We’d arrived at the age of irrelevance, the lot of us – except for Daphne, who was not yet 30 – so it was important to acknowledge we were still alive, among the living.
Our running joke: anniversary cards that said, Congrats on being halfway through our marriage! Does it mean something good or bad that neither of us pointed out by how many years, with that last card, we’d overshot?
Today they were moving back to the city because their mother never liked it here in the country, near the woods. Inside the house, the boxes were packed for the movers who would arrive in twenty minutes. Their mother watched the three children from her bedroom window, a tall window with old and rippled glass. Nora waved. Her mother waved back and let the curtain drop. Soon, Nora thought, that window would belong to a thin and pale woman whose children were already grown. Nora imagined her standing at the upstairs window and staring out at the yard like a ghost...