Gussie looked at the marigolds. She looked at the crabgrass in its pile, roots up, drying in the sun. She looked at the back of her own house, the house she had lived in for thirty-nine years, the house with the kitchen window where she had watched two children grow up on the swing set that wasn't there anymore, and she did a sum she had already done in March, a sum she had been carrying around with her for three months like a smooth stone in her pocket.
Ramsay. Sunita. Zinnia. Coralie. And her.
Five.
She had booked for six.
"Ms. Searcy," she said, "I'm going to call you back in one hour. Don't put anybody down for anything. And don't tell anyone in that house that you talked to me."
"I can do that," the woman said, after a pause in which Gussie could hear her deciding that she could. "Mrs. Bennet, is everybody all right?"
"That," said Gussie, "is the question I'm going to go find out."
She hung up. She stood. Her knees had their opinion about it, which she ignored. She went into the house through the garage door, washed her hands at the kitchen sink for a full thirty seconds the way the posters at the clinic had taught everybody, dried them on the dish towel, and then sat down at the kitchen table where she had written the check, and put the phone face down on the oilcloth, and made herself go through it from the beginning, because she was a woman who had spent thirty-one years as a claims adjuster for an insurance company in Dayton, and the first thing they teach you as a claims adjuster is that people do not usually lie to you about what happened. They lie to you about the order it happened in.
So. The order.
In February, her granddaughter Zinnia had turned sixteen, and at the birthday dinner, at the Chinese place on Wilmington Pike with the fish tank, Zinnia had said, while picking the cashews out of her kung pao, that she had never seen the ocean. Not once. She had seen Lake Erie, which she said did not count because you could not see Canada from it but you knew Canada was there, and that was not the same thing as an ocean. She had said it lightly, the way teenagers say things they have been thinking about for a long time. Ramsay had looked at his plate. Sunita had looked at Ramsay. Coralie, Gussie's daughter, who had driven over from Columbus for the dinner and who had been, since the separation, a woman who looked at her phone every forty seconds as if it might be about to bite her, had said, "God, we should do something about that," in the voice of somebody who knows that nobody is going to do anything about it.
And Gussie had gone home and sat at this table and thought about it.