Gloria died on the second of November, 2008. Margot was eleven.
Wren & Salt opened the following August. It made money from the first year. Every March, an envelope arrived from Pauline's accountant, and every March I deposited the check into a 529 account in Margot's name, and I did not spend one dollar of it on myself. Not because I'm a saint. I want to be clear on that. Because it wasn't mine. It was Gloria's last idea, and I only ever had the one job, which was to carry it.
The rest of my money went where it had to go. The second mortgage. The credit card. The roof, in 2013. I bought what I needed and I didn't buy what I didn't, and somewhere along the way I stopped noticing what I didn't have. A man gets used to a nine-dollar jacket. He starts to like it.
Margot went to Ohio State and then got her master's at Northwestern. She told her friends she had partial scholarships, which she did, and she told them her mom had left her a college fund, which, in a way, was true. When she finished, there was still money in the account. It's still there. I was saving it for her wedding.
She never asked how a dental hygienist's life insurance had stretched that far. She was a kid, and then she was busy. And I never offered.
VIII
Four days went by without a word from her.
I worked. On Monday I replaced a door gasket at a pizza place in Lakewood. On Tuesday I spent six hours chasing a refrigerant leak in a florist's cooler and finally found it in a place nobody would think to look, a pinhole in a line where it ran behind a baseboard heater. On Wednesday I did nothing at all, which I'm not good at, and I sat in the garage with a cup of coffee and stared at the workbench.
On Wednesday night, I did something I don't usually do, which was look at Margot's Instagram. I don't post anything myself. Peter showed me how to follow her a year ago.
There was a new picture from Saturday night. It was the one from dinner, the one she'd taken standing up. There was Peter, smiling. There was Philippa, elegant, and Graham, raising his glass. There was the roast chicken on the table, and the old iron ice hook hanging from the beam above. The caption said: Two families, one table. So grateful. 🤍
And on the far left edge of the picture, cut off by the crop, there was a brown corduroy shoulder with a suede patch on the elbow. That was all of me that made it in.
I looked at it for a long time. Then I put the phone in the drawer of the workbench, under the box of wire nuts, and went to bed.
She came on Saturday morning. I was in the garage with the door rolled up, working on a chest freezer for my neighbor, Mr. Okonkwo, whose wife kept a whole deer in it every winter and who'd called me in a panic when it started making a sound "like a cat in a dryer." I heard a car door, and I looked up, and there was Margot coming up the driveway in jeans and an old Ohio State sweatshirt with her hair in a ponytail, carrying two coffees.
She looked about fifteen. She looked exactly like her mother.
"Hi," she said.