The Year I Stopped Answering

Chapter One

The pheasant arrived at four o’clock on a Tuesday, and Dana Whitaker signed for it because that was what she did. She signed for things.

She was home by then because Tuesdays she worked seven to three, a schedule she’d negotiated eight years ago when Iris started kindergarten and had defended since like border territory. The delivery man had the box balanced on one knee and a scanner in his free hand, and he looked at the label and then at her with an expression she recognized, the look of a man who had carried something strange enough that he wanted, just once, to be asked about it.

“You want to know what it is,” Dana said.

“Ma’am, I’ve been wondering since Columbus.”

“It’s a taxidermied pheasant.”

He considered this. “On purpose?”

“For a school auction.” She signed the glass with the little plastic wand, her name coming out, a seismograph reading of a signature. “Donated. We take what we’re given.”

“My condolences,” he said, and left her with it, and she stood on the porch a moment in the raw February air, a box the size of a dorm fridge at her feet, the street doing its four o’clock things, the Hendricks’ dog stating its case to a squirrel, somebody’s recycling bin still out from Monday, tipped and rocking. It had been packed by someone with strong opinions about bubble wrap, and when she got the flaps open the pheasant stared up at her with the fixed, offended expression of a bird that had been dead for forty years and still couldn’t believe it. The donation form, taped to its base, listed the donor as the estate of somebody’s great-uncle and its value as “sentimental.”

She carried it inside and set it on the dining room table, next to the microwave, which lived there now because the kitchen had no counters. The kitchen had not had counters since November. It had plywood where counters would someday be, and a sink that worked if you were gentle with it, and a contractor named Gary who answered texts on a lunar schedule. Fifteen weeks. In January it had been a project, in February a situation, and somewhere in the last two weeks it had crossed over into a condition, a thing the family had, like a surname. She had learned to make coffee on plywood. She had learned a person could make almost anything on plywood if she stopped waiting for the situation to improve, which was, if she let herself think about it, a lesson with more range than the kitchen, so she didn’t let herself think about it, mostly, and made the coffee.

“There’s a dead bird on the table,” Iris said from the stairs. She was twelve and had recently perfected a way of coming downstairs that sounded like furniture falling.

“It’s for the auction.”

“Who’s going to bid on a dead bird?”

“Someone with a den,” Dana said. “Or a grudge. Don’t touch it, it’s older than Grandma.”

“It looks like the pig,” Iris said. “From your story. The dissecting one.”

“It looks nothing like the pig. The pig was a pig.”

Iris came the rest of the way down and circled the pheasant at a respectful distance, phone out, already photographing it for an audience of seventh graders. She shot it from below, from the side, came in close on the glass eye. Her braid had come apart on one side, and Dana’s hands wanted, on their own, to fix it. She kept them on the box flaps. Three weeks ago Iris had informed her, with the cold precision of a lawyer, that she could do her own hair, and the treaty that followed had terms Dana was still learning. The terms kept moving. The treaty was about the terms moving.

“Marcy’s mom is letting her go to the thing Friday,” Iris said, not looking up from her phone.

“The thing at Delaney’s.”

“It’s not a thing, it’s just people.”

“People at Delaney’s house, whose parents I’ve never met, until eleven.”

“Ten thirty.” Iris said it fast, a negotiator’s reflex, and then caught herself being caught. The tips of her ears went pink. On Sunday she had said the gathering ended at nine thirty, and she had said it looking straight at Dana. What had sat wrong for two days was not the lie. It was the eye contact. Dana had lied to her own mother at twelve, everyone lied to their mother at twelve, it was practically developmental, but she had done it looking at her shoes, at the wallpaper, at anything, because at twelve the face still knew what the mouth was doing. Iris had held her eyes and delivered it clean, and Dana had spent two days deciding whether she was raising a liar or a person with excellent nerve, and whether, at twelve, there was a difference.

She folded the box flat, taking her time with it. “Ten thirty is interesting,” she said. “Because on Sunday it was nine thirty.”

“I said around nine thirty.”

“You said nine thirty like you’d seen it notarized.” She slid the flattened box against the wall, where it joined the others, a cardboard record of everything this house had signed for. “Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to text Marcy and get Delaney’s mom’s number, and I’m going to make one extremely boring phone call, and if the actual end time of this non-thing survives contact with an adult, you can go.”

“That’s humiliating.”

“It’s thirty seconds.”

“Nobody else’s mom calls.”

“Then I’ll be exotic.” Dana picked up the donation form and clipped it into the auction binder, which lived on the dining room table too, between the microwave and the fruit bowl, the whole surface a refugee camp for the life the kitchen used to hold. “One call, Iris. Or Friday is a documentary about the postal service and me.”

Iris made a sound that was not agreement and was not defiance either, a sound with a whole treaty negotiation folded inside it, and went to the kitchen doorway and stopped, at the edge of the plywood. “When is Gary coming back.”

“When his heart heals,” Dana said. “Nobody knows. He’s very fragile.”

That got the laugh, the real one, the one that still sounded seven years old, the one Dana would have paid retail for, and Iris took a string cheese from the fridge and thundered back up to her room, and Dana stood in her counterless kitchen and allowed herself, briefly, to feel that she had handled it. The lie addressed, the door left open, no yelling, terms offered. Somewhere there was a version of this afternoon where she’d gotten it wrong, and she’d hear about that version at some future Thanksgiving, delivered across a table by a grown Iris with a grown Iris’s aim. But not tonight.

She spread the binder open and worked at the plywood standing up, because the auction was in eight weeks and the auction did not care about counters.

She had a binder with eleven tabs. She had a spreadsheet whose rows knew things about the parents of Bishop Middle that those parents would not have said out loud in confession: who could be counted on for wine pull donations, who bid drunk, who bid divorced, which two families could not be seated near each other since the incident at the fall carnival that no one discussed and everyone knew. She had a gym reserved, a caterer at the half-confirmed stage where they answered emails but wouldn’t sign anything, a DJ who kept trying to upsell her on lighting packages with names like Starlight Experience, and now a pheasant. Today’s list: confirm the table count with the custodian, chase the caterer, draft the donation-request follow-ups, enter the great-uncle into the spreadsheet. It was, all of it, hers to hold, because in October she had raised her hand in a cafeteria that smelled like industrial ranch dressing, and this was the price of a raised hand in Westerville. She had known that going in. Some part of her, the part she fed least and relied on most, had raised the hand because of it. A held thing could not wobble. A woman holding a gym, a caterer, a DJ, a seating chart, and a dead bird was a woman whose hands were visibly, certifiably full, and there was a safety in that she had never once said out loud.

Tom got home at six, kissed her temple, looked at the pheasant for a long moment.

“Okay,” he said.

“Auction.”

“I figured it was auction or something’s wrong with the food chain.” He set his keys in the bowl and his lunch cooler on the plywood, and rolled his shoulder, a slow backward circle, and she registered it. Site day, then. Which meant the Henderson bid had gone to a walk-through, which meant he’d be at the laptop later, which meant the evening had a shape now, and she filed the shape away. Sixteen years and she could read his day off his body before he said a word about it, and she did not often stop to ask whether he could do the same to her, and if he could, what he’d been reading.

“Gary?” he said.

“Silent.”

“I could call him.”

“You could,” she said, “but then he’d know we’re desperate, and Gary feeds on desperation. We have to be cool. We’re playing dead. Like our friend here.”

Tom looked at the pheasant again. The pheasant looked back with its glass eye, keeping its own counsel. “This is why the kitchen has no counters,” he said. “Because we’re playing dead.”

“It’s a strategy.”

“It’s something,” he said, mild, and got a beer from the fridge, and asked about Iris’s Friday thing, and she gave him the summary version, treaty terms and all, the lie and the phone call and the pending verdict, and he listened with the beer resting against his chest and nodded in the places a person nods.

“You’re calling the mom,” he said.

“I’m calling the mom.”

“She’s going to be mortified.”

“She’s going to survive it. That’s the whole curriculum this year. Being mortified and surviving it.”

Sixteen years of marriage had worn certain conversations smooth, and this was one of them: she reported, he ratified. It worked. She would have said, if asked, that it worked, and she would have been telling the truth, and the truth would have had a plywood layer under it that she didn’t look at directly, the same way she made coffee every morning without looking at where the counters weren’t.

They ate at the dining room table, the three of them and the pheasant, chicken reheated in the exiled microwave, and Iris, who had decided at some point between string cheese and dinner to be delightful, did an impression of her social studies teacher discovering the smart board was unplugged. It was merciless. It had structure. Act one, Mr. Kalb’s confidence, the marker uncapped with a flourish. Act two, the first click that did nothing, the second click, the man’s whole worldview beginning to buckle. Act three, and here Iris stood up from the table to get the posture right, Mr. Kalb following the cord hand over hand along the wall like a sailor in a storm, all the way to the outlet, and finding it, and holding up the plug to the class in silence, like an exhibit, like evidence of a crime society itself had committed against him. Tom laughed until he had to put his fork down. Dana laughed and watched her daughter take the bow that was owed, flushed with the specific joy of a twelve-year-old who has the room, and thought, with no ceremony at all, that this was a good life. It was a thought she had often, and on purpose.

After dinner the house sorted itself into its evening stations. Iris showered and went horizontal with her phone. Tom took the laptop to the armchair, the Henderson numbers open, the game on low beside him more for company than attention. Dana took the couch and the seating chart, and for forty minutes the only sounds were the dishwasher running its little heart out against the silence where a kitchen used to be, the announcer’s murmur, keys. She moved the Brennans away from the Wallaces for the third time. There was no table in that gym far enough for the Brennans and the Wallaces, there was possibly no gym, and she was considering the nuclear option, splitting them across the buffet line’s natural border, when her phone buzzed at 8:40, face down on the auction binder.

She almost let it go. One buzz, short, a text.

Rachel Beal. Dana hadn’t heard from Rachel in over a year, and her thumb was already swiping before her brain assembled a guess, reunion or fundraiser or somebody’s separation announced with a wine glass emoji.

so so sad about nic. are you going saturday??

The gym, the chart, the announcer’s voice, all of it kept going. Dana read the text twice. There was a kind of stillness that started in the hands, she would notice later, before anywhere else. Her thumbs hovered over the glass and did not move, and the screen dimmed, and she tapped it awake, and the words were still in the same order.

Across the room, Tom said something about a foul. The dishwasher changed cycles with a click and a sigh.

Sad about Nic. Are you going Saturday.

There were only so many things it could mean and her mind ran the list with a speed that shamed her, hunting for the survivable ones. Sad about Nic could be divorce. Could be a diagnosis. Could be a fire, a flood, a gallery closing, Rachel grieved widely and at volume, Rachel had once texted the whole group in mourning over a canceled television show. Are you going Saturday. Going where Saturday. You did not go to a diagnosis. She sat very still on her own couch, in the blue light, holding the phone, and let the list run out, and at the end of the list there was only the one thing left standing, the thing that had been standing there from the first read, patient, certain, waiting for her to finish.

She typed, what happened? and deleted it, because you could not ask that. Asking that told Rachel what Rachel’s text assumed you already knew, and something in Dana, faster than thought, some old muscle that managed rooms and phone calls and other people’s assumptions, was already protecting her position, already not wanting to be the one who had to be told.

She typed, just seeing this, and deleted that too.

She typed nothing, for a long time, while the screen dimmed and dimmed.

“You okay?” Tom said, not looking over. Sixteen years. He could hear a silence change.

“PTA stuff,” Dana said. The words were out before she chose them, smooth as a signature. “Julie’s melting down about the caterer.”

“Tell Julie it’s a gym,” Tom said, and the crowd on the television rose about something, and he leaned toward the screen, and that was that, the moment sealed over, the lie already load-bearing.

She looked back down at her phone, at the little gray words that had rearranged the temperature of the room without moving a single object in it. Upstairs the shower fan ticked off on its timer. The seating chart sat open on her lap, all its solvable wars. Nic at forty-six. Nic in a lab coat two sizes too big, freshman year, holding a scalpel over a fetal pig and saying, I’m going to name him Gerald, you can’t stop me. Nic’s last text, whenever that had been. A farmers market. Something about a braid. She had not answered it, she knew that much without looking.

And began, very carefully, in the manner of a woman signing for a package she did not remember ordering, to type.

Chapter Two

The obituary was four paragraphs and Dana read it standing at the plywood in the dark, at 5:50 in the morning, before anyone else was up, with the coffee maker gurgling beside her elbow like a co-conspirator.

She had found it by typing a name into her phone at two in the morning with her husband asleep beside her, the screen brightness thumbed all the way down as if the light were the crime. Nicola Adair Chicago. The funeral home’s page had loaded with a stock photograph of lilies, and she had read the first line, and put the phone face down on her chest, and lain there listening to Tom breathe, and picked it up again, and that was how the night had gone, in installments, until the ceiling turned gray. Now it was morning and she read it properly, start to finish, standing up, dressed for work, a woman with a lunch to pack.

Nicola June Adair, 46, of Chicago, died suddenly at home on February 17th. Beloved daughter of the late Robert and Carol Adair. Cherished sister of Justine Adair-Ross (Daniel) of Evanston. Adored aunt of Ella and Sam. A photographer of rare warmth and wit, Nic saw people the way they hoped to be seen.

That was the sentence that got through. Not beloved, not cherished, those were the wooden pews of obituary language, everyone sat in them. Saw people the way they hoped to be seen. Somebody had fought for that sentence. Somebody had sat at a kitchen table with a funeral home’s word limit and fought for it, and it was true, it was the truest thing you could say about Nic in under ten words, and Dana had had no idea, none, that she was in a world where it needed saying in the past tense.

Visitation Thursday, March 5th, 4 to 7 p.m., at a funeral home on Ridge. A celebration of Nic’s life to be held in early April, details to follow. In lieu of flowers, the family asks you to shoot one roll of film of an ordinary day, and to actually get it developed.

Dana read the last line three times. That was Nic’s own voice, embedded in the obituary like a hair in amber, the actually especially, the little elbow in the ribs of it. Somebody had known her well enough to write that. The thought had edges on it and Dana set it down, the way you set down a knife when you notice how you’re holding it.

Saturday, Rachel had said. The visitation was Thursday. Rachel had the wrong day, which meant Rachel was forwarding grief, warm and fast and about eighty percent accurate, and for one bright ugly second Dana let herself hope the whole thing traveled at that accuracy. That there’d been an error. Some other Nic, some other Adair, the world was full of people, surely it had two of her.

The obituary had her photograph in it. It was recent. Her hair was mostly gray now, cut short, and she was laughing at whoever held the camera, mid-word, caught in the act of being Nic, and there was no other Nic and there never had been.

The coffee maker finished with its three-beep flourish, absurdly festive. Upstairs the pipes knocked, Tom’s shower. Dana poured her travel cup, wiped the plywood though nothing was on it, and went to work.

Work held her. The practice ran on her, and Wednesdays were hygiene-heavy, the waiting room turning over every forty minutes, and she sat at the front desk in the eye of it and was excellent. She rebooked the Kowalski kids around a band trip. She talked an insurance company through its own policy, patiently, twice. She intercepted Dr. Fanning before he double-booked himself for the third time this month, and when Mrs. Ostrander came out of the back teary because it was her first appointment since her husband passed, and the hygienist hovered helpless, Dana came around the desk and took the woman’s coat off the rack and held it open for her and talked to her about the parking situation on Schrock Road, the roadwork, the detour, sixty seconds of gorgeous nothing, and Mrs. Ostrander got her arms into her sleeves and her feet under her and left upright. It was a thing Dana knew how to do, had always known: you did not hand a drowning person more water. You handed them a coat and a detour. She watched the woman cross the lot to her car and stood at the window a moment with her hand still on the coat rack, and did not examine why.

She called Rachel at lunch, from her car, in the parking lot behind the practice, with a turkey sandwich unwrapped and untouched on the passenger seat. Rachel picked up on the second ring, already talking.

“I know, I can’t, I literally can’t, I keep picking up my phone to text her about it, isn’t that insane? Like, who do I text about Nic dying? Nic. She’s the one I’d text.”

“Rachel, what happened?”

“You didn’t hear?” A rustle, Rachel moving somewhere quieter, a door closing on office noise. “Okay, so, it was her heart, but not like, not a heart attack heart attack. It has a name, hang on, Justine told Amy and Amy told me. Something with dissection in it. Where the artery, like, the wall of the artery just, it just tears. Out of nowhere. It’s mostly women, apparently, women our age, women who are fine. She was fine, Dana. She’d just done a wedding two days before. There was nothing, no warning, nothing anyone could have caught. That’s what the doctors kept telling Justine, apparently, like it was supposed to help. Nothing anyone could have caught.”

The parking lot was the color of March. Salt-white asphalt, a crust of old snow along the fence, a plastic bag doing slow circles by the dumpster, resting between attempts.

“A neighbor found her,” Rachel was saying, quieter now. “She missed a shoot Wednesday morning and didn’t answer, and she never missed shoots, so the studio called around, and the neighbor had a key for the plants. She was just, she was at home. They think it was fast. They keep saying that too. It was fast.”

Dana looked at the sandwich. She had made it at six forty this morning with the obituary still open on the plywood beside the bread, turkey, mustard, the pickle sliced thin, hands doing their eleven thousandth sandwich while the rest of her stood in a funeral home’s webpage, and it occurred to her now, distantly, that this was going to be the texture of it. That the news was not going to arrive once, cleanly, like weather. It was going to arrive like this, in a parking lot, next to a sandwich, in installments, forever.

“Thursday,” she said. “The visitation. You said Saturday.”

“Did I? God. Thursday. See, this is why nobody should hear anything from me.” Rachel exhaled, a long shaky pour of a breath. “Are you going? You have to go. God, Dana. You two. I still think of you as a unit, you know that? Dana-and-Nic. All of sophomore year I don’t think I saw one of you without the other one attached. You had that whole language. The eyebrow thing. You’d do the eyebrow thing across a whole party and then both just leave, like, simultaneously, and nobody ever knew how you decided.”

“I’m going,” Dana said, and heard herself say it, and it was true the way a signature is true. Decided in the hand before the mind convenes.

Rachel talked for eleven more minutes. Dana held the phone and watched the plastic bag and put sounds in the pauses. Rachel had a version of the last few years, secondhand, patched together from Christmas cards and Instagram: Nic thriving, Nic with a print in some juried show at a gallery whose name Rachel mangled twice, differently, Nic and somebody named Paul for a couple of years and then no more Paul, nobody knew the story there, Nic teaching a workshop for teenagers at a community center that Rachel was pretty sure was on the North Side, or possibly Evanston, or possibly that was a different thing. Rachel told it all in the tone people use when they’re building a case that everything had been good, that the story had been mid-sentence, because the alternative tone was unbearable on a Wednesday lunch hour. Dana agreed in the right places. She had her own patchwork and it was thinner than Rachel’s, and she noticed that, noticed it the way you notice a step missing in the dark, the drop arriving before the understanding. Rachel, who had been a satellite of the friendship, a warm outer moon, was briefing her, Dana, the famous other half of the unit, on the last six years of Nic’s life. And Dana was letting her. Was grateful, even, was taking notes with some appalling secretarial lobe of her brain, Paul, gallery, workshop, teenagers, filing it all under a heading she refused to read the name of.

When had she last actually spoken to Nic. Spoken, voice, phone against her ear.

Her birthday. Which birthday. The one in the old house, no. The one where Iris had the ear infection, where Dana had taken the call pacing the upstairs hall with a bottle of children’s Tylenol in her free hand, half listening, saying uh-huh into the phone while reading the dosage chart, and Nic had said something that had made her laugh anyway, even then, even at half attention, and had said at the end, in the doorway voice, the leaving voice, we should actually talk sometime, like real talk, and Dana had said absolutely, soon, with the Tylenol in her hand. Iris’s ear infection year. Iris in first grade. Six years. The math sat in the car with her, on the passenger seat next to the sandwich, and would not leave.

“Anyway, the family said no flowers, did you see? You’re supposed to shoot a roll of film. That is so her I could scream,” Rachel said, and her voice went thick, and for a moment neither of them spoke, two women in two parking lots ninety miles apart, holding phones.

“I have to get back,” Dana said gently. “Rachel. Thank you for texting me. I mean it. I’d rather have heard it from you than from the internet.”

“Of course. God. Of course.” A pause, and then, with Rachel’s whole heart in it, tactless and true: “She loved you so much, you know. Like, of everybody. You know that, right?”

The bag lifted off the asphalt, cleared the fence in one try, and was gone.

“I know,” Dana said.

She went back in and worked the afternoon and was excellent, and drove home the ordinary way, and stood for a moment at the bottom of her own stairs before she went up to change.

The stairwell wall was photographs, it had always been photographs, she’d hung them herself in the first year in this house and added to them since, school pictures, the trip to Michigan, Tom’s parents’ fiftieth. And at the turn of the stairs, where the light from the landing window fell in the afternoon, the wedding pictures. The ones by the water. Sixteen years she had climbed past them, twice, ten times a day, carrying laundry, carrying a sleeping Iris, carrying her phone and her keys and the mail, and they had gone the way of all permanent things, into the wallpaper of her seeing. Now she stood on the third stair and looked. Tom laughing with his head thrown all the way back, a thing he did maybe twice a year, caught forever. Her own mother in the parking lot, hooting, actually hooting, at something outside the frame. Dana herself looking off camera at someone, mid-word, lit up. She knew who she’d been looking at. The photographer had been the someone. In half of them, if you knew how to read them, the subject was really Nic, Nic reflected, Nic implied, the laugh traveling toward the lens like light from a source just out of view.

Sixteen years on the wall of her own stairs. She climbed past them and went to change.

She told Tom that night.

She told him at the plywood, while he sliced peppers for fajitas on the cutting board balanced across the sink, because the plywood was for setting things on, not for knives, they had rules now, a whole provisional government. She waited until his hands were busy. She had not planned to wait until his hands were busy and she noticed that she had.

“A friend of mine died,” she said. “From college. Nic. Nicola. I found out last night, that was the text.”

Tom put the knife down and turned all the way around, and the fact that he turned all the way around made it briefly hard to talk. “Dana. Last night?”

“I didn’t want to say it and then just go to bed.”

“What happened? How old?”

“My age. Her heart. It’s a rare thing, a tear, it mostly happens to women our age who are otherwise fine. There was no warning.” She heard herself distributing the facts calmly, in order, a woman handing out programs at the door of the thing instead of being inside it. “The visitation’s next Thursday, in Chicago. I’m going to drive up.”

“Of course. I’ll move that Thursday, we can leave after Iris gets on the bus.”

“You don’t have to come.”

It landed a half-degree wrong, she heard it land, and Tom’s face did the thing where it didn’t change. “Okay,” he said. Careful. “Do you not want me to come?”

“It’s not that. It’s a long drive, and you’ve got the Henderson bid, and honestly I’ll be, I’ll drive up, I’ll pay respects, I’ll drive back. You never even met her.” That last sentence came out shaped like a fact and functioned like a door closing, and she watched it close, and did not stop it.

“Six hours in a car each way is a lot alone,” Tom said.

“I’ll take the good podcasts.”

He looked at her a moment longer. Sixteen years. He knew the difference between a wife who wanted space and a wife who wanted to be argued with, and she watched him try to read which one she was, and she kept her face pleasant and organized, and understood, in a small cold way, that she was making herself illegible on purpose and that he would let her. That was the deal underneath the deal. He turned back to the peppers.

“College friend,” he said. “Nic. Was she at the wedding?”

“She was,” Dana said. “She took the pictures everyone likes. The ones by the water.”

“Wait.” The knife stopped. “The photographer? The one who got your mom laughing in the parking lot? That’s, she’s the one who died?”

“That’s her.”

“Dana, those pictures are on our stairs. I look at her work every day.” He put the knife down. “I knew the face. I’d have known her in a room. I never had a name on it, that’s the thing, sixteen years and I never once had a name on it.” He turned around again, and there was something new in his face now, an adjustment, a man discovering the map of the last two decades had a landmark he’d mislabeled. “You never talk about her.”

“We lost touch,” Dana said. “You know how it is.”

And Tom, who was a kind man, and whose great marital gift and great marital flaw were the same thing, nodded, and let it be how it is, and the peppers went into the pan with a sound like applause.

At dinner Iris wanted the details, structurally, like an engineer. Where in Chicago. How far was that. Was Mom flying or driving. Why driving. Could you see the lake from the highway. Was the lake really that big, big like the ocean, or big like Buckeye Lake but more so. Tom fielded the geography. Dana ate her fajita and listened to her family map the route to a funeral like a road trip, and did not stop them, because their version of Thursday, weather and mileage and the lake like an ocean, was so much easier to sit inside than her own, and because Iris asked, at the end, spinning her fork, “Were you guys friends like me and Marcy?” and Dana said, “Yes,” and it was the truest thing she’d said all day, and nobody at the table but her knew to flinch at it.

She did the dishes at the gentle sink. Tom took the laptop to the armchair. And at nine, alone a moment in the counterless kitchen, Dana stood with the dish towel in her hands and looked at her phone where it lay dark on the plywood, and did not open the old thread, the one with Nic’s name on it, sitting down there in the list under the K’s and the M’s, under months of more recent business, the school, the caterer, Priya, Gary. She knew what was in it. She knew the last two messages were not hers. Thursday first, she told herself, in the voice she used for triage, one thing at a time, and hung the towel on the oven door, straightened it, straightened it again, and went up to bed past the water pictures in the dark.