Page 117

* * *

We ate everything in that kitchen.

That is the honest truth of my last morning as an unmarried man. I sat at my mother's island in Gregory's shirt and ate cold sea bass out of a container with a fork. Lance told an extremely long story about his agent that I do not believe was true, and my father made about nine cups of coffee nobody had asked for, because he needed something to do with his hands.

Nobody said one word about the previous week.

I thought about Steven once, quietly, and hoped somebody was making him breakfast.

Gregory sat next to me with his ankle hooked around mine under the counter, and every so often my mother would look at the two of us, put her hand over her mouth, and have to go and check something in the pantry.

Then we heard a car on the gravel.

It was Benny.

He came around the side of the house with the iPad against his chest, looking like a man intending to be somewhere else within the hour. And walking behind him, in a cardigan and a pair of very muddy sneakers, was Reverend Anne-Marie.

I want to be honest about my first reaction, which was to go and hide in the pantry with my mother.

"Blaine," said Benny. "I'm so sorry. I did call earlier."

"It's fine."

"I've got a truck coming for the arch, and I wanted to walk the meadow first to make sure we're not leaving anything in the grass. Cables, mostly. People always leave cables." He adjusted the iPad. "And Reverend Anne-Marie is — well."

"I left my scarf," said Anne-Marie.

Everybody stared at her.

"It's a good scarf," she said. "I knitted it myself. It's blue. I've been telling myself for days that I wasn't going to come back here and bother anybody about a scarf, and then this morning I thought, Anne-Marie, you're being ridiculous, they're not going to throw you off the property."

"Nobody's throwing you out," I said. "Of course you can look for your scarf."

"Well." She smiled at me. It was a very kind smile and I had not earned it. "You'd have been within your rights."

We all walked down to the meadow. All of us. I don't know how that happened — nobody decided it — but my mother wanted to see about the arch, and my father wanted to see about the truck, and Lance wasn’t going to be left alone in the kitchen. So the entire lot of us went down that hill in the middle of the day like a school field trip.

The grass was still flat where the chairs had been. You could see the rows. The arch stood at the top of it, stripped down to the frame — bare wood, no eucalyptus, no ranunculus, nothing on it at all. Somebody had taken everything off and left a pile of dry stems at the foot of one leg.

It looked completely different without the flowers.

That's the thing I keep coming back to. It didn't look sad. It looked like what it actually was, which is two posts and a beam, and I thought: there's nothing wrong with it.

"Found it," called Anne-Marie from somewhere off to the left. She held up something blue. "It was in the ferns. I've no idea how it got there."

"Right," said Benny, making a note. "That's everything, then."

And Gregory said, "When's the truck coming?"

"Half an hour, they said, but they're never—"

"Don't take it," I said. Much too loudly.

Everybody turned around.

"Darling?" said my mother.

I didn't answer her. I turned and looked at Gregory.