Luck by Joan Barfoot Page B

of someone else’s home to step inside and brew up this coffee and sit at this table. Look at the dawn light, the smooth shapes and bright surfaces, the way the space has its own swooping rhythm from window to countertop, up to doorway, down to table, touching the floor and swinging upwards again. Can it be that she has been regularly going in and out of this room for years? Has touched, hundreds and thousands of times, each of these surfaces?
    And Philip did, too?
    There is something hard inside her that bitter coffee does not dissolve. What do other widows do on the second day?
    They go shopping for funeral outfits, or get their hair done, or sleep under sedation, or helplessly weep. Or they are responsible for comforting children. Nora has all the black clothes she needs, her hair is fine, she is not sleepy, she is beyond tears at the moment. She has no children to comfort, or anyone else. She doesn’t even have funeral arrangements to attend to. Sophie takes care of details. They hired her, thanks more to Philip’s income than Nora’s, to be keeper of the household, a resident practical person in a situation intended to be of mutual benefit. She was a cousin of friends in the city who described her, with sympathy and fascinated relish, as a woman rendered distraught and unstable by a mysteriously inflexible desire for virtue that had recently been overwhelmed by experience; a smart and competent person who needed a quiet place and clear, simple tasks of no moral weight whatsoever until she recovered.
    Has Sophie recovered?
    She was supposed to leave Philip and Nora free for what they supposed to be their more urgent and happy pursuits, and to do so unobtrusively, which for the most part she has; so quiet, at least in the earliest months, that they could be startled to come upon her padding about just when they might have forgotten her. To be sure, there are the shrieking nightmares occasionally startling them awake in the night, but basically she has been, and done, what she was supposed to be and do. Or as Philip kept saying, “Isn’t it great to be free just to work?” Of course. Nora nodded.
    But now Philip has abandoned all his urgent and happy pursuits; leaving Nora with what? Sophie takes care of thedetails, and Nora’s own pursuits make no sense at the moment. It’s beyond her what material, which stitch, colour, shape, shade or texture could possibly depict the weight of being so much at a loss. It would have to be something extraordinary she has never yet seen in her palettes or threads or baskets of scraps.
    Her fingers drum on the table, she stands to look out the window, she paces, she sits down at the table again. Something needs doing, but what?
    Upstairs, Sophie is still in bed, but awake. She heard Nora go in and out of the bathroom, was alert to her quiet footsteps slipping downstairs. She’s damned if she’s going to worry about whether there’s enough coffee. She has wakened from her dreams with an idea. This is different, obviously, from waking up wondering if this is a day Phil will make a small gesture, or they’ll have one of those glances, or something will happen that unexpectedly leaves them alone together for an hour or so, but her intentions do nevertheless involve Phil’s skin, and his hands.
    Has it been only a day?
    Unlike Nora, Sophie does not feel him scattered and dispersed, either everywhere or nowhere. In her mind’s eye he is focused and precisely observing, her specifically. Never mind where he’s looking down from, which isn’t a place exactly, more like he’s a camera mounted above her, the way he himself could be mounted above her. Only the past couple of months, and not so often. There could have been a lot more times if he—they—hadn’t felt the need to be exceedingly careful. Beth, for instance, has to be clubbed like a seal before she notices most things, but if she did get a clue, she would either go running to Nora or more likely blurt something out