What My Daughter Saw At The Store
Todd noticed everything I noticed. He is a careful man, not given to alarm, and for weeks he said almost nothing about any of it, which told me more than if he had said a great deal. One night in early August he finally admitted it out loud, sitting across from me at our own kitchen table with the baby monitor for our daughter’s old room still plugged in out of habit even though she has not needed it in years.
“I keep thinking about my mother’s old choir director’s husband,” he said.
That man was not a blood relation to us, just an old friend of the family, a widower two towns over who lost eleven thousand dollars two winters ago to a man who called him three times a week and told him he loved him like a son. It took his own son finding the wire transfers to end it. Nobody in our family had said the word out loud yet, but I understood exactly what Todd meant, because I had been carrying the same fear since the bank line, dressed up in different clothes. A lonely widow. A patient stranger. A story that only needed a few months to work.
We had other guesses too, quieter ones we did not say to each other directly. That the cardiology visits were more serious than she was letting on, and the cash was for tests or a treatment she did not want the family fretting over. That grief, thirteen months in, had finally found a crack to get through, and this was what it looked like when it did.
Grief in that house had never once looked like sadness, not the kind you can see from across a room. Marilyn did not cry at Howard’s funeral until the very end, and even then it was quiet, a handkerchief and a straight back. She went back to her garden three days later. She hosted Sunday dinner that same month like always, ham and butter beans and the same congealed salad she has made since before I was born. If you did not know to look, you would have called her fine.
I had started to wonder, by that second week of August, whether fine had just been the version of Marilyn we were allowed to see.