Stiltsville: A Novel - By Susanna Daniel Page 0,136

old self; he and Gloria invited me for dinner every Sunday night. Margo stopped by every other day or so, and we continued to take water aerobics classes together, though Cynthia was replaced by another instructor, who was not as good. Margo returned to sailing on the weekends. She said being on the water reminded her of him. She started a program teaching jazz dance to street kids in Liberty City, and this quickly became her full-time job, and she left the college altogether. Marse and Paul got a dog and named it Bennett. Marse wanted a big wedding but Paul said he’d already done all that, so she told him she didn’t need reminding that this wedding wasn’t special to him, then stormed out and spent the night at my house. They made up in the morning. They were married at the Barnacle, on the water, she in a green dress and he in a guayabera. They honeymooned in Peru and brought me a small cement bust, an infant head, which I perched on the windowsill in the kitchen. I played a lot of tennis, and at night I sat in the living room and looked around at the items that had populated my life—our life—for so long, and instead of getting easier this became unendurably painful, and I knew I had to go.

I moved to Asheville, North Carolina, where decades before, Dennis and I had spent a long autumn weekend at a bed-and-breakfast. We’d hiked and admired the foliage and watched street musicians in Pritchard Park. With the profit from the sale of the big house, I gave Stuart and Margo a nest egg and bought myself a two-bedroom brick townhouse on a quiet street. Gloria drove up with me and helped me arrange my kitchen, then flew back to Miami. Before she left she told me she envied me a little, retiring to a quieter life, but I think she was only trying to lessen my guilt over leaving them, over leaving Margo. I took a part-time office job and joined the local tennis club, where I play doubles with a woman who also has been widowed. My mother lives a three-hour drive away, and almost every weekend I visit her or she visits me. During my first summer, Bette and Suzanne flew out and we shopped for antiques. Margo and Stuart came for my first Christmas, and it snowed.

I’ve returned three times: once to stay with Marse while Paul was in the hospital for bypass surgery, once to spend Mother’s Day with Margo, and once after Grady’s second stroke, for his funeral. Bette and Marse and I started a tradition of going away together each year—so far we’ve been to San Francisco, the Outer Banks, and Guadalajara. Margo drives up for a long weekend every couple of months. She talks about moving to be closer to me, but though I am lonely for her, I don’t encourage it—she needs to become steadier in her own life. I hope that one day she will have a baby. If this happens, though, I’ll have to consider moving back, which is right now unfathomable to me. When I think about Miami, it is as if all I loved about the place no longer exists. It is as if every regret I’ve ever had lives there. But I miss my daughter, and I would like our family to continue.

The mountains and changing seasons here remind me of my childhood. I miss the ocean, of course, but I do not care to live near it again.

The night Dennis fell in the guest room, his hip snapped, and he lay moaning while I called 911. Before he was able to come home from the hospital, he developed pneumonia, and Dr. Auerbach—who I could tell didn’t really believe me when I told him Dennis had crossed the room on his own—told us it was time for hospice care. He said he was sorry the disease had moved so fast. There are people, I know now, who live a dozen years or more with ALS—but here we were only two and a half years after the diagnosis, being shown the door.

I ordered a hospital bed for the living room. I probably should have done this months before, to make Dennis more comfortable and give him more space for visitors, but I was always a step behind the disease. In the hospital after his fall, Dennis had been on a continuous regimen of morphine and