to squeeze one last trip into the nine weeks that stretched like a suspension bridge across a deep and wide gully, their anniversary on the other side.
Bathroom light off, covers up on her side of the bed, and on his. Married. Before Ethan, she hadn’t even held this picture in her head; she wouldn’t have known how to.
She stepped out of the apartment, closed the door, and headed toward the elevator. He always told her as soon as he knew he was going back. Sometimes a trip would be planned weeks in advance, and sometimes he’d be leaving that night. She was used to not knowing when. What was different this time was not knowing if.
2
Howell House could accommodate three residents, and the staff had referred to these three women as the Fates for as long as Cass had worked there. No one knew who’d first given them the name or how it had been intended, but Cass took it as a sign.
On her way over, she avoided the sidewalk cracks as if she were trying to make sure she stepped on solid ground. Look up—May was always telling her to look up—and there were the lacy pink and white flowers of the dogwood trees. Columbus was where she’d first seen them—the four strong petals, flawed around the edges, surrounding the heart center.
At the coffee shop, her usual medium latte with coconut milk. Back on the sidewalk, as her steps quickened, her worn canvas messenger bag rubbed against her thigh. Inside the bag, her slim laptop and a copy of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the first book she’d read to May almost four years ago. Now May wanted to read the book again. At the intersection, Cass stopped and took a sip of coffee.
“Is he home?” Vee asked, out of breath.
“Where’d you come from?”
“I saw you from the bus.” Vee was thirty-two, three years older than Cass, and tall, with shiny, black hair that looked as if she’d taken the scissors to it herself, in the dark.
“Is that glitter in your hair?” Cass asked.
“You like it?”
“I do, actually.”
“How is he?”
“Wonderful.”
“Maybe if Dillon left for two months, he’d be wonderful when he got back.”
“Ha,” Cass said, leaning forward to push the button. Dillon was an alcoholic and Heathcliff-ish, according to Vee. Cass had never met him. Ethan hung out with her and Vee every once in a while, but she and Vee were friends, not the four of them.
“Those buttons don’t do anything,” Vee said. “They’re there to make you think you have control.”
Cass stared at the light, willing it to change. “He might be home for good.”
“I don’t care what the two of you agreed to,” Vee said, her hand waving in the air as if it wanted to fly away, and her tattoo—a tiny bird in flight toward her wrist—sneaking out of her sleeve. “Everybody in the world wants The Afghan Woman guy to keep going to Afghanistan.”
Cars passed in a blur. “I thought you were on my side.”
“You know I am.”
“He brought up the agreement himself this morning.”
“And I woke up thinking about it,” Vee said. “But I mean, do you want to be that person, the woman who stopped him from going back?”
Cass stepped away from the curb and looked at Vee. “I’m not stopping him. He wants more than just Afghanistan. The agreement was his idea.”
“Right,” Vee said, but she might as well have rolled her eyes.
The wind gusted. Cass turned her head to the sky.
“Perfect day to knock hang gliding off the list,” Vee said.
Vee’s lists. One with things she wanted to learn how to do and the other with things she was afraid to do, which made her want to do them. Mostly, she and Vee were two of a kind, but Cass’s lists never included doing the thing she was afraid of.
“Aren’t you going the wrong way for the library?” Cass said.
“Health center. Out of birth control pills. What did he bring you this time?”
“This handmade journal the size of my palm. With a papery light green cover and this delicate green thread that wraps around it.”
“I just love the way he brings you things.”
The light changed, and they started across Howell Mill, each knocking into the other between the white lines.
“Singer sends his regards,” Vee said. Singer was the artist bartender where she and Vee hung out—where Vee went almost every day after work. Cass joined her when Ethan was gone.
“Back at him,” Cass said, thinking of his red hair and warm smile. Singer was a bright light at the end of a long day—and he was always here.
As they separated on the other side of the street, Vee waved over her head.
But Cass felt as if she’d forgotten something, and it took her a few seconds to land on Vee’s words about Ethan’s famous Time cover. When she did, she told herself not now, steering her thoughts back to reading to May, who’d made it to ninety-three but who, according to her doctor, wouldn’t live much longer. She’d told Cass, “It’s my heart. I used it up. Isn’t that grand? I didn’t waste any of it.”
At the entrance to the deserted parking lot that had once been Hattie Howell’s front yard, Cass tripped over a tree root but recovered without falling. Maybe the staff should park out here. Energy was what this place needed. And music. Open windows. But at the moment, all the windows were painted shut.
3
At Howell’s front door, Cass used her key. Hattie Howell hadn’t had any children, and when she died at ninety-six, her will created a foundation to run a home for older women. She wanted other people to have the benefit of aging as she had—in a real home. Plus, she wanted them to have something she hadn’t had—the benefit of living with others. In the foyer, a sofa sat against the back wall and in front of it, a coffee table with a bowl of lemons—real. That had been Cass’s first suggestion. Real lemons made it an entirely different place.
“It’s me,” she yelled.
“Morning,” Ella yelled from the back of the house.
Off the foyer to the right was Bev’s glass office—regal Bev with milky smooth black skin. Cass unlocked the door. She didn’t have an office and would usually sit in the breakfast room or the kitchen to make notes or file reports. She had more contact with the Fates, whereas Bev managed the staff, the finances, the regulations. Cass was the Fate liaison; Bev, the board liaison.
But when Bev was not here, like this week, with Ella’s help, Cass did it all. She dropped her stuff on the desk. And in six more months, Bev would
