I went to a coffee shop.
I sat by the window with my laptop. I worked on the nonprofit bookkeeping for about an hour, because it was interesting work and I was good at it. Then I closed the laptop and read a book for forty-five minutes, which I had not done in the middle of a workday in approximately seven years.
Then I called my mother.
Not — I didn’t actually call her. She is gone. But for a moment, in the coffee shop, I felt the reflex to call and tell her what I was doing. She would have liked knowing I was in a coffee shop reading in the middle of the day. She would have said, with the kind of quiet satisfaction she had about things going right: “Good. That’s good.”
I sat in the coffee shop for another twenty minutes.
When I left, I drove past the house on the way back to the apartment. I don’t know why. The new owners had put up a different mailbox and a small planter by the front door. The planter had yellow mums in it. The kitchen curtains were a different color.
I drove by slowly and then I kept driving.
She was everywhere in me already. The house was just a house now.
THE ACTUAL ENDING
Here is what I know, having been through the cream-colored envelope and the folder and the conference room and the sale and the move and the Tuesday mornings that are mine again.