By the time she crossed into Virginia the sun was low and orange behind her and the hills were going purple, and she thought about her children.
Ramsay at nine, building a fort out of couch cushions in the living room the week after Lysander moved out, and refusing to come out of it for supper, and Gussie sitting on the floor outside it with two plates of fish sticks, eating hers, saying nothing, until a small hand came out between the cushions for the other plate. Ramsay at seventeen, in the hospital the night she'd had her gallbladder out, sitting in the vinyl chair all night with his homework, because somebody had to be the man of the house, he'd said, and she had told him, Nobody has to be the man of the house, honey, the house can just be a house. Ramsay at forty-four, with a rotisserie chicken, not meeting her eyes.
Coralie, who had been six when her father left and fifteen when he did not come at Christmas, and who had never, as far as Gussie knew, said one word about either of those things out loud, not to her mother and not to anybody, and who had instead grown up into a woman who made lists, who was early to everything, who married a man at twenty-five because he was dependable and divorced him at forty because she had discovered she could not breathe inside dependable, and who now lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Columbus with a cat named Fitzgerald and looked at her phone every forty seconds.
They had protected her. That was what she kept arriving at, mile after mile. In their way, which was a clumsy way, a way that involved rotisserie chickens and inventory counts and her own credit card, they had tried to protect her from the thing she had told them she could not bear. She did not know yet whether to be furious with them or to be ashamed of herself for having made them think they had to. She suspected the answer was going to be both, in some proportion that she would spend the rest of her life adjusting.
She stopped for the night at a motel in Emporia, Virginia, just off 95, the kind with exterior doors and a soda machine that hummed under the stairs. She took a shower and put on her nightgown and lay on top of the bedspread, because she had read things about motel bedspreads, and at nine forty her phone lit up on the nightstand.
Zinnia.
Gussie looked at the name for two rings and then answered.
"Grandma?" Her granddaughter was whispering. There was the sound of the ocean behind her again, and the thin buzz of insects, and a creak of wood. "Are you awake?"
"I'm awake, honey."
"I'm on the roof. There's this little room on top of the house with windows all around, it's called a crow's nest, and you can see both sides. Both oceans. Well, one's the ocean and one's the sound, but it looks like two oceans. It's dark now, but there's lights on boats. I'm the only one up here."