victories have shown Lena what her soon to be ex-husband is capable of when he wants something. She assumes that if Randall wants her to keep the house, he—no they—must be worth more than he has let on.
Today everything is different. She knows it is better to be less controlled by Randall, to be out of the place that no longer feels like home. Even though, physically, Camille and Kendrick are around, the house has lost its soul.
“I’d like to see a three-bedroom apartment.” Lena stands before the guard at the desk, impressive in his black uniform, as he dials the leasing office.
A gawky agent steps into the lobby from behind a door with a sign that reads: STAFF ONLY. The young man begins with a tour of the lobby, the workout room, and a small library area for the use of all the tenants.
Lena waves off his canned spiel and presses her hand to his arm—the same calming gesture she would have made to Kendrick or Camille. “All I want to see are the available units. I can’t take a sales pitch today. Sorry.”
They head for the two banks of elevators and tour several vacant units until she sees the apartment she wants: one with a view of the lake and the hills so that she can see where she lived from where she will live.
The apartment will do fine for her and Camille, and hopefully Kendrick, until Lena decides on a permanent place to call home. She will miss her house: scrub jays trilling at five in the morning, rock doves cooing, rain pelting against the tiled roof; chirping crickets and dancing butterflies; the full moon through the bedroom window—luminous and mysterious; the crunch of autumn leaves, winter wind singing through the trees; the secret compartment behind the fuse box where a four-year-old Kendrick stored his rubber dinosaurs; a six-burner gas stove, blueberry pancakes on Sunday mornings.
In this kitchen, three times smaller than the one she has now, she thinks of how she will manage Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas, too, if she is lucky, and in a few weeks a cake for Camille’s graduation. Lena will do whatever she must to make Camille’s celebration normal. Let Randall do it. There’s more to raising a child than signing checks. Let him hire a caterer, handle the details of the graduation party. Ha! Let him make sure Camille roams among family and old friends, collects envelopes of money and gift certificates, and pretends, if only for one day, that nothing in her life has changed. Let Lena be a guest in what was her own home.
“Ma’am?” The agent is tentative, but Lena does not need to be sold. “Excuse me, but this is the last apartment I have to show you.”
“Where do I sign?” With no thought to where the money will come from, Lena decides a six-month lease makes the most sense, requires the least obligation for such a tenuous situation. The last time she rented an apartment she was twenty-five and three years away from buying the stucco house—a half-mile from Lulu and John Henry—that she lived in until her marriage.
While the gleeful agent completes the paperwork, Lena returns to the place she will call home. The apartment is simple: the ceiling meets white walls in sharp angles without the crown molding in every room of her house, a gas fireplace, wall-to-wall carpeting. This new place fourteen floors above street level is lovely but sterile.
“Hello, hello,” she calls out, waiting for her echo to repeat her words like children do in empty rooms. When she moved into her first apartment, there were friends there to help. It was a party: a celebration of independence, a joyful adjustment to living without parents, sister, or roommates. The process begins again. Same but different. The period of adjustment. The vocabulary change from we to I. She walks from the open kitchen to the bedrooms and the small balcony. Who will greet her but these walls when she comes home? Who will she ask about their day? Who will say goodnight?
Twenty-three years of hard work: for her children, her husband, her marriage. Twenty-three years of sowing the seeds for a good life. Lena crosses her heart and whispers, “Dear God, I know my life will never be the same again. Please bless me and let new seeds sow themselves here.”
f f f
“This is the easiest commission I’ve ever made.” The agent is excited when she returns. Lena imagines that he has spent