Luck by Joan Barfoot

Nora’s eyes. “So what do you think?” and Sophie’s heart pauses until Nora adds, “Should I call her?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe. You’d know better than I would.” Although it’s true Sophie is curious about his first wife, the only wife he was actually willing to leave.
    “I suppose. I’ll think about it tomorrow. Probably even a short marriage should be acknowledged, if she wants it to be.”
    Beth watches, she listens, she yawns although her day’s been far more exhilarating than distressing. The yawn is contagious. “I wonder, Beth,” Nora says, “if I could ask another big favour.”
    “Of course.” Beth steps forward, reaching down to take Nora’s hand from the arm of the sofa into her own. “What can I do?”
    After a moment Nora carefully removes her hand, places it around her teacup, intending to avoid offence but wanting to be free of those unnerving fingers. “I don’t want to sleep in that room tonight.” She can’t say
our room
now, or
my room
yet, so
that room
it must be. “I don’t actually want anyone sleeping there tonight. So could I borrow your bed again? It’d put you on the sofa, I’m afraid, but would that be all right?”
    “Anything. Anything you want, you just have to ask.” More or less, Beth has said that before. She will say it as often as she needs to, until it sinks in. “I don’t mind the sofa at all.”
    It’s a full sixteen busy hours since Nora let loose that scream. Each of them, even Beth, sees that going to bed will acknowledge the day’s events in a most final way; that turning lights out will be a more true farewell to Philip than anything has been so far.
    Two of them are slow to give up, they move reluctantly.
    Beth gathers an armful of sheets and a pillow and makes up the sofa for herself. Sophie and Nora take turns in the bathroom upstairs, then each closes a bedroom door behind her, click and click. What is left behind, in the silence and darkness?
    For this house Philip made the pine kitchen table and the four pine kitchen chairs. He built his and Nora’s bed, empty tonight. He did not make the old wicker sofa out on the porch from which he raised Sophie a couple of months ago, on the remarkable night of one of her nightmares, but when he led her through the late spring dark warmth around the house to the private patch of grass out back, that was his workshop shielding them from view.
    That big renovated former barn was one of the selling points when he and Nora were looking at properties here. Its long, high walls are stacked with many shapes and sizes and varieties of wood. Its many shelves hold fat patterned bolts of upholstery. There are tidy rows and containers of tools and glues and screws and decorator nails. There is a wide work-table, and a smaller one, both of them jumbled with projects doomed now to go uncompleted. There are baskets of scrap wood and scrap fabric which Nora customarily loots for materials useful to her. Sawdust floats in the air and is settled and lodged in cracks in the floor. There’s a mixture of smells: dust, wood, sharp chemicals. When anyone called him an artist or, as Beth did, asked if he was like Nora an artist, he laughed. “I design,” he would say, “and I build. I just lovewood.” So he did. Wood took shape in his hands in more governable and perhaps more beautiful and certainly less ambiguous ways than, say, any women were likely to.
    Eventually the women sleep, the new widow first, not because she is heartless or untroubled, more because after this strangest of days, trying to realize and disorientingly failing to realize, of trying and mainly failing to absorb a tidal wave, a tsunami of new ideas, new definitions, new words,
dead
being one,
widow
another,
alone
the big one—after all that, and despite having had the afternoon to herself, she is just bone-deep worn out.
    Sophie lies awake longer. In her darkened room with the window overlooking the backyard and the workshop, she is aching,