Claire looked at me when I laughed.
She smiled.
After lunch, Tom took the children into the garden, and Claire and I sat at the kitchen table with our cups.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“Honestly.”
“I don’t have a word for it,” I said.
“It’s too much to hold all at once.
But it’s good.
It’s — ” I stopped.
“I’ve been alone in my house for months.
Since Carol passed.
And I’d started to think that was just how it was going to be now.
The rest of it.
Just me.”
“And now?” Claire said.
I looked through the kitchen window at the garden.
Daniel was attempting a cartwheel.
Rosie was critiquing it.
Tom was pretending to referee.
“Now I have somewhere to be on a Saturday,” I said.
Claire was quiet for a moment.
“I spent a lot of years being angry,” she said.
“Not at you — I didn’t know you well enough to be angry at you.
Just at the situation.
At the gap where a father was supposed to be.” She turned her cup in her hands.
“I’m not going to pretend that’s completely gone.
It might come up sometimes.
I might have days where I feel the loss of it all over again.”
“I understand,” I said.
“But I don’t want to live in that,” she said.
“I’ve done enough of that.” She looked at me.
“I want to see what this can be instead.”
“So do I,” I said.
Outside, Daniel finally landed the cartwheel.
Rosie clapped once, sarcastically, then immediately tried one herself and fell over.
Daniel laughed so hard he sat down on the grass.
Claire shook her head, smiling.
“He’s going to be insufferable about that for weeks,” she said.
“He should be,” I said.
“He earned it.”
She laughed.
And for a moment, in the warm kitchen with the sound of her children outside and the coffee going cold between us, the forty years of absence felt like what they actually were — the past.
Not gone, not forgotten, but behind us.
Where the past belongs.
Later, when I was getting ready to leave, Daniel appeared at my elbow.
“Are you coming back?” he said.
I crouched down to his level.
“If your mum says it’s alright,” I said.
He looked at Claire.
She nodded.
He turned back to me with the solemn gravity of an eight-year-old making a formal decision.
