Chapter 14: The Phone on the Arm of the Sofa

On Sunday morning my family sat around the farmhouse living room with coffee, waiting for my mother to finish deciding where we were having lunch.

Nobody was ever allowed to decide that but her.

I sat on the end of the sofa, and Ben sat on the arm beside me with his thigh pressed against my shoulder.

I could feel exactly how warm it was.

I had slept for three hours, wrapped in a quilt on a dock and then in a bed, and I felt rinsed.

Across the room Janelle had her feet tucked under her in the good armchair, telling the story of her honeymoon.

"We're going somewhere with snow," she said. "Nick wants Switzerland, but I said no, I just want a cabin with a fire and a hot tub, the way we..."

She stopped.

It was a very small stop.

If you weren't looking for it, you would have thought she was reaching for her coffee.

"The way we what?" my aunt said.

"The way we used to dream about," Janelle said. "Looking at venues. In Stowe. In the rain."

"In Stowe," Nick said, from the window.

"Yes, in Stowe."

"We never went to Stowe for venues."

"Nick."

"I mean, not for the venue."

Nobody in that room noticed anything.

My uncle was reading the back of a cereal box, and my great-aunt was asleep.

I noticed.

I was thinking about a Friday in the middle of November, last year, when I had lain in my own bed with a fever of a hundred and two.

I had called Nick a dozen times.

He had texted me back at last, from a closing in Albany, with no signal and so sorry, babe.