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George’s separation from Tom had never culminated in actual divorce.

While they rarely spent time together, one tangible thread of their marriage remained: a weekly conversation.

Always on Sunday, because he didn’t fly on Sundays anymore.

He had the seniority now to pick up the flights he wanted when he wanted them, and he’d declared Sunday his “day of rest.”

It wasn’t a religious thing. They had never been churchy. Which was just one more thing, George knew, to feed the gossip mill at the country club. Even Helen and Frank made regular appearances at First Methodist.

“That club,” her mother had scoffed, when she was still around to scoff.

“As if anyone should care what those spoiled know-nothings think about anything.” The house felt empty and enormous without her mother in it.

She’d considered selling it and getting an apartment for herself—something small and easy to care for.

But that wouldn’t do, because someday the girls would come home.

She liked to picture them walking in the front door.

To imagine them in their childhood beds, giggling at some private joke as she listened from the hallway.

How could they have grown up so fast and flown so far away from her?

“I’m still here,” said Tom. He’d been so good to her after Adele’s passing.

Calling almost every day. Bringing a bag of what, for him, constituted groceries: a six-pack of Coke and a Styrofoam tray of cube steak and ten pounds of potatoes.

She even woke one morning to find him mowing her lawn, which didn’t need mowing.

“I have a yard man for that,” she told him.

But she understood. He’d liked Adele. And he knew how it felt to lose a parent, to lose both parents.

To feel like you were the last remaining bulwark against the mysterious force that gave and took life.

He wanted to help, and, like almost everyone else, he didn’t know how, so he came over and mowed her already-cut lawn.

He never said anything about Frank, and George believed this was his way of allowing her room to come back, to do the right thing.

It wasn’t too late. Sometimes she was tempted.

No more guilt. No more sneaking around. But then Frank would trace a finger down her neck, and suddenly neither of them had wrinkles or stiff knees or to-do lists, let alone grief or disappointment.

They were young and beautiful and the world and all its possibilities lay before them, theirs for the taking, and they hadn’t yet chosen the wrong possibilities, made the wrong turns.

“You still there?” asked Tom.

“Sorry. Yes. What were you saying?”

“Any mail this week?” Sometimes one of them received a letter. The one who hadn’t tried their best to sound pleased for the one who had. And the one who had tried to ease the disappointment of the one who hadn’t by reading theirs aloud over the phone.

“No, but I talked to Vivian, and she got a letter last week.” George didn’t need to specify that it was from Ruth.

Ivy had written to her and to Tom each once and never again, and the text of those two letters—they’d read them to one another, naturally—had been identical.

Ivy was in Vietnam. She didn’t want them to think she was ungrateful for the comfortable childhood they had provided her, because she wasn’t.

Though she didn’t, George reflected, say that she was grateful for it either.

She was well, and she hoped they were too.

And they didn’t need to worry about Ruth, because Ivy kept a close eye on her.

George had found that reassuring, though she wasn’t certain why she should.