Chapter 27: The Small Room

Ethan left the hospital on the fourth morning against advice, with a bag of pills and a list of foods he was allowed.

He did not go home.

He drove two hours inland with the window down, and the sea air thinned and turned to cut grass.

Millbrook had one stoplight, and it was green.

He turned into the lane he had not driven since the funeral.

The house on the left was his parents'.

The shutters were closed, and the lawn had been mown by someone who was paid to.

The house on the right had a porch, with a swing, and a woman in a church coat sitting on it.

She was shelling peas into a colander and she did not look up.

"You're thin," she said.

"Hello, Mrs. Green."

"I've told you since you were nine, it's Gran. Sit down before you fall."

He sat on the step, because it was lower than the swing, and she handed him a pea pod without speaking.

He split it and ate the peas raw.

They were sweet, and a little bitter at the end, and he had not tasted anything so good in a week.

"He called me," she said. "Evan. From the hospital car park."

"Did he."

"He said you were being stupid."

"He's right."

"He's always right, that's what's wrong with him." She snapped a pod. "I raised him to be. I should have raised him to lose an argument once."

Ethan laughed, and it hurt where the ulcer had been.

She looked at him then, properly, through her glasses.

"Why've you come, Ethie?"

"I want to see where he grew up."

"You grew up next to it."

"Not since I was fifteen."

It was true.

Eighteen years on the next porch, and he had crossed that threshold for one summer only, and remembered none of it.

His mother had said the Greens kept to themselves.

His father had said you did not eat in a neighbor's kitchen unless you meant to owe them.

She put the colander down and stood.

"Come on, then."

The house was small and clean, and it smelled of bread.

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