“We’re leaving now,” Stem said.
“Oh! Well, tell Nora Happy New Year.”
“And you thank Mom for us, okay? Do you think she’s running an errand?”
“Married?”
“Errand. Could she be out running an errand?”
“Oh, no. She doesn’t drive anymore.”
“She doesn’t?” Stem stared at him. “But she was driving just last week,” he said.
“No, she wasn’t.”
“She drove Petey to his play date.”
“That was a month ago, at least. Now she doesn’t drive anymore.”
“Why not?” Stem asked.
Red shrugged.
“Did something happen?”
“I think something happened,” Red said.
Stem set the boys’ backpacks on the breakfast table. “Like what?” he asked.
“She wouldn’t say. Well, not like an accident or anything. The car looked fine. But she came home and said she’d given up driving.”
“Came home from where?” Stem asked.
“From driving Petey to his play date.”
“Jeez,” Stem said.
He and Red looked at each other for a moment.
“I was thinking we ought to sell her car,” Red said, “but that would leave us with just my pickup. Besides, what if she changes her mind, you know?”
“Better she doesn’t change her mind, if something happened,” Stem said.
“Well, it’s not as if she’s old. Just seventy-two next week! How’s she going to get around all the rest of her life?”
Stem crossed the kitchen and opened the door to the basement. It was obvious no one was down there—the lights were off—but still he called, “Mom?”
Silence.
He closed the door and headed back to the sunroom, with Red following close behind. “Guys,” Stem said. “I need to know where your grandma is.”
The boys were just as he’d left them—sprawled around the Parcheesi board, jackets not on, Sammy still in his socks. They looked up at him blankly.
“She was here when you came downstairs, right?” Stem asked. “She fixed you breakfast.”
“We haven’t had any breakfast,” Tommy told him.
“She didn’t fix you breakfast?”
“She asked did we want cereal or toast and then she went away to the kitchen.”
Sammy said, “I never, ever get the Froot Loops. There is only two in the pack and Petey and Tommy always get them.”
“That’s because me and Tommy are the oldest,” Petey said.
“It’s not fair, Daddy.”
Stem turned to Red and found him staring at him intently, as if waiting for a translation. “She wasn’t here for breakfast,” Stem told him.
“Let’s check upstairs.”
“I did check upstairs.”
But they headed for the stairs anyway, like people hunting their keys in the same place over and over because they can’t believe that isn’t where they are. At the top of the stairs, they walked into the children’s bathroom—a chaotic scene of crumpled towels, toothpaste squiggles, plastic boats on their sides in the bottom of the tub. They walked out again and into Abby’s study. They found her sitting on the daybed, fully dressed and wearing an apron. She wasn’t visible from the hall, but she surely must have heard Stem calling. The dog was stretched out on the rug at her feet. When the men walked in, both Abby and the dog glanced up and Abby said, “Oh, hello there.”
“Mom? We’ve been looking for you everywhere,” Stem said.
“I’m sorry. How was the party?”
“The party was fine,” Stem said. “Didn’t you hear us calling?”
“No, I guess I didn’t. I’m so sorry!”
Red was breathing heavily. Stem turned and looked at him. Red passed a hand over his face and said, “Hon.”
“What,” Abby said, and there was something a little too bright in her voice.
“You had us worried there, hon.”
“Oh, how ridiculous!” Abby said. She smoothed her apron across her lap.
This room had become her work space as soon as Denny was gone for good—a retreat where she could go over any clients’ files she’d brought home with her, or talk with them on the phone. Even after her retirement, she continued to come here to read, or write poems, or just spend time by herself. The built-in cabinets that used to hold Linnie’s sewing supplies were stuffed with Abby’s journals and random clippings and handmade cards from when the children were small. One wall was so closely hung with family photographs that there was no space visible between one frame and the next. “How can you see them that way?” Amanda had asked once. “How can you really look at them?” But Abby said blithely, “Oh, I don’t have to,” which made no sense whatsoever.
Ordinarily she sat at the desk beneath the window. No one had ever known her to sit on the daybed, which was intended merely to accommodate any excess of overnight guests. There was something contrived and stagey in her posture, as if she had hastily scrambled into place when she heard their steps on the stairs. She gazed up at them with a bland, opaque smile, her face oddly free of smile lines.