For Love by Sue Miller Page B

died, for her as well as for himself, that he didn’t feel he mourned at all. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I feel as though her death has given me back some earlier version
of her. The way she was then. And I feel so . . . tender for that person. I’m mourning that person now, I guess.’ He had looked at Lottie with pouched, tired eyes. ‘On your
time.’
    Finally Lottie had stopped getting up with him. Often she didn’t even wake now when he slid carefully out from under the covers, when he padded across the carpeted bedroom floor, the
clicking of bones in his ankles the only sound he made.
    He looked at her again across the kitchen table. His eyes seemed deeper momentarily, a darker color. ‘Poor Lottie,’ he said.
    She shook her head. ‘Poor Jack,’ she countered.
    He smiled. ‘In general, a sorry group.’
    Lottie drank some more coffee and set her cup carefully in the saucer. The china was Jack’s – Jack’s and Evelyn’s – like almost everything else. It was elegant,
formal, some Wedgwood pattern with intricate little dragons chasing each other round and round the rim. Nothing Lottie would have chosen. ‘I don’t know what I expected,’ she
said.
    ‘But it wasn’t this?’
    ‘No.’ She looked at him. ‘It was this: I knew it’d be . . . hard. I knew you’d still be feeling terrible about Evelyn. But I didn’t expect it to feel the way
it does to me. I thought
I’d
be different, honestly.’
    They were quiet for a moment. Faintly they could hear music, what Megan called music anyway: the steady punch, punch, punch of rap. ‘You’ve been a trouper,’ he said.
    Instantly her eyes filled with tears. ‘Don’t say that. Don’t say a stupid thing like that. This isn’t something I’m enduring.’
    He watched her as she grabbed a paper napkin and blew her nose.
    ‘When will you go?’ he asked after a minute.
    ‘Mid-June or so, I guess. Cam has to get the roomers out of the house, and that’ll be the hard part. They’ve been there forever. They’re entrenched. They’re working
on
theses
. And Ryan wouldn’t be able to come till then anyway. I’m going to try to reach him in the morning to see if he’s interested. Cam says Mother’s estate can
pay him, and I know he’d like the money. He loves money.’
    ‘Well. It’ll be nice for you to have some time alone together with him.’
    ‘Yes. In all honesty, I was dreading this summer here. The two of them in the same house.’ She gestured vaguely up at the distant pulses of Megan’s music.
    But this wasn’t the truth. The truth was that Lottie hadn’t been able to imagine Ryan living here with them. Jack was used to a more public life with Megan and his other children.
For years there’d been a housekeeper and a daytime nurse for Evelyn, and the shape of their life together seemed connected to that: they were all polite with one another. She would have
called it
distant
if she couldn’t feel the affection too.
    She and Ryan had always had a messier relationship, volatile and intimate. They fought loudly and often, and he sometimes swore at her; but he was also capable of a rough affection –
wrestling holds that loosened to a kind of embrace, occasionally a visit to her bedroom after a date or an evening out, when he sat by her feet and earnestly and self-importantly explained his
feelings about some girl, or a political event, or something he’d read, liberally sprinkling all his comments with profanity. How could any of that become part of her life in this house?
    ‘Megan likes Ryan,’ Jack said. ‘I thought she even had a crush on him during the wedding stuff.’
    ‘She hasn’t had to live with him yet.’ Lottie got up and took her empty cup to the sink. From here she could see across a wide patch of grass and low bushes to their
neighbors’ house. The lights were off in their kitchen now, but all the upstairs windows blazed. Homework, Lottie thought.
    ‘You think it’ll be most of the summer, then?’