Home Safe by Elizabeth Berg Page A

stacked up to hide another box. There it is, the Christmas gift she bought for Dan and received in the mail two days before he died. As part of the gift, she had promised herself not to tell anyone else about it, not Tessa, not even Midge. Dan had a man's typically ambivalent feeling toward the relationship his wife enjoyed with her best friend: glad she had such a treasured confidante, but a bit worried about the content of all they shared. She thought it would please Dan that this gift was something only the two of them knew about. It had pleased her.
    On the day the gift was delivered, she immediately hid it in her closet until she could wrap it—she'd intended to put it in a much bigger box, so that he'd never be able to guess what was in it. She has not seen it since the day she put it here; she had, in fact, forgotten about it.
    She unfolds the paperwork lying on top of the Bubble Wrap: World War II Navy Mark II Sextant, manufactured by David White, 1943, Original GI Issue. Precision ground lenses, brass gears and fittings, stainless steel screws. Very fine and precise navigational instrument .
    She pulls the antique out of the box and holds it in her hands, moves the horizon mirror forward and back, studies the half-moon-shaped graduated arc, the telescopic lens. She imagines how pleased Dan would have been to receive this, how he would have looked at it, then up at her; again at it, then up at her. He would have understood that she had gotten it as a way of telling him to go ahead and buy the boat. Not for nothing had he read aloud to her William Steig's Amos & Boris , the children's book about a mouse who sets off to sea. Dan had brought the book home the day after he and Helen had shared with each other their retirement fantasies, and he had read it to her that night, in bed. Helen had particularly liked the passage about Amos, the mouse sailor, lying on his boat's deck and looking up at a night sky crowded with stars. At that moment, Amos was more aware than ever of his tiny size against the vastness surrounding him, but he also came to understand his essential part in and of it. For Helen, the scene suggested a metaphysical kind of anchoring that one longs for and rarely achieves, a respite from a primary loneliness as common to humans as blood and bones. So although Dan had read the book to her as a last-ditch attempt at persuasion, she took it as a conversion experience.

ten
    “G OOD EVENING ,” T ESSA'S DOORMAN SAYS .
    “Hi, Walter. Is Tessa home?”
    “Surprise visit?”
    “Yes.”
    “She just got home. She got a new pair of boots today. That young woman has style . Of course, I'm the one who told her about them. They were in Vogue . Would you like to see?”
    “Maybe later. I need to go and talk to Tessa.”
    Helen rides the elevator up, thinking of how she might tell her daughter what she has learned. All afternoon, she pondered whether or not she should tell her at all. Maybe she should just sell the place without looking at it, why make it more complicated? In the end, she decided to come and talk to Tessa face-to-face.
    When her daughter opens the door, Helen speaks before Tessa can. “I know, I didn't call. But I have to talk to you about something.”
    “What happened? Did something happen?”
    “It's not bad. It's … odd.”
    Tessa steps back from the door so that her mother can come in. “I just got some Chinese,” she says.
    “Enough?” Helen asks, and Tessa says of course.
    While they eat straight from the cartons, Helen tells her daughter about the house. She tells her, too, that she's thinking of selling the place, sight unseen.
    “How can you say that?” Tessa asks.
    “Because we're not going to move there, so why spend the time and money looking at it? I like living here. I don't want to live somewhere else.”
    “I could live somewhere else.”
    “No, you couldn't.” Helen grabs a broccoli spear, puts it in her mouth, and sucks off the sauce.
    Tessa gives her a