The Best Thing for You by Annabel Lyon

life.” May smiles up at me when I hold a cup of coffee out to her. Liam’s I set down in front of him.
    “I wouldn’t have minded the opportunity to travel,” Liam says, staring at his cup without touching it. “San Francisco, Saint Petersburg. At certain points it would have been extremelybeneficial to my career. I found having a family quite limiting, in fact.”
    “Financially,” May says, frowning and nodding at the same time, trying to understand.
    “That too,” Liam says.
    “Thanks so much,” I say, as though this is just another of our routines, as though this is a line he’s used before and I’m not rocking, reeling hurt.
    “Calvin’s travelled a lot, I think,” May tells me. “Thailand, Vietnam. Did you know he’s a Buddhist?”
    I nod gravely. “You can just tell.”
    “Tell what?” Jupiter’s in the doorway, pulling at his cuffs. He gestures I shouldn’t get up, he’ll help himself to coffee.
    “Calvin, at work,” May says. “I told you about him. He’s kind of cute, too, in a sad sort of way.” She giggles. Jupiter rolls his eyes and puts his hands round May’s neck like he’s going to strangle her. Then he sits down and sips his coffee.
    “Kate’s fitting in, then, at the new job,” Liam says. “Everybody loves Kate, as usual.”
    May giggles again, inadvertently, then stops, like she’s stopped a bottle of bubbles. She’s not stupid, she has radar. She glances at Jupiter again and this time it’s not a question. He holds up his cup for a fraction of a second which I take to mean, I know. Just let me finish this.
    Liam must have seen the signals too, for he puts the brandy bottle away and makes some more conversation about nursing shortages and government cutbacks, but May and Jupiter are wary and within a few minutes they’re on their feet pleading an early morning. We hug, and the men shake hands again, and May says, “See you Monday.”
    “They don’t even work weekends, I’m pretty sure,” I tell Liam when we’ve closed the door behind them.
    “Lucky them,” he says.
    We spend some time in the kitchen cleaning up. Silence makes the house feel like a decompression tank down under water. Liam starts taking chairs out into the hallway so he can sweep. “Let’s move the fridge,” I suggest. We grapple the fridge out of its nook until we can see the precise dimensions of its absence: a square patch of dust and a couple of Cheerios.
    “May has a crush on this Calvin guy from your work, wouldn’t you say?” Liam says. “Did she talk about anything else all evening? I can’t remember.”
    “He likes her too,” I say. What the hell. “He tries to hide it but he can’t. It’s kind of endearing.”
    “Poor Jupiter.”
    “Yeah,” I say. “It’s always worse for the husband, isn’t it? So
limiting.
”
    He gives me a look from the old days: misery. Then: “I’m going to Mass tomorrow.”
    “Oh, great,” I say.
    “I have to do something.”
    I cap the Pine-Sol with a sponge and flip the bottle upside down, then back. Kneeling in the gap between fridge and wall, I make passes over the floor. The dust collects on the sponge in black lines. The linoleum shines wetly. The fumes are the best.
    “I want to go to confession,” he says.
    “Why?” I take another shot of Pine-Sol on the sponge and hand it to him. “Now what have you done?”

    Drainage ditches bisect what used to be the back lawn; it’s rumpled as a rug now, creased and flipped back. The yard is a lot of bumps. I’m thinking it looks worse than when they started. Pushing aside some tarpaulins protecting the glass, I go into thegreenhouse, a stuffy orange ten-by-ten space, and remove a Coke can and a MMM arvellous MMM uffins bag of cigarette butts. I can’t imagine why they take their lunch in here unless it’s not to be seen. But why?
    A few days ago I suggested the thing about the holly. The older one said, “That your boy out front?” We could hear basketball sounds – spaced