She put down the letter. “Oh.”
“What?”
“Is this really about Justine? Or is it about something else?”
“No, it’s definitely—”
“My father used to do this. It was like anger was his proxy emotion. Whenever he was anxious about something, he’d take it out on Mom. Or the reading lamp… He was always yanking the chain right out of the socket.”
“I don’t do that.”
“Are you worried about something?”
Matt rolled his eyes and pounded another stamp into place.
Mary Ellen took a long, fortifying breath through her nose. “So, I know we haven’t really talked about this, and I don’t want you to feel like I’m pressuring you.”
“What?”
“I guess I’m just wondering if you have any plans. Now that the girls are gone and all.” This felt terrible coming out of her mouth. Nagging. Hectoring. “It’s okay if you don’t want to say.”
“You care about my plans?”
Mary Ellen blinked at him. “What?”
“Yes. I have plans.”
“Okay, good—”
“Which you would know if you’d ever bothered to ask.”
“Oh, come on, Matt. I was trying to leave you alone! I didn’t want to pressure you!”
“Well…” He shrugged, looked at the table. A lock of hair fell into his eyes, and he tucked it dolefully behind his ear.
“Matt, honey—”
“I get it. I realize I’m kind of useless at this point. My work here is done.”
“I never said that.”
“You’re probably thinking it.”
“You’re not useless.” Mary Ellen went back to folding and stuffing. She’d never thought that. And anyway, she wasn’t married to Matt for his usefulness. It was his friendship, his constancy. It was also, she was beginning to realize, his resemblance to her father. That steely dedication to the status quo.
“I know you’ve been through a lot, Mary, even before the whole tree-falling-on-you thing. You’ve been questioning things. And I just… I hope you’re not questioning me. Us.”
“Oh, Matt.” Mary Ellen squared a stack of envelopes, tapping them on the table. “I mean, sure, I’ve been trying to move things in a different direction. I haven’t been happy for a long time. And I’ve reached a point in my life where it feels kind of urgent to make changes.”
“And?” Matt was staring at her with wide eyes.
“What?”
“This is the part where you reassure me.”
Mary Ellen slid the stack of envelopes across the table to him. “I don’t know,” she said softly.
“What?”
“I don’t know if I can reassure you.” She looked down at the table, then raised her eyes to Matt’s confused and frightened face. She supposed her face looked the same, because she was finding this out at the same time Matt was. “It’s the honest truth, Matt. I feel different about things now. I feel like just because something has been a certain way for a long time doesn’t mean it’s going to be that way forever…or that it has to. I mean, when did we get so frozen in place? Remember what it was like to be a teenager, when every minute of every day was a chance to try things out, to try being this kind of person or that kind of person, to walk through all these different doors and see what was on the other side?”
Matt looked lost. “Yeah,” he said. “It sucked. I mean, at least now I know who I am.”
“Do you really, though?” Mary Ellen sat back in her chair.
“I know that I’m your husband, and I’m a father, and I don’t want those things to change.”
“I know you don’t.”
“Are you leaving me?”
Mary Ellen searched Matt’s face, seeing its contours as if for the first time, as if she were back in the drawing studio, teasing the physical world into shapes and shadows and lines. She saw the way the light from the kitchen window settled along the center of his forehead and down the ridge of his nose, skirting the hollows under his eyes and the recesses of his cheeks. She saw the worried dents in his forehead, the way his eyelids retreated into his brow. She saw the uncertain set of his mouth, the stubborn smile lines, the tiny fans at the corners of his eyes. She saw fragility and joy, pain and pride. The exhaustion of age and the anxiety of love.
Ivy was right—Mary Ellen had nothing but choices. It was easy to ignore the multitude of futures arrayed before her, harder to open her eyes and imagine wandering into the wilderness or going to the sun. Staying in one place could be a trap, or it could be a declaration of love. It all depended on how you looked at it.
Mary Ellen reached across the table and took Matt’s hand, which was warm and limp, waiting for her answer. She shook her head.
“No,” she said. “Not today.”
• • •
Mary Ellen Googled “Gardner Funeral Home,” just trying to sort the real from the made-up, and possibly to find an address to send a letter to. But there was no such business anywhere in New York. She supposed Ivy didn’t have any way of finding her either. Maybe she’d glimpsed Mary Ellen’s last name and address on her driver’s license, but it seemed doubtful that she would have memorized it.
She browsed some Montana smoke-jumping sites and considered calling them all to ask if they had any rookies named Ivy. For some reason, though, she never found the time to sit down and do it. Maybe she didn’t want to find out. Maybe she didn’t need to.
It wasn’t until years later, after the girls had graduated and she and Matt had downsized to a trinity in Northern Liberties, that she saw a report on the news about a forest fire outside Missoula. She grabbed the remote and hit Record, but no matter how carefully she scrutinized the footage, she couldn’t spot a
