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miles.



chapter three

    T OM WAS GONE BY THE TIME I WOKE UP . A FTER FORTY-TWO years of marriage we had figured out how to be quiet in the morning. I pulled on some sweatpants and a T-shirt and went to see if I could catch him before he left, but the only person home was Woodrow, our contractor, sitting at the kitchen table with a bagel and a cup of coffee, reading the newspaper. I was thrilled to see him. When Woodrow took on our Florida room, he had no idea what he was getting into. He had scheduled other jobs and so for days at a time he would be gone. I had come to believe the house was going to cave in under my feet whenever he was gone. My peculiar sense of logic had convinced me that as long as Woodrow and his crew were working, the foundation would not collapse.
    Woodrow was about my age. We had both grown up in Raleigh. We had lived not more than ten miles away from each other for most of our lives, but we hadn’t met until we had both passed sixty and he came to work on our house. That can happen sometimes, especially when one person is white and the other is black. The years go by and you just keep missing each other. Tom had defended Woodrow’s nephew once, a good boy who did well in school but bore an unfortunate resemblance to another kid who knocked over Exxon stations for a living. After the case was over,Tom and Woodrow got to talking about the sunporch we had one day hoped to add on to the back of the house. Woodrow was feeling sufficiently grateful to Tom and said he thought he could do it for a very reasonable price. Except we only had slightly less than half a room. Every now and then he would have his men do a little work on it just so we could feel it might actually happen one day. The rest of the time was devoted to the foundation. That is, when they were there at all.
    “Hey there,” Woodrow said, looking up from the paper, my reading glasses sitting on the end of his nose. “I picked up bagels but Tom didn’t want one.”
    “Is he gone?”
    “Ten minutes ago.”
    I poured myself a cup of coffee and refilled Woodrow’s cup. I sat down at the table and Woodrow folded up the front page and pushed it over to me, but I just shook my head and pushed it back.
    “I don’t care what’s going on in the world.”
    “Tom told me Kay was marrying a Bennett.”
    “How did he seem to be taking it this morning?”
    “I’ve seen him in better moods.”
    “It was a pretty big surprise.”
    “If one of my girls had ever come home with a millionaire, I think I would have found something nice to say about it.” Woodrow ripped off a chunk of bagel and soaked the edge of it in coffee.
    “Not if you didn’t like the guy.”
    “Tom says you all like him well enough.”
    I shook my head. I was ashamed of myself. “You’re right, we do. I keep forgetting that. Don’t you want some cream cheese?”
    “They didn’t put any in the bag.”
    I got up and went to the refrigerator and found the cream cheese, and then I got myself a plate and a knife.
    “Kay’s a smart girl,” Woodrow said, handing me the bag of bagels. “She’s going to do what’s right. You don’t have to worry about her.”
    “Like you don’t worry about your girls.”
    “When you’ve got four girls, you learn to spread your worrying out evenly among them. It’s better that way, keeps you from getting too focused on any one thing. The biggest mistakes I’ve made as a parent came when I started putting all my worry on one of them. Get your mind off of Kay for a while. Try worrying about one of your other kids.”
    As if on cue, the only other child who was still around for me to worry about made his entrance. George came down the hall from his room looking sleepy, his pale hair kicking up in half a dozen directions. More so than with any of my other children, I had a hard time coming to terms with the fact that George had grown up. He was the baby of the family and I guess I thought that meant he would stay that way. It was a