awkwardly beneath the other.
There was a pair of glasses on the marble beside her.
Ryan came in behind Claire.
“She fell.”
Claire set her garment bag over the back of a chair.
Eleanor tried to smile.
“It was stupid.”
Claire crouched.
“What hurts?”
“Nothing.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“My hip a little.”
“Head?”
“No.”
“Did you lose consciousness?”
“No.”
Ryan opened the refrigerator.
“She tripped looking for her glasses.”
Claire looked at the glasses on the floor.
Then at her mother.
Eleanor was not wearing her wedding ring.
Claire noticed that before she noticed the bruise.
For forty-three years, Eleanor Whitmore had worn the same narrow gold band beside her engagement ring. After Daniel Whitmore died eleven months earlier, she moved the wedding band to her right hand because, she said, the left felt too empty with only one ring and too crowded with both.
She had not taken it off at his funeral.
She had not taken it off for surgery twenty years earlier until a nurse insisted.
“Where’s your ring?”
Eleanor’s eyes went immediately to Ryan.
Ryan shut the refrigerator.
“Which ring?”
Claire stood.
“The one I’m asking about.”
Eleanor rubbed her thumb against the bare place on her right hand.
“I misplaced it.”
Ryan sighed.
“See? This is what I’ve been dealing with.”
Claire looked at him.
“What have you been dealing with?”
“Her memory.”
Eleanor’s head turned.
Only slightly.
Claire saw the humiliation in it.
Ryan kept talking.
“She loses things. She forgets stuff. She gets up in the middle of the night and leaves cabinets open. Last week she put the television remote in the pantry.”
“I did not.”
“You did.”
“I put it down beside the pantry.”
“You found it inside.”
“No.”
“Mom.”
Ryan said the word with exhausted patience.
It was convincing.
Almost.
Claire had been trained to distrust confidence when confidence was doing too much work.
She crouched again.
“Mom, where are your reading glasses?”
Eleanor pointed weakly toward the floor.
“There.”
Claire picked them up.
The frame was red.
Her mother’s glasses were tortoiseshell.
Claire turned the red pair over.
Drugstore readers.
Ryan’s jaw tightened.
“What?”
Claire looked at him.
“You said she fell looking for her glasses.”
“That’s what she told me.”
Eleanor stared at the floor.
Claire stood and crossed to the chair where her mother’s champagne-colored handbag rested. She opened it without asking.
Ryan said, “Seriously?”
Claire found a folded tissue, a wallet, hand cream, two peppermint candies fused together in their wrappers, and Eleanor’s tortoiseshell reading glasses.
She took them out.
Her mother closed her eyes.
Claire held one pair in each hand.
“Which ones are yours?”
Eleanor pointed to the pair Claire held.
Ryan rolled his eyes.
“They’re both glasses, Claire.”
“No.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“One pair is hers.”
“She buys cheap readers all the time.”
Eleanor said, “No, I don’t.”
Ryan turned toward her.
“You have three pairs.”
“I have one.”
“You had the blue ones.”
“Those were your father’s.”
“Same thing.”
“No,” Eleanor said.
Her voice sharpened unexpectedly.
“They were not the same thing.”
Ryan looked away.
Claire watched him do it.
She put her mother’s glasses in her left hand and set the red pair back on the floor where she had found them.
Then she asked, “How did she get the bruise?”
Ryan rubbed his forehead.
“She fell.”
“On what?”
“The counter.”
Claire looked at the counter.
“Which part?”
Ryan stared at her.
“What are you doing?”
“Which part?”
“The edge. I don’t know.”
“There’s no blood.”
“Why would there have to be blood?”
“There wouldn’t.”
“Then why mention it?”
“I didn’t. You did.”
The old rhythm came back between them so easily that Claire almost hated herself for recognizing it.
Ryan pushing.
Claire refusing to move.
Their mother trying to make the room smaller around them.
May you like
When they were children, Ryan had always been the louder one. Claire learned that silence irritated him more efficiently than argument. Their father mistook that for maturity and praised Claire for self-control. Ryan heard every compliment as subtraction.
By nineteen, he could turn any family dinner into a referendum on fairness.
