“It’s nice,” Diane said. “It’s a nice room.”
“It’s my room,” I said.
She looked at me. Then she nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “It is.”
She went home to Karen’s basement before Greg got back. She moved into Linden Park on the third of January. Greg and Owen carried her boxes. Lily carried a little potted fern she picked out at the grocery store, to make the new place feel like home.
I brought her a set of curtains. Store-bought. Plain. I didn’t measure. They were two inches too short.
She hung them anyway.
She comes to dinner on Sundays now. When we invite her. Both of us. She knocks first. She doesn’t sigh at my dishes. Sometimes she helps with them. Sometimes she loads the dishwasher wrong, and I don’t say anything, and she catches me not saying anything, and we both almost smile.
She never asked for the money back.
