Chapter 6
I drank my tea. My granddaughter finished the book and immediately started it again from the beginning, which was something she did with books she liked. Thomas's photograph watched us from the mantel. The pearl earrings were beside it.
At some point Genevieve knocked on the door. I did not answer it. At some point Benjamin knocked and said Mom, and I did not answer that either, because some conversations require the other person to wait in the driveway and understand the size of what they are asking for before the door opens.
The door would open. I had said it would and I meant it.
But not today. Today was for the good cup, and the book about birds, and a child who had waved at me from a gravel path because she saw her grandmother in a window and that was reason enough.
When the car finally left, my granddaughter looked up from the book.
"Are they going to come back?" she asked.
"Yes," I said. "They're going to come back."
She considered this. "Are you going to let them in?"
I looked at the door. I looked at Thomas's photograph. I looked at a seventy-seven-year-old woman's hands around a tea cup that was finally being used for the right occasion.
May you like
"When the time is right," I said.
She nodded as though this was the correct answer and went back to the birds.
