“The body isn’t even cold yet.”
“No boundaries,” Molly said. “I mean, she’s our mother.”
There was silence, except for the stream.
Then Daniel said, “Do you think they…”
“What? Do I think who what?”
“You know. Mom and Karl.”
“Daniel! You’re, you’re a…” She wanted to say pervert, but she was overcome by a wave of nausea.
“Molly, oh god, that’s disgusting.” He moved out of the way as she retched.
“Thank god Ben didn’t see that,” she muttered, still leaning over the side of the chair.
*
The next morning was a Saturday and Coco took Cora to a mall an hour away as compensation for too much nature, Ben and Ruby went out on a bike ride, and Molly and Danny were both still asleep. Joy made herself a soft-boiled egg that was too hard and a piece of toast. The house was unusually quiet, no construction equipment grinding next door, no grandchildren squabbling. Even Gatto was silent, asleep in a patch of sun in the kitchen. Joy drank her tea and thought how serene it was.
Alone at last.
That was meant to refer to a couple, surely. Two lovers, alone at last.
Nevertheless.
She and Aaron had lived together for so long they had barely noticed each other, like two old dogs asleep before the fire. Without him, the room was empty, any room. Yet it was wearing to be around other people. That was something she realized more and more. People you love, they wear on you, too. Molly and Danny and Coco and the girls, she wanted them to be near every minute of every day—it was wearing, that was all. Lovely. And wearing.
She looked for the jam in the refrigerator, but then remembered Coco kept it in the cabinet. But she kept peanut butter in the fridge instead of the cabinet. It was aggravating, all this change. Coco and Danny put knives in the dishwasher, they left the bathroom door closed when no one was in it. There were so many things here, Upstate in her house, that were done differently now. The television remote was new and made no sense to her, but then, she was not allowed to watch television, anyway, she made it too loud and disturbed everyone. The toilet paper was the wrong brand, as were the paper towels and the dishwashing liquid. The towels were folded oddly and put in the wrong closet when they were clean or, when they had been used, hung wet and moldering on hooks she had never installed in the bathroom. The place had become almost foreign to her, as if she were a stranger, a stranger in the house her mother gave her, the house she had nurtured and protected for so many years.
She wondered what would happen if she agreed to live with Karl. It was possible he would turn out to be another comfortable old dog, just like Aaron, just like her, but it was more likely he would be wearing. New, unfamiliar, and wearing.
Of course she would bring him to Ruby’s bat mitzvah. Her children were behaving like children. They should be happy she had a new friend. She hadn’t mentioned Karl’s proposal that the two of them live together, but even that should make her children happy. Would they prefer she be sent off to a nursing home, by them? Like Freddie’s father? To fend off some senile old goat? Like Freddie’s father? Molly and Danny were probably worried about their inheritance, that’s what it was. She was doomed to rot on a urine-stained sofa like Mrs. Astor. Except there was no inheritance. Except the house. Which they wanted to sell. Where she no longer belonged.
She tried to shake off this feeling that she was an intruder, the sense that even this timeless place had moved on and left her behind. She went outside and sat in one of the Adirondack chairs. Such an unpleasant smell. The dog must have vomited. She moved to the porch swing and breathed in the wet summer air, so familiar, her summer air. But it felt all wrong, even the air was wrong, heavier than she remembered it, stickier. The fresh smell of grass and soil and the damp living smell of the stream evaded her. She had hoped, she’d been sure, that Upstate was where she would get her bearings again. She would walk along the road and pick wildflowers, wade in the stream to cool off from the summer heat, pick raspberries from the thorny hedges at the bottom of the hill.