My mother gave a practiced little laugh. “Mother, she has everything.”
“You give her things,” Eleanor said. “That is not the same.”
Then she looked directly at me. “Pack a bag. You’re coming to Larks Falls.”
I looked at my parents and waited for the protest, waited for some version of no that would feel like love even if it arrived as inconvenience. I watched them run the calculation instead. No school pickups. No scheduling conflicts. No disruption to the launches and dinners and curated weekends.
“It might be good for her,” my mother said slowly, “to experience something simpler. For a semester.”
“For as long as she needs,” Eleanor said, and it was settled.
Eleanor’s house in Larks Falls was a tall old Victorian with creaky floors and deep porches and windows that rattled when the wind came down from the county road. It smelled like lemon polish and old books and stew that had been on the stove since noon. The kitchen table was round and scarred and always in use, and dinner was mandatory and loud and conducted without phones, without performance, without anyone pretending to be elsewhere.
Eleanor asked me specific questions.
What did I think about the zoning fight over the new development outside town? What had I read about the pension ruling in the paper that morning? How would I argue the opposite position from the one I had just taken?
The first few times she asked, I said I did not know.
