“Joanna” by Molly Gott

I always got along with my girlfriends’ families, and for that, I had Florence to thank. She set a real precedent for me. The first time I went down to Georgia with her granddaughter—my girlfriend—Maxine, I didn’t know what to expect. Florence was an authentic Southern debutante, with a dining room wall covered in oil portraits of herself. To my surprise, she was very kind to me. And she did provide a warning. That first night, when Maxine went down to the basement to dig up an extra set of sheets, Florence stood in her enormous, brass-adorned kitchen and said, “She left home when she was sixteen, did she tell you that?”

“She did.”

“My oldest grandchild. She was impatient. Stubborn, too. Is she still that way?”

“She is.”

“That’s not a thing that changes in a person. Once a leaver—”

Maxine came bounding up the stairs then, with her Cheshire Cat smile, so I didn’t get to say what I believed, which was: On a long enough timeline, isn’t everyone a leaver?

With Maxine and me, it took another fifteen years, but it did eventually happen. She left me without warning, on a winter night, the week after New Year’s. It was like a country song about a man going out to buy cigarettes and never coming back. I mean: it was wholly unbelievable. I was sitting at our kitchen table, leafing through a seed catalog when she said she had to run out to the pet store for the dog’s new senior formula food. Thirty minutes later, she called from a payphone at the gas station two miles from our house.

“I don’t think I’m coming back,” she said.

“You cannot be serious,” I replied.

But she was serious, a rarity for her. We were living communally then, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and all our friends were really shocked. They said there was no way she meant it, she was having some kind of psychotic episode, she would surely be back. But I knew her, and I knew the voice she used when she’d made up her mind. She never came back. We never saw each other again. A month after she left, she sent me a list of belongings she wanted from the house—everything fit in two boxes, which I shipped to the Vermont address she provided.

Florence had been dead for a year, so I never did find out what she thought of Maxine leaving me like I was a housewife in curlers. I don’t think she would have said, I told you so. She was harsh, but not cruel. I liked to think she would have hit Maxine on the back of the head and said, What is your problem? That girl was the best thing that’s ever happened to you. I spent a lot of nights imagining that.

Many years later, I pulled off my wool socks in the locker room of the YMCA. It was quiet for a Saturday afternoon, just me and a young woman standing in front of the sauna, fidgeting with the temperature dial. Snow kept people away. I’d have an entire lap lane to myself, a relief. My daughter, Anya, had left for college on the West Coast and I was having a horrific time at work. I was in a period of feeling very sorry for myself, and that required space.

The young woman—she looked only a few years older than Anya—opened the wooden sauna door, stuck her head in, then turned up the dial even higher. Waiting for the temperature to climb, she turned to the room’s sole full-length mirror and put her hand to her neck, which was encircled in a green ring. This had happened to me before, when I wore cheap jewelry into the chlorine.

“Do you need some makeup remover, honey?” I asked, already fishing the plastic bottle and a cotton round out of my locker.

The young woman startled, just slightly, at the sound of my voice. It was always monastically quiet in there, and I had a feeling the snow falling outside further muffled any sound.

“Yes, thank you,” she said, and stretched out her hand. I rose from my bench, set the cotton round on her palm, and dribbled the makeup remover until it was soaked through.

“You might have to really work at it, but it will come off.”

“Alright.” She turned back to the mirror and began scrubbing at the green ring with fierce determination.

The pool, which I swam in three or four times a week, had a utilitarian beauty. The lifeguards kept it clean. The overheard lights were florescent, but the far wall was made of glass, overlooking a wide avenue. I adjusted my swim cap and lingered at the water’s edge. I’d missed a phone call from Anya that morning. Should I have waited by the phone instead of coming here? Should I have called Gloria (my ex and Anya’s mother) to make sure everything was alright? I knew that was silly. I couldn’t stop my life every time I missed a call, but I wasn’t used to her living so far away yet; the distance had made me illogical, uncertain of how to behave.

I dove into lap lane four—my favorite—and propelled myself toward and away from the glass wall again and again and again. I loved when my feet slapped the concrete for a turn. The water was cold enough to motivate.

The last time I saw Florence alive, we were down in Georgia to celebrate Christmas with Maxine’s family. I still found Christmas novel then and committed to it with the whole-hearted spirit only an outsider can have. I was baking sugar cookies in a checkered apron when Florence asked me to go out to the rose garden with her.

“It’s snowing,” I said.

“I have something I want to show you.”

Maxine looked up from her spot in the living room where she was fixing a shelf, caught my eye, and shrugged.

“Alright. Let me just take this apron off and put my coat on.”

In the rose garden, with the snow coming down, she said, “There’s nothing I need to show you. I need to ask you for a favor.”

“A favor?”

“I need you to drive me over to Dahlonega.”

“Why?”

“To see Jim.”

“Jim?” Jim was her ex-boyfriend from years earlier. I’d never even met him. Florence was engaged in romantic drama until the day she died, which Maxine and I agreed you had to respect.

“Yes, Jim.”

“I don’t think—well, I don’t think your family likes him very much.” “That’s why I’m asking you to take me.”

“It’s snowing.”

“And that’s the second reason why I’m asking you to take me. It’s not safe for me to drive in these conditions. You’re young. You’re from New York. You can drive in the snow.”

“I really can’t.”

“Sure you can.” She looked toward the house, then bent over one of the brittle rose bushes, beckoning dramatically in a performance of “showing” me something.

“We’ll tell them we’re out of bacon and have to run to the store.”

I sighed. “They can check the fridge and see there’s bacon. Let’s tell them we need more butter.”

The roads were worse than I’d anticipated. In Maxine’s truck, I drove ten miles below the speed limit, gripping the steering wheel, my whole body tense.

“You’re doing great,” Florence said the second time the tires skidded. “I really do appreciate it.” She pulled a gold tube of lipstick from her purse and began re-applying in the rearview mirror. “I would wait, but he’s leaving town tomorrow.”

“For how long?”

“Forever, maybe. He’s moving to the desert, where his son lives. He sold the house. He’s leaving tomorrow and he just told me yesterday. Can you believe that? Unbelievable. I have to go over there and let him know it’s unbelievable.”

The snow began to slow and finally we reached Jim’s house. It was bigger than I’d imagined from how Maxine talked about him, as if he was some kind of low life, a real scum of the earth man, but this was a respectable brick house, with pillars and manicured hedges out front.

Florence opened the door and then looked at me, expectantly. I didn’t know what to say. “Good luck,” I said. “I’ll wait here.”

She eased herself down from the truck and walked gingerly up the icy path to the house. Terror struck me. If she fell, how would I explain it to Maxine and her family? She looked tiny and shrunken. Finally, she made it to the door. She steadied herself, pulled her shoulders back, and knocked. Jim answered quickly. They did not embrace. She stepped inside. Immediately, he kneeled down with surprising grace and I saw he had a pair of slippers in his hands, which he set down before her. She placed her hand on his shoulder, slipped her shoes off, and put the slippers on in one swift motion. I imagined they’d done this thousands of times. He stood back up and closed the door.

I waited, trying to imagine what they were doing inside Jim’s house, but I couldn’t get any farther than an image of the two of them sitting at a white kitchen table. After thirty minutes, Florence emerged and shuffled her way back to the car. Again, I was terrified she would fall and again she didn’t. She seemed unchanged and completely composed, but when she lifted herself onto the passenger seat, I saw she was still wearing the slippers, which were now wet from the snow.

“Your shoes,” I said.

Florence looked down at her feet. “Oh!”

“Do you want to go back inside and get them?” I thought of her making her way across the icy path again. “Or I could do it?

“No,” she said, inserting her seatbelt into its buckle. “No, I do not.” I drew my breath to argue.

“We will stop at the store to get the butter though,” she said, leaving no room for discussion.

At the grocery store, I offered to run inside by myself, but Florence said, “No, I’ll come with you.”

I followed her to the dairy aisle. She somehow made the slippers look like real shoes.

“Which kind?” I asked in front of the butter case.

She pointed to a brand wrapped in gold foil.

On our way to the checkout line, in the soda aisle, she paused and straightened her back and said, “Do you think you and Maxine will ever have children?”

I did not. I didn’t want children then, and Maxine didn’t either. We were both thirty-four. For years, she’d been saying, in a dreamy way, that she was interested in fostering troubled teenagers—I would say we could talk about it when the time came, although it sounded like a nightmare to me, and I knew the time would never come. But I was flattered Florence would ask, standing under the florescent grocery store lighting, in her wet slippers, having just said goodbye to a man who, for all I knew, was the one true love of her life.

I was flattered Florence would ask, standing under the florescent grocery store lighting, in her wet slippers, having just said goodbye to a man who, for all I knew, was the one true love of her life.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I think we will.”

“Very good.”

I never did tell Maxine about my expedition with her grandmother that day. When we got back to the house, Maxine was under the massive Christmas tree, rigging up a complicated mechanism to ensure it would not topple over in the middle of the night, like it had in previous years. “Come join me!” she called when we opened the front door. Orchestral music played from the stereo. Florence excused herself to take a nap and I joined Maxine on the soft, lemon carpet, surrounded by boxes of ornaments. She paused her work, smiling at me with a screwdriver between her teeth until I laughed and she set it down. “I was starting to worry,” she said, taking my socked feet in her lap and squeezing them. “Thought about calling the grocery store.”

“The roads were icy.”

“But you handled them?”

“But I handled them.”

She stood up and began to hammer a metal hook into the wall behind the tree. “Thank you for taking her. You know how she can be when she sets her mind to something.”

When I got home from the pool, the red kitchen telephone was ringing off the hook. It was Anya, upset. Gloria was, evidently, having some kind of surgery. Did I know that? I didn’t. How couldn’t you know? she said, through tears. And it’s snowing there? She doesn’t have anyone to take her home from the hospital and it’s snowing!

I tried to calm her down, then called Gloria.

“Our daughter tells me you are having surgery and need someone to drive you home from the hospital.”

“I told her not to call you.”

Gloria refused to specify what kind of procedure she was having, and I refused to ask more than once. If she wanted to keep secrets, there was nothing I could do to stop her. I had learned that long ago and given up on the hope that I could somehow shake them loose from her.

Her procedure, whatever it was, was being performed in a hospital outside the city, which seemed bad to me. Why not one of the hundreds of hospitals here? It must have required one hell of a specialist. Or worse, she was cutting corners, going to someone who would do it for a discount. So like her, I thought, to endanger herself without considering the consequences for other people. It was easy for me to dip into that egoism, to believe I knew what was or was not like her.

Gloria said the surgery was scheduled for the end of the month. She would take a cab to the hospital by herself, and, if everything went well, spend only one night there. I could pick her up on Friday morning.

“I’ll be there,” I said.

“You don’t have to sound so smug about it.”

I was hurt, but she was probably right. I probably did sound smug.

I was having trouble filling my evenings during that period. No Anya to entertain. No one I was interested in thinking about. There was still an hour of daylight left and the snow was slowing. The landlord usually sent a service to salt the sidewalk in the morning, but I’d seen a shovel in the downstairs utility closet, and, after the conversation with Gloria, I couldn’t face being inside for the rest of the night.

I met Gloria ten years after Maxine left me, at a fundraiser for a community farm I did some pro bono accounting work for. This was the summer of 1988. The fundraiser was an elaborate dinner in the middle of one of their fallow fields. Halfway through the second course, an unexpected thunderstorm hit. We fled our tables and rushed into the barn to take cover. I leaned against the wall, watching the lighting and thinking about how, as a child, my mother would take me into our dank garage to watch summer storms with her. After an hour, the rain stopped. Everyone cheered. Then Gloria stood up on a bench to announce that the road into the farm was flooded. “But not to worry!” she said. “Be merry while we figure it out.” She was wearing a loose denim shirt, so I didn’t notice she was pregnant until later, when, after everyone else had left, in the loft above the barn, she offered me rum punch from a galvanized bucket. She gave me the chair while she sat on a small wooden bench.

“You’re going to let me drink alone?” I asked.

She let out her yelping laugh and pulled at the back of her denim shirt, so it was tight around her belly. “For three more months, anyway.” She lifted her hand to the bottom of the glass and tipped the rum into my mouth. Then she took my hand and pressed it against her stomach, while using her knee to open my legs.

Two months later, we moved into the apartment on East Third Street, where Gloria still lived, where she was sitting right now, looking down at the slush-filled street, angry that, despite everything, she still ended up with me driving her home from the hospital.

When Maxine and I were together, we never had any messages on our answering machine. Most of our friends lived nearby and walked over if they had anything to tell us. But one afternoon, right after my thirty-fifth birthday (I remember there was discarded silver wrapping paper in the corner), I came home from town to the machine lit up red. When I hit PLAY, Maxine’s mother’s voice filled the kitchen, a blinking telegram from another world. “I am calling because your grandmother is in the hospital with pneumonia. It’s nothing to worry about, but I knew if I didn’t tell you and you found out later, you’d use it as an excuse not to talk to us.”

I called the clinic, where Maxine was working a double-shift, and got one of the other nurses to put her on the phone.

On the drive down to Georgia, we fought. We could fight about anything. I actually liked fighting with Maxine. It was athletic. Her grandmother had been right; she was stubborn, but not in the way most people are. She was a flexible thinker with immutable conviction. This was inspiring and maddening, in mostly equal measure.

Florence’s situation worsened quickly. I didn’t realize that people die of pneumonia all the time and so was confused all week, always one step behind whatever Maxine was telling me. When it became obvious that Florence was not going to recover, Maxine convinced her mother to move Florence back to the house, so she could die in her own bed, surrounded by family. It seemed wrong for me to be in the room when she died, so I excused myself when it became clear it was about to happen. Maxine’s entire family was assembled, forming a ring around the bed.

They were quiet, painfully awkward, tense. From the hallway, I heard Maxine break the silence. “Does anyone have anything they want to say to Florence?”

I was stunned, again, by her good-and-direct-ness.

After the funeral, the family gathered at Maxine’s uncle’s house, a rambling ranch-style surrounded by thin pine trees, at the edge of a man-made lake. Buck was an enormous man with six black labs. The oldest one was also named Buck. No one seemed to think it was funny except me and Maxine.

It was a warm, wet spring evening. On the rickety wooden deck, the family started telling stories. Because I hadn’t heard the stories my entire life, I became the audience.

“Has she ever told you,” Buck began, handing me a bottle of beer, “about when Mama stole the guns back for me?”

“I don’t think she has,” I said.

“Maxine, what have you been telling her?” Buck took a swig from his bottle and leaned back, readying himself to tell. “My father was, by all accounts, including his own, a real piece of shit.” He looked at Maxine. “You’ve told her that?”

“She knows.”

“He was very unfaithful to my mother. When I was eight and Maxine’s mother was ten”—he pointed to Maxine’s mother, who was listening from her spot next to the hot tub—“he left her for his secretary. And then, six months later, he dropped dead on a tennis court on a hot July day. He’d already divorced my mother, left her nothing. He kicked her out of the house. She didn’t have a college degree—she’d dropped out of school to marry him—and was working at the market to support us. That apartment—I don’t like to think of it. She was a very hard worker. She went back to college in her forties—you know that?”

“It’s really impressive.”

“My father always promised me I would inherit his gun collection. His new wife said no. All the guns were locked in the basement of Daddy’s house, where we no longer lived. My mother gave that woman three chances. Every time, she said no. The guns belonged to her, she claimed. Maybe when she died, I could have them. One day, Mama picked me up from school. I don’t know where Maxine’s mother was that afternoon. She picked me up from school and there was a big, fluffy towel on the passenger seat, which she told me to hold.”

“At the barn,” Maxine’s mother broke in. “I was at the barn.”

“First, we stopped at the hardware store. Mama bought a hammer and a roll of duct tape. Then we drove over to Daddy’s house. Our old house. Mama told me to wait in the car. She went right up to the front door. There were rectangular windows on both sides. Mama duct-taped the towel to one of them. Then she used the hammer to break the glass. Once she removed the towel, she stuck her hand right through the broken window and unlocked the door, calm as could be. The new wife hadn’t even changed the code on the gun safe. Couple minutes later, she came back out to the car, carrying the guns. I’ve had them ever since. They’re in the basement right now. She was always calm under pressure. Graceful. That’s how I’ll always remember her.” Buck took a long swig of beer and several family members tutted in agreement.

“She forgot to pick me up,” Maxine’s mother said from her perch.

“What?”

“From the barn. She forgot to pick me up that day. I stayed at Helen’s house until eleven that night, when she finally remembered me.”

Buck’s face darkened. “That’s not the point.”

“It was the point to me.”

Tension rushed over the family, a wire pulled tight.

I excused myself and went inside to fish another beer from the cooler. I knew Maxine’s mother had a right to assert her version of the story. Still, I found myself siding with Buck. I was grateful to have witnessed his awe, and the way he seemed to believe it would keep him safe.

The thing was, I thought about leaving Maxine all the time. No, that’s not true. I couldn’t imagine the act of leaving. I saw us together, I saw us apart. What it took to get there—a black box. We had so much furniture! How could I leave? Where would I go? Some people make homes in other people. It makes leaving very difficult.

Afterwards, I thought of Maxine in Vermont, feeding a stove. Her practicality. The rigor she applied to daily life. My shock: in the end, her imagination eclipsed mine.

I bought ice packs. I made a list of Gloria’s favorite comfort foods. I called Anya and assured her everything would be alright. The snow stopped, then started again.

In those first weeks after Maxine left, our friends wanted to hold vigil with me. I swatted them away like flies and spent most of my time walking the dog. Trudging through the leafless forest, I realized: I’d expected Maxine and I to slowly unbraid ourselves from each other. I had witnessed that kind of divorce—it was rare, but it did happen. It seemed to involve a steady drip of pain, stares across a sturdy kitchen table, lots of heads in hands and chamomile tea. The couple dissolves. Two people emerge. A decade later, they embrace at a party and smile, sensibly, at everything that has passed between them. The other partygoers, witnesses now, think to themselves, those two—what a testament to the power of time, then take another hors d’ouevre.

That kind of divorce seemed to involve a steady drip of pain, stares across a sturdy kitchen table, lots of heads in hands and chamomile tea.

I wanted that kind of divorce. I didn’t get what I wanted, which is not the same as getting nothing, but it felt the same for a very long time. I stayed in Tennessee for another two years. I did not replace any of the belongings Maxine asked me to ship to Vermont. I learned to live without a blender. Friends came over and I had no wine glasses. A framed photograph of a Texan mesa hung above our bed and one night, it came crashing down on me, dragging the nail out of the wall with it. I never re-hung it—no hammer. Anyway, I left the photograph behind when I moved back to the city. To my friends in Tennessee, I described my move as temporary, even though I knew it wouldn’t be. I was never good with short stints. You meet people, you delight in encountering certain dogs on your walk to work, you learn which hardware store is better, which market sells fresh ramps every spring. You accumulate knowledge and then you’re supposed to throw it all away? I could never bring myself to do that. I’ve loved so many people who dreamed of escape (Maxine and Gloria being only two). When they asked, in their different ways, Don’t you want to run away? I answered truthfully: No.

The day before Gloria’s surgery, the woman with the green ring around her neck was in the locker room again.

“We’re on the same schedule,” I said.

“Must be.” She turned the sauna dial. “It’s so peaceful in here. I like to linger. I don’t know why it’s so peaceful.”

I too had not understood the peace for a long time. Then it dawned on me that the rules of the YMCA excised entire populations from the locker room. There were, of course, no men, but there were also no children and no young mothers. There was a separate locker room for kids, so ours was mostly the domain of women who hadn’t yet had children or who were past their childrearing years. There was the occasional off-duty mother, sneaking away, but it was infrequent. That locker room was full of women looking at their older and younger selves, and the effect of that was peaceful. I didn’t tell the young woman any of this. I closed my locker and left it for her as a thing to discover.

Sometimes, the end does not correspond to what came before it. Maxine loved me, wholly and devotedly, so I trusted she would leave me in the same way. Eventually I made new friends who’d never met her. I was careful not to tell these people how she’d left; it did not reflect who she was. She was not cowardly. She was not rash. She did not take pleasure in my pain. Yes, Maxine left me without warning on a cold, dark night that began a cold, dark stretch of my life. But she only did it once. She spent one day leaving me and thousands loving me. I did the simple math and knew which outweighed the other. I went on living.

Other times, there really is symmetry. After six years together, I left Gloria. Symmetry, but no balancing of the cosmic scales. I didn’t track down Maxine and tell her I finally understood what she’d done to me because I still didn’t understand. I moved across town, to a bigger, more sterile apartment and filled it with new furniture and small appliances, all wrapped up in their little cords. Anya was still my daughter. There was a period when I worried Gloria would try to say otherwise, but she never did. We split our time with her fifty-fifty. Now, when she came home from college, Anya could take the bus across town, but for years, we met on the second Sunday of every month, at 12pm sharp, in Lankletter Park, the midpoint between Gloria’s apartment and mine. I had a car and Gloria did not—she’d always refused to get one, saying her family had never needed one growing up, implying, I felt, that mine was wasteful for having one. I would have been happy to drop Anya off, but, no, Gloria said, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. Eventually, I came come to resent it. Maybe it was about fairness, but I think she also wanted to keep me out her life. On the morning of her surgery, I hadn’t been inside that apartment for twelve years.

When I arrived at the hospital, Gloria was sitting in a wheelchair out front, dressed in plaid pajamas, a nurse watching over her. She had a bandage at the base of her throat. She nodded hello to me. I got out and watched as the nurse eased her out of the wheelchair and into the passenger seat. Then I reached across her, clicked the seatbelt into place, and closed the door. The nurse handed me a plastic bag. Inside, she explained, were Gloria’s drain care materials. She had two drains, one connected through a port under each armpit. We were supposed to empty them twice a day, measure and record the amount of fluid in the log they provided, and call the doctor if the amount dropped below 30 milliliters or the plastic tubing between Gloria’s armpits and the plastic bulb became irreparable clogged. If there was just a small clog, the nurse said, I would be able to fix it by applying lotion to my index and middle fingers, using one hand to hold the tubing, and the two fingers to work out the clot. Did I understand? Yes, I said, I understood. Then the nurse looked at me gravely and said, “She’ll be fine if she chooses to be.”

What was that supposed to mean?

The sky was approaching sunset by the time we finally got to East Third Street, after a stop at the pharmacy and the grocery store. I put the hazard lights on and went around to open the passenger-side door for Gloria. She grabbed my arm and forced herself to her feet. In the backseat were the paper sacks of groceries. There was no way she would be able to carry them inside.

“The groceries,” I said.

“I’ll see if Mr. Harris can bring them up for me.”

“Don’t bother Mr. Harris. I’ll just do it.”

“The car.”

“It’ll take five minutes.”

“They ticket more than they used to.”

“It’s fine.”

“They’re ninety bucks now.”

“I’ll roll the dice.”

She stood there for a moment, in the center of the salted sidewalk, formidable not despite her bandage and pajamas but because of them—she’d always been this way, whatever state she inhabited was the strongest state.

“Don’t bother Mr. Harris,” I repeated. “I can do it.”

I expected the apartment to be unchanged, but it wasn’t. Gone was the pleasant clutter. Gone was the Tiffany lamp on the small foyer table. Being inside seemed to weaken Gloria’s defenses.

“I’m going to lay down for a second,” she said, leaving me in the kitchen.

I unpacked the bags, put a bunch of bananas on the counter, a jar of peanut butter in the pantry, the icepacks in the freezer. I took the various orange bottles from the pharmacy bag and lined them up on the counter. There was a pad of paper and pencil near the phone and I grabbed them, copied down the names on each of the plastic bottles, and put the paper in my pocket.

The radiator clanged. The winter Anya was born, it clanged all January and February, like a body possessed. Then, the kitchen was wallpapered in a daisy print. The steam from the radiators molded the wallpaper, and I eventually removed it with a vinegar solution and razor, slicing the paper into strips and removing it like bark from a tree. Gloria painted the walls mauve. Now, they were soft yellow.

I toasted and buttered a piece of bread and brought it to Gloria, who was laying on top of the comforter, with the television on. She had a television! In the bedroom! This was shocking. It disturbed and depressed me. When we were together, Gloria never watched television. It would have been unthinkable. She didn’t brag about it, she just had so many other, more important things to do. This television was a violation. I thought of her as someone who lived outside culture, a quality that frustrated and enchanted me when we were together. Surely, Gloria didn’t watch the local news? She didn’t tune in to sitcoms? Had she and Anya been watching television in bed together, all these years? Wouldn’t I have known that?

“How are you feeling?” I asked, from the bedroom threshold.

“Bad, Joanna. I feel bad. Come in, it’s fine.”

I sat on the bed and handed her the toast.

She had the same headboard as when we’d lived here together. It was heavy walnut with laurel engraved in it, a twenty-first birthday gift from her mother. The bed was king-sized, too big for the tiny room. I’d always resented it, how there was nowhere else in the bedroom to go, how you had to shuffle around it, how it was the command center from which all business got done.

Gloria took a small bite of the toast, then set the plate on her bedside table. “I’m tired, and I think I need to sleep. You can go. I’ll be fine.”

“We have to empty your drains first.”

“Mira will be here in an hour. She just couldn’t get the day off work.”

“We should do it before I leave. Not worth risking infection.”

“She’ll be here.”

“What if she’s late?”

“I can do it myself.”

“You can’t raise your arms above your waist. Up,” I said. I said it how I used to say it to Anya when she was parked in front of the television and refused to brush her teeth.

In the bathroom, I set the fluid measuring cup on the sink’s ledge and the recording journal on the toilet seat.

“Should I stand in the shower?” Gloria asked. “In case it gushes?”

Nothing in the instructions mentioned gushing, but it was a small miracle she was letting me do this, so I said, “After you.”

She climbed into the tub and I climbed in after her. My socked foot skidded on the porcelain.

I unbuttoned her shirt, then eased each sleeve off her shoulders. She didn’t wince. There were two drains, one hanging on each side of her waist like little grenades. Under each of her armpits was a port where the tubing exited, terminating in the plastic bulbs. The tubing was taped to her sides. It all seemed very low-tech. Each bulb was about half full of a yellow and red liquid. It looked like all bodily fluids—snot, urine, blood—combined into one. I bent over and disconnected the left bulb, squeezed the liquid into the measuring cup, wrote down the amount on the log. The right bulb was clogged. A small clot of blood was stuck halfway down the tube, so the liquid was backed up.

“One second,” I said. I stepped out of the tub and retrieved a bottle of lotion from beneath the sink. Just like the nurse had told me, I used my index and ring fingers to work at the tube, easing the blockage down into the bulb. I was surprised when it finally worked. “It’s all good,” I heard myself say, as if I was some blissed out hippie.

Gloria laughed, in a not unkind way.

I helped her put her shirt back on and she climbed back into bed, closing her eyes in exhaustion. I pulled the comforter over her body and ran my hands over her legs, could feel her shinbones beneath the down feathers. She opened her eyes and looked up at me.

“I always thought you would die before me,” she said.

“I did too.”

“Most people probably thought that. Your family. Prone to early death. I found comfort in it after you left me, you know. I’d been afraid of finding you dead, and then I didn’t have to worry about it anymore.

“You should really try to eat the toast.” I picked up the plate.

She took it and set it back down. Behind us, the TV played the local news.

“I can’t believe you have a television in here,” I said.

“I’ve always liked falling asleep to the television.”

“Not when we were together.”

“I put it away before you came over for the first time to impress you.” She pointed to the closet. “It was in there, the whole time.”

I couldn’t believe it. “Why didn’t you just say you wanted to watch television?”

“I thought I could be a person who didn’t watch television with you. I was, I guess. I succeeded.”

“All that time, you were hiding it away?”

“Six years. Not so much time.” She straightened her back against the headboard. “I’m really getting tired, Joanna. You can leave.”

“You’re sure you have everything you need?”

“I’ll be fine.” She made a motion with her hand like she was shooing away a cat. “What are you going to do now?”

I had the whole evening ahead of me again. “Probably go for a swim.”

“Sounds nice. I should swim.” She closed her eyes.

I waited for her to fall asleep, then slipped out of the room, through the kitchen, and down the stairs. The sun was still out, and the snow had started back up. There was a ticket on my windshield. On the corner was a church with a stained glass window that hit the sky like a gong. When I stepped onto the sidewalk, I thought of Florence stepping into that cobwebbed basement, how she turned the dial on the safe’s combination lock, if she laughed at the absurdity of stealing from her own house. Did it feel like trespassing? Were the guns heavy? And when she flung the car door open, as I was doing now, did she get a robber’s rush, the drunken mix of shame and righteousness? I’d been wrong, and I was grateful for it. Be patient long enough, and everyone comes back.