“Yeah,” I say. “We can try again.”
Susan nods. “I’m so sorry, Elsie.”
“Me too,” I say, and it isn’t until I say it that I realize I mean it. We sit there for a minute, considering each other. Can we do this? Can we be good to each other? Susan seems convinced that we can, and she’s determined to take the lead.
“All right,” she says. “Let’s get composed and head out.”
“You are much better at composure than I am.”
“It’s a learned trait,” she says. “And it’s entirely superficial. Hop in the shower, I’ll wait here. I won’t poke through anything, I promise.” She puts her hands up in the air to signify swearing.
“Okay,” I say, getting up. “Thank you, Susan.”
She closes her eyes for just half a second and nods her head.
I head into the bathroom, and before I shut the door, I tell her she’s welcome to poke through anything she likes.
“Okay! You may regret this,” she says. I smile and get in the shower. While I’m washing my hair, I think of all the things I have been meaning to say to her for weeks. I think of how I’ve wanted to tell her the pain she caused me. I’ve wanted to tell her how wrong she was. How little she really knew her own son. How unkind she has been. But now that she’s here, and she’s different, it doesn’t seem worth it.
I get dressed and come out into the living room, and she’s sitting on the sofa, waiting. Somehow, she’s put me in a better mood.
Susan drives us to a random restaurant she found on Yelp. “They said it was private and had great desserts. Is that okay?”
“Sure,” I say. “I’m always up for someplace new.”
Our conversation, when not about Ben, doesn’t flow as freely. It is awkward at times, but I think both of us know that is to be expected.
I tell her that I am a librarian. She says that she loves reading. I tell her that I am not close with my parents; she says she is sorry to hear that. She tells me she’s been working on occupying her time with various projects but can’t seem to stick to something longer than a few months. “I realized I was too fixated on the house so I stopped renovating, but truthfully, renovating is the only thing that keeps me occupied!” Eventually, the conversation works its way back to the things we have in common: Ben, dead husbands, and loss.
Susan tells me stories about Ben as a child, about embarrassing things he did, tricks he tried to play. She tells me how he would always ask to wear her jewelry.
The visual of Ben in women’s jewelry immediately cracks me up.
She drinks her tea and smiles. “You have no idea! He used to always want to dress up as a witch for Halloween. I would explain to him that he could be a wizard, but he wanted to be a witch. I think he just wanted to paint his face green.”
We talk about Steven and how hard it was for her to lose him, how much of Steven she used to see in Ben, how she feels like maybe she suffocated Ben, trying too hard to hold on to him because Steven was gone.