The Bird House A Novel

September 5, 1967

quick shower



PETER CALLED AT 4:30 AND Emma watched me on the phone intently, as if she knew. Could she hear the difference in my voice? Were there variants every time I opened my mouth, lilting to her brother, stern to her, flat to Theo?

Before we hung up we made plans for Wednesday, at the tavern. He said, “Good-bye, love,” and my face flushed; I splashed water on it at the kitchen sink.

I made hamburgers for Emma and me, then kept them warm in the oven while I fed the baby his cereal and applesauce. It was satisfying, his willingness, his swallowing. His gums squeaking against the rubber of the spoon, the flourish of my wrist as we emptied the bowl together.

“Why does he always get to eat first?” Emma whined.

“He eats first because he goes to bed first,” I said firmly.

I was pretty certain this was true, that I’d always nestled him in his crib before tucking her in.

After dinner I played a few games of Candy Land with Emma, then made a point of putting the baby down first. He seemed sleepy and didn’t fuss when I turned to leave. I watched as his eyes made the progression from open to closed, fluttering the same way Emma’s used to, as if he were trying to stay awake and couldn’t. I smiled and stood there a few minutes, watching him sleep, synchronizing the rhythm of his rising and falling chest with my own.

I closed the door when I left, but the bell I’d left hanging inside was gone. A wispy fiber of red ribbon trailed between the knob and the wood, like something a forensics lab would unearth.

When I went in to read to Emma, she said she missed Daddy. I cuddled her against my shoulder and asked if there was anything I could do for her instead. She said that maybe a snack would help. We walked down to the kitchen together and I hummed as I made her a grilled cheese sandwich. It smelled buttery, slightly smoky, as I slid it onto the cutting board and cut it into triangles.

But as I watched her eat, all hunger and no hesitation, no gratitude, I felt I was being slowly choked, strangled by bad manners in my own kitchen.

“What do you say?” I asked as she finished.

She looked at me with blank eyes and I realized she had no idea what I wanted her to say. My prompt held no meaning. My aunt Caro told me once that it took over a thousand times of saying something to a dog before it understood the command. How long did it take with children?

I sighed. These were my coworkers—the toddler, the baby. This was my job—the meals, the dishes, the diapers, the tantrums. The world’s tiniest, most claustrophobic factory. The hours were unbearable and the conditions were apparently not going to improve.

When Theo came home I told him I had to go pick up milk at the new minimart. How was it possible he didn’t hear the lie in my voice? He didn’t look up from his floor plans, didn’t say anything except, “Fine.”

I stood at the door and held my breath, testing him. Let him look up, I thought. Let him notice that something is wrong. He didn’t. I left. Milk.

I turned on the car and pulled out of my parking space. After a few blocks I rolled down my window, despite the slight chill, and breathed in the night air gratefully. I kept going in the direction the car was pointing: east. I passed Haverford College and then left our township, driving slowly past the minimart. Its lights struck me as too bright, almost blue compared to the dark edge of the town. Inside a clerk stared out at the street; he looked bored, a look I recognized from a great distance, even without illumination. I changed course slightly and headed southeast, passing through a few towns I hadn’t seen in years, and which looked seedier than I remembered, until I crossed the intersection near Route 1. There it was. The shopping mall site that occupied Theo nearly every night and weekend. The construction was nearly complete, and the landscapers had brought in several backhoes to start preparing for the garden beds that dotted the parking lot and hugged the facade. As if they could make up for the large concrete structure by softening it with plants. The sign in front said UPPER VALLEY SHOPPING CENTER in curling green type accompanied by an illustration of a tree. What a ridiculous name, I thought. How on earth could something be both “upper” and a “valley”? As I circled around, I saw lights through the window of one entrance, where one of the large “anchor” stores was going in. A group of men rolled white paint along the ceiling, and I commiserated with them. It’s terrible to have to work at night, whether you’re diapering a baby or painting a wall, but at least they had work. At least when they left their house, they had a destination.

I had to face facts: I had nowhere to go, and I didn’t want to go home.

I headed back to Bryn Mawr and parked at the train station circle next to a yellow cab and waited for the local to arrive, as if I had someone to pick up. The cabbie next to me read a tabloid under the dome light. I wrung my dry hands and pretended to have a purpose.

When the train pulled up, the conductor got off first, bouncing a little as he landed. Three other men followed him, each clutching a briefcase, each wearing a dark coat. The trio walked past us, toward the larger parking lot at the town square. The cabbie and I had something in common now; no one wanted us. He turned out his dome light and backed out.

After a minute or so I left, too. I didn’t set out for Peter’s house precisely; the truth was, I knew the address but not the exact location of the street. He lived in Gladwyne, where the homes tended to be grander, but the streets leading there were darker and more circuitous, the street signs small and mossy and barely readable in the dark. It took me a while to find it. It was barely within the city limits, on the edge of what most people considered the town. Most of the driveways wound up hills; Peter’s was short, close to the street. His flat lawn held fits and starts of grass, no trees. The house was white stucco in parts, dove gray and brown stone in others. An optimist would call it a cottage. It looked to have been part of a larger estate, perhaps a caretaker’s house. But no one was caretaking now. The stucco was pocked and peeling, and the bluestone walk leading to the front door was cracked and chipped, as thin as fingernails in places. There were no shutters, window boxes, or shrubs; no tendrils of ivy to soften the facade. It was as cold as the shopping center.

A lamp was still lit in the living room. I pulled over and watched the window, not knowing what I expected to see. For twenty minutes nothing moved through the frames of divided light, not a cat or a fly. I don’t know if Peter has pets, I thought with a start. I don’t know. I saw only a gray sofa and a white lamp. There was nothing on the walls.

I imagined he and his wife were in bed, and left the light on in case one of them needed water, or medicine, or got up to read a book. Surely there was something to read on a low coffee table below my sight line? A trio of magazines, an oversize book of photography? I wanted more for him: books, flowers, art. But even the drapes hid whatever colorful pattern they held, showing only their dull plastic lining.

A cast-iron outdoor light burned at the start of the short walkway, close to the street, illuminating a few forgotten things. The leaves collecting around the light. Petal-less flowers, like undressed mannequins. The silver milkman’s box with a dent in its lid. These things made me immeasurably sad. It could have been beautiful here; it must have been once.

I remembered junior year, when Peter was looking at colleges, he’d chosen Yale but had been so tempted by Princeton. He came home from his interview and told me the grounds were so beautiful; the campus was awash in flowers. And when he bought me a corsage for a dance, it was never carnations, but something more unusual: lilies or orchids. How could a man like that live in a house like this?

I didn’t know his wife, but people had told me she was pretty. Small and quiet, kind of fragile, Betsy had said. And Peter told me she was an excellent mother, a great cook. I remembered being jealous when he proudly mentioned those things, knowing I hadn’t stepped into the world with either of those skills. Mine had been hard earned. When I thought of her—which I didn’t often—I’d always imagined her gardening and baking and decorating. And I’d pictured him fixing whatever needed fixing, as comfortable as he was with hammer and nails. But from the looks of their house, I’d been wrong. All wrong.

This was nothing like my own house with its small oases of turquoise bath beads or overflowing window boxes. No. There were no small bright harbingers that someone was trying. It had been lovely once, but now felt worn and broken, and worse than my kitchen had felt forty minutes before.

I left, and went straight home, forgetting the milk.





May 25, 2010



Tom and Tinsley drive Ellie to and from school every day, and from the looks of the Langley car line this afternoon, so does everyone in the school. Whatever happened to buses? When I went to Langley the parking lot was smaller but I couldn’t remember it ever being full; no one’s parents came unless they were ill. Now the row of minivans and SUVs snaked down the adjacent side street and around the corner; the tedium lasted so long, and was so predictable, people brought newspapers and knitting. I envied them; I had to content myself with filing my fingernails.

Finally I made it to the front of the line and around the horseshoe, and Ellie waved and ran toward the car. I stopped and waited, but she didn’t touch the door. I wondered for a moment if my Civic was so outmoded that the door handle style had gone out of fashion; did she not know how to open the door? I motioned to her, get in, get in, aware of the line behind me, but she shook her head. Finally a teacher opened the door and Ellie scrambled in. The woman pulled the seat belt across Ellie’s lap as if she was an invalid. I turned back to the front so she wouldn’t see my tsk-tsking face. The way these teachers baby these children!

“Was there something wrong with my door?” I asked.

“Oh, only the teachers can touch the cars.”

“You can’t touch your own car?”

“No. My mom says it has something to do with insurance.”

It was our first night and I didn’t want anything to ruin it, so I made a conscious effort not to roll my eyes. My plan was as follows: drive Ellie to my house, help her with her homework, play a game or two of Scrabble, then treat her to an early cheeseburger. The following night I thought we’d go out for a movie and popcorn. But I should have known better than to plan—when there’s a child involved, you never know how a day might unfold.

When we returned to the house, Ellie dropped her backpack in the foyer and I went to the kitchen and poured goldfish crackers in a bowl. I’d seen them once in Tinsley’s cupboard and thought Ellie must like them.

“Bon appétit,” I said, brandishing the dish.

She looked at the orange crackers, but hesitated; her hands stayed down at her sides.

“Go on, before I eat them all,” I said and smiled.

“It’s just that, um, Mom says I need protein after school.”

“Well, there’s cheese in these,” I said.

“That rhymes.”

I watched her eat the crackers, holding each by its tail, then biting the heads. A nibbler, like Tom was—the only boy I ever knew who ate nuts one at a time instead of by the fistful. We used to sit together in front of a jigsaw puzzle and I’d give him his own bowl of peanuts so I wouldn’t be tempted to eat all of them in the time it took him to eat three.

“How much homework do you have?”

“None.”

“None?”

“I finished it during free period.”

“Would you like to play Scrabble then?”

“Can we play in the attic first?”

I squirmed in my seat, remembering the last time. There was too much up there; it had become a dangerous place to play, like running too close to the highway.

“Please? I want to see Grandpa Theo’s pretty handwriting.”

“I tell you what, Ellie, I’ll bring some things down and we can look through them here.”

“Okay,” she said quietly. A bit disappointed, but not too. I still had her affection and attention, I thought.

My knee cracked as I went up the stairs. I thought I knew where the rest of the letters were; all bundled together, in the top compartment of one of my family’s brown trunks. I opened three trunks before I found them. They were tied with green twine, faded now, next to one of my mother’s shoe boxes, which I seemed to recall held more buttons. Remembering Ellie’s idea to put them in a pretty bowl on the coffee table, I brought the shoe box down along with the letters.

I spread a few of Theo’s letters across the dining room table. His words were always so simple—“I look forward to seeing you next Saturday” or “There’s a good play opening in March”—but in his hand they came alive. Only Theo could write the word “like” and have it look like love.

Ellie surveyed her grandfather’s swirling handwriting carefully. “Did they teach him this in school?”

“I don’t think so. We all learned to write the same way, like you.”

“I guess if you look carefully, you can see the regular handwriting hiding in there,” she said, squinting. “He just added some extra dips and swooshes.”

“Yes, I see what you mean.”

“It must have taken a long time to write them this way.”

“No, he was actually quite fast. He always preferred fountain pens, with the liquid ink kind of spreading on its own across the page.”

“Liquid ink?”

I got up and showed her one of Theo’s old pens from the desk, and she twirled it in her hand like an artifact before setting it down. I’d always thought that because he had to use pencils in his work, he was particular about writing letters with pens. A kind of letting go.

“What’s in the other box?”

“Oh, buttons, I believe. Remember what you said about putting them in a jar? I’ll get a vase or something.”

I stood and went into the kitchen, and left her alone with the box. That’s how sure I was of what was in it.

I returned with a stout glass vase to showcase the buttons, but buttons weren’t in Ellie’s hand. More letters were, tied with velvet ribbon, pink, my mother’s favorite color.

My heart sank; my mother had kept my father’s letters? Even after what he did to her? I admit, I wasn’t that thorough about sorting through papers after she died; it was a frantic time, with the children small and Theo always traveling, and Peter tugging on my sleeve. When I cleaned out her room at the nursing home, she had so little it broke my heart all over again. I just put all her shoe boxes and albums into a trunk; I vaguely recall running a dust cloth over them and lifting the lids just to make sure there were no moths or spiderwebs taking hold, but not reading or organizing anything.

“Who is P. S. Biddle?”

“My mother,” I said. “Her maiden name was Phoebe Scott Biddle, but her friends called her P.S. And this”—I untied the bundle and held up the first letter—“must be one of the love letters from my father.”

“Oh, let’s read it!”

“Go ahead,” I said and smiled. At least someone was deriving joy from their relationship.

“‘Dear P.S., It is a very cold spring in Boston. The lecture halls are drafty and some of the students attend class with mittens on. I’ll be done with exams soon and will meet you in Nantucket on Memorial Day. Tell your father I’m ready to fish. Love, Frank.’”

She looked up and pulled a face, twisted and grotesque, like a squashed pumpkin. “That’s not a love letter!”

I couldn’t help laughing. A whole new generation disappointed by my father!

“Well, he signed it ‘love,’” I countered.

Naturally, my cynicism allowed me to read deeply between his lines—male students didn’t wear mittens. My father was staring at a pretty girl wearing angora mittens, while my mother was waiting patiently for him. Why, he’d likely cheated on her the entire length of their relationship, the cad!

“Maybe the rest of them are better,” she said.

I shrugged. My father had never been one to gush over anything. Rather like Theo, now that I thought about it, always stammering and at a loss for anything but the plainest words.

“Grandma, some of these have different handwriting.”

I took a faded envelope from her hand and squinted at the return address. Jay Stephens. The handwriting was small and even, the envelope bulkier than the ones from my father.

Ellie took out three folded sheets and began to read to herself. Her lips moved ever so slightly, a habit I’d have to work on with her; she was getting too old to do that. Suddenly she started to smile.

“This is a love letter!”

“Oh, really,” I said, disbelievingly.

She started to read, in that slightly awkward, halting way children do.

“‘Darling P.S., do your initials stand for “pretty sweet”? Or “perfectly stellar” or “phenomenally smart,” or “particularly suc-cu-lent”?’”

“Let me see that,” I said briskly, reaching out to pluck it from her hands.

She yanked it away, laughing, and continued to read. “ ‘In my book, you’re all four. Seeing you biking into ’Sconset with that basket of roses—I can’t get the image out of my mind. I have half a mind to put a vase of roses on my desk to remind me of you. I’ve only just left on the ferry and I’m already writing to you, planning our next escape. When I see you, I’m going to—’”

“Hand it over,” I said.

“Aw, Grandma, it was just getting good!”

I scanned the rest of the letter. When Jay Stephens saw my mother, he was planning to “ ‘drag you up to the widows’ walk as the sun sets over the jetties and kiss you until it’s time for the green flash on the horizon.’” I read it aloud to Ellie and she said, “Eww!” Then I explained what jetties and widows’ walks were. I could picture it precisely: the sky streaked a wild pink, like lipstick applied on a train. The flat blue water of the harbor. The scent of roses, the sound of bell buoys. The small square on top of my mother’s house felt as snugly dangerous as the crows’ nest on a pirate ship. Ellie was right: this was a love letter.

There were eight envelopes from him in all, spanning the three months she summered in Nantucket. I went through the last letter. Jay Stephens didn’t say good-bye to her in it; on the contrary, he made plans to see her the following month, before she had to close up the house for the season. I reached for the envelope. The postmark was June 8, 1936, two years after my parents were married.

The corners of my smile sank; the letter grew heavier in my hand. Could I be holding my father’s side of the story—that my mother broke his heart first?

“I like the name Jay,” Ellie said.

“Do you now?”

“He sounds nice, Grandma. Who was he?”

Good question, I thought. I went back to the date on his letter, two years after my parents’ nuptials. I was born less than a year later. I reached for Theo’s pen and wrote down “Jay Stephens” and the cities in the postmarks—Greenwich, New York City, Stowe.

“Grandma, what are you doing?”

“I’m going to call my cousin and see if his mother, my aunt Caro, ever mentioned this gentleman, if—”

“You mean you never met him? Why don’t we just Google him?”

“Excuse me?”

“You know, we’ll look him up on the internet.”

“He’s probably dead by now, Ellie. Mother would have been, what, ninety-six?”

“Courtney’s great-grandmother is ninety-three and she smokes cigars.”

“But she’s not on the internet, dear.”

“She could be. People put their family trees on it all the time. Some of the kids in my class got the photos and information for their Generations project that way.”

I felt the beginnings of a shudder along my jawline. Dead people’s christenings and weddings and vacations sprinkled on the internet in such a fashion? That struck me as worse than having them end up at an auction or in an antiques shop. Whenever I stumbled on something like that in a store, part of me wanted to buy up all the framed daguerreotypes just to keep them out of the public eye. Having them displayed seemed a form of grave robbing.

“Well, maybe another time, sweetheart. We have to clean up for dinner.”

She washed her hands and I went upstairs to splash water on my face. I looked in the mirror and saw my mother looking back. I had never resembled my father, something that was a relief to me after he hurt my mother so. I remember how she wept when I went off to college and left her behind in that little bungalow on Aunt Caro’s estate. She looked so small, so alone. Do people think of me that way, too, alone in my house?

I dried my face, took a deep breath, and went downstairs. No time to think of such things when I had Ellie to entertain. Since it was something of a special occasion, I’d decided on the Potting Shed, which was known for its homemade ketchup and pickles. It was an expensive choice, but since I knew we’d be ordering cheeseburgers, it didn’t seem overly extravagant. And this was my pride and joy after all; I couldn’t justify slumming around with her forever. We left at six, so I wouldn’t have to drive home too late.

“Reservations for Ann Harris,” I said and smiled at the young hostess.

She scanned the book and her smile turned into a frown.

“I’m sorry, we don’t have you listed. Could it be under another name?”

“No, it would be Harris.”

“When did you call?”

It was a simple question, honestly asked. But my mind held no calendar or date book or clock. I blinked and said I didn’t know. The hostess looked back at the half-full restaurant, littered with tables marked RESERVED.

“Would you mind sitting near the bar area?” she asked and I said no, not at all, and she showed us to a small table and apologized for the mix-up.

I was pleased to see Ellie put her napkin in her lap before she looked around the room. It was a lovely space, high ceilinged and airy. I remember long ago, the entire structure had indeed been the potting shed for the Perkins estate, and Mrs. Perkins had been known to string it with lights and throw casual dinner parties for fifty people in it, which my parents were sometimes invited to. When the property was broken up and rezoned years ago, a family friend vowed to keep the casual dining tradition alive. The room was decorated in a garden motif—watering cans held simple bouquets that sat on sideboards that used to be potting benches. The tables were covered in brown paper with a cache of crayons in a clay pot. The waitresses wore denim work aprons that had pockets for corkscrews and pens. It was all very casual in the most offhand, upscale way imaginable. Ellie seemed quite taken with the condiment tray of five types of pickles, as well as the widemouthed jars that held their famous ketchup. I ordered a glass of house merlot, which they served in a huge snifter.

The burgers were delicious, and the French fries hot and crisp. We finished with mud cake for Ellie, which arrived in a terra-cotta planter. I sipped the last half inch of my wine and had one bite. It was still dusk when we got up to leave; the bar wasn’t quite dark yet, and the light looked odd, muddy, like the corner of a closet.

“Annie?” I heard as I opened the door.

“It’s a man,” Ellie whispered.

I turned around.

“Annie Harris, you son of a gun.”

Ellie looked at me, wide eyed and amused.

“Peter,” I said softly. I’d seen him several times in the last few years, but from across a room, not up close. From far away, I could only see the difference in his shadow, his extra weight and heft, the reddened tone of his skin. But now I glimpsed the old Peter inside the frame of this new one. His eyes, even half hidden in the flesh of his face, still twinkled. And when he smiled that broad smile his teeth were genuinely white, not the blue-white of people who have them bleached. A man who likes to talk needs nice teeth, I thought, and Peter had always loved to talk, more than any other man I had ever known. I realized with a start that I was smiling, and quickly pulled down the corners of my mouth.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your granddaughter?”

“I’m Ellie,” she said, stepping forward and extending her hand.

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Peter.”

“Peter the high school boyfriend who made the bird house?”

“Ellie, who told you that!”

“You did, Grandma,” she said and my cheeks went cold. When, exactly, had I told her that? And what else had I let on?

“Yes,” he chuckled, “the very same.”

“It’s a very nice bird house. You should make them for a living.”

“I’ll consider that vocation in my next life, perhaps.”

“What are you doing here, Peter?” I said, swallowing hard.

“Eating dinner,” he said, twirling the cherry in his Manhattan. “Like I do most nights before I retire to my bird house making.”

“A cherry’s not much of a dinner,” Ellie pointed out.

“That’s why I ordered a steak.”

“You eat here most nights?”

“Yes, it’s less lonely than Wyndon Manor.”

I raised my eyebrows, but I may as well have whistled, or said, “Well, la-di-da.”

“What’s Wyndon Manor?” Ellie asked.

“It’s a retirement community, sweetie,” he said.

“A very nice one,” I clarified.

“Sit down. Have a drink with me.”

Ellie plopped down next to him.

“Oh, but we have to go,” I said.

“No we don’t,” she replied. “I have no homework.”

“Remarkable! I have no homework, either. Come on, Annie, have a drink with your old friend.”

I sat down and looked at him as carefully as I could while pretending not to. The lines of his face, the definite jaw and the curve of his cheekbone were still there. Even his neatly trimmed sideburns had the same shape, if not the same color.

He ordered a Shirley Temple for Ellie and a glass of pinot noir for me, and showed Ellie how to play quarters while he told me he’d made a lot of money investing in “dot-coms” with his son-in-law, Michael.

“I haven’t spoken to you in years, and the first thing you do is brag about your investments?”

“I was trying to impress you with my success,” he chuckled. “Isn’t that what you always wanted?” he whispered.

My cheeks flamed. “Don’t be silly.”

He talked a bit more about people we knew. He asked about Betsy, and if Theo’s funeral had been difficult. He mentioned that his wife lived in the health care center of Wyndon Manor and had for nearly ten years. I nodded, not wanting to let on that I already knew this, that Betsy had told me years before.

“And how are your daughters? Are they married?”

“One is, one isn’t. Carrie has given me two plump grandbabies in the last five years, and Laura is torturing her boy-friend by traveling all over Europe without him. Every few weeks she emails us pictures of herself with different people she’s met, and most of them seem to be gentlemen.”

Both of his daughters were frozen in time in my mind: from the faded picture he carried in his wallet. They were four and five then, and looked almost identical, with big smiles like Peter’s and the same cowlick in the front.

“Sounds like she’s not ready to settle down.”

“Oh god, Annie, who is, at that age? Were you? Was I?”

“No.” I laughed. “There should be some sort of college you have to go through before they allow you to get married and have children. Something that prepares you.”

“But what can prepare you for the surprises life hands you?” he said quietly.

I sighed and fiddled with a dish of peanuts that sat on the bar. “We’ve both had our share of surprises.”

“And drama,” he said.

“Tragedy and comedy,” I said.

“What are you guys talking about?” Ellie said, turning her eyes to me, then Peter, then back again.

I took a sip of my wine, which was so much better than the other glass I’d had, it was hard not to gulp it down.

“Life,” Peter said. “Love.”

“Love?” Ellie screwed up her face, and we both laughed.

Peter’s left thumb rubbed his wedding ring absently and I remembered this much: he was still married. His wife never fully recovered but he didn’t divorce her—not for me, and not for anyone else.

“Things never turn out quite the way you expect, do they?” I said breezily. “In love or in life.”

“I thought you’d leave,” Peter said quietly.

“What?”

“Who?” Ellie said. “Leave where?”

“Ellie,” he said, recovering with a twinkle, “doesn’t your grandmother seem like the kind of person who’d live in a big city? I always imagined her walking to a great job at a magazine where she’d write articles or short stories and boss everyone around, then she’d leave to pick up her son from school before walking home to a smart high-rise apartment with a sweeping view of the river.”

“Cool,” Ellie said.

I burst out laughing, the wine nearly flying. “I’ll give you this, Peter: you have always known the right thing to say.”

“Have dinner with me next week,” he whispered, leaning in. He smelled of whiskey and cherry and salt, a not-unpleasant combination. It reminded me of the Jersey shore, of pink taffy and paper cones full of French fries, cheap but delicious.

“That,” I said and smiled, “was not the righ—”

“You and Ellie, meet me here.”

“I’m free.” Ellie’s eyes were hopeful; she liked the bar stools, the darkness, the sticky feeling against her hands. She inhaled deeply as she spun in her chair, searching for a whiff of the forbidden.

“I don’t think so,” I said, but I didn’t stop myself from smiling.

We spoke of a few old friends who lived nearby. I told him a bit about Tom’s job, where he worked, what he did, but he said he already knew, which struck me as odd. Had he been checking up on us?

Ellie slurped the last bits of soda through her straw, and I took the sound as a buzzer: it was time to go. The sky was darker when I stood up and told Ellie we had to mosey on.

“Well, if you change your mind about dinner, you know where I am. Every night.”

“Yes,” I said softly.

He shook Ellie’s hand solemnly and leaned over to kiss my cheek. His lips brushed, then lingered a moment. There was no dampness or sound, just a connection. As if he took a tiny part of me with him when he pulled away. I shivered, and made an inane comment about the weather turning chilly.

I walked to the door, his gaze warming the back of my head. What a change, I thought, him watching me go. My head was still spinning when I got out to the parking lot and fumbled for my keys.

I opened the doors and Ellie climbed into the backseat. I turned left out of the lot instead of right, and got turned around on the winding Gladwyne streets. The street markers were the old-fashioned kind, bitter green and small, and I couldn’t see them in the darkness. I rubbed my temple; the red wine headache was starting now instead of in the morning.

“I hate driving at night,” I fumed. We were trapped in a web of cul-de-sacs; it was ten minutes before we finally stumbled out onto a main artery. Which main artery, I couldn’t say.

“Are you okay, Grandma?”

“Yes, yes, don’t worry, dear.”

“You should get a GPS.”

“Nonsense, oh good, there’s River Road ahead, we’ll cut over.”

I was halfway around the curve when the deer came from out of nowhere. Instead of slowing or braking, I swerved to the left, around it, missing it, but sending the car careening across the right lane and back left again, bouncing against the curb. Another car approached and Ellie screamed, “Grandma!” while I finally got the wheel to the right and back straight again. Overcorrection, they call it.

Ellie’s sniffling came up from the backseat and I gripped the wheel tighter to stop my hands from shaking. I pulled across the next intersection and parked at the base of someone’s driveway.

“We’re fine, Ellie,” I said, but my heart was racing. “Everything’s fine.”

“I know,” she said softly.

We sat in the strange driveway a few more minutes. When I leaned back to pat Ellie’s hand and tell her everything was truly okay, no harm done, I noticed she had her right hand in her pocket. I imagined at first that she was fingering a lucky penny, a marble, some talisman that calmed her.

But then she spoke: “Don’t worry, Grandma, I—I won’t tell my mother.”

“What? Why on earth?”

“She told me to call her if you ever get lost or forget anything.”

I breathed as lightly as I could, trying to regulate it, not let too much of anything out.

“Or if you drink more than one glass of wine,” she whispered.

“Everyone forgets now and then,” I said quietly.

“I forgot Meghan’s birthday last year.”

“See? We’re alike, then.”

As I pulled out and inched our way home, I imagined the small emergency phone nestled in her pocket, waiting to be put into service, waiting for something to go wrong. And I wondered what she would have said to Tinsley about it all—the phrases she would have used, the description of the deer, of the animal who crossed our path when it was too dark out to see.