Voicemail.
I left a message that I am proud of in retrospect. Calm. No accusation. Just, “Hey, are you on your way?”
Seven-thirty.
Eight.
At eight-thirty, I called Dennis.
He answered on the third ring with the voice of a man sitting comfortably at home watching television. The voice of a man who had not recently thought of anything that required him to be elsewhere.
“Walter,” he said. “What’s up?”
What’s up.
I looked at the table.
The good china.
The cloth napkins.
The candles that had been burning for three hours.
Seven place settings, not one of them disturbed.
“The birthday dinner,” I said. “I had it down for tonight.”
There was a pause.
The pause of a man who does not remember and is now deciding what to do with that fact.
“Oh,” he said. “Yeah, we had… Karen’s thing ran long, and we just figured we’d catch you next time.”
“Karen’s thing?”
“Her book club,” he said. “It went late.”
I looked at the table again.
At the roast I had rested properly.
At the cake I had made twice before getting it right.
At Carol’s empty chair.
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks for letting me know.”
I hung up.
Then I sat at the table alone and ate a plate of the food I had made.
And it was good food.
It deserved better than that evening.
I ate slowly.
When I finished, I blew out the candles, covered the dishes, and sat in the dark dining room for a while.
The house made its small nighttime sounds around me. The refrigerator hummed. The old floorboards shifted. A car passed outside, headlights briefly sliding along the wall.
And in that quiet, something in me settled.
Not broke.
Settled.
This is the last time, I thought.
Not angry. Not dramatic. Just clear in the way things become clear when you have finally allowed yourself to see them whole.
This is the last time I set this table for people who will not come.
The following Monday morning, I called a real estate agent named Linda. She worked at a firm on College Avenue in Broad Ripple.
I had done enough research over the weekend to know what the house was worth. It was a good house in a good neighborhood. A three-bedroom craftsman I had owned for twenty-two years and maintained carefully because Carol had loved it, and then because it was mine.