— Susan asked at last. — If that’s okay with you.
Eleanor looked out the window. In June the hollow looked nothing like it did in winter, or even in spring: wild green by the fence, birches full of leaves, tall weeds beyond the garden with white umbrella tops.
— That’s okay, — Eleanor said.
It was not joy—joy sounds quicker than that. It was agreement, calm and without conditions. Real agreement.
— Daniel will be glad, — Susan said, and her voice softened. — He misses you. He just doesn’t know how to say it.
— Same, — Eleanor said.
— I understand, — Susan said.
Eleanor was quiet a moment.
— Tell Mike the milk arrived fine. Tell him he picked good milk.
— I will, — Susan said.
Eleanor hung up. Sat for a moment looking at the phone lying beside the blue address book, still open to S. Then she stood up.
Something had changed outside, though she only noticed it when she stepped closer to the window. The sky in the west had darkened and gone greenish, the way it does before a storm, and somewhere beyond the woods thunder rolled. The first storm of summer. Eleanor looked at the sky and thought of Walter. He had loved thunderstorms. He would go out on the porch bareheaded and stand there watching the clouds move in. She would scold him: “You’ll catch cold.” He’d laugh and say, “Nobody catches cold from a thunderstorm.” She never knew whether that was true or whether he had just made it up. But she would go out after him anyway, in her coat, still grumbling, and stand beside him.
Now the first drops hit the window—big, scattered ones. Behind her, from the crate, came a sound. She turned. Gray was looking at her over the edge of the crate, straight and serious, with no obvious purpose—just looking. Quiet slept beside him, curled into a dense gray ball.
— Storm, — Eleanor said to Gray. Why she said it, she didn’t know. She just did, the way people say out loud what they notice when there is another living thing nearby.
Gray looked at her for another second. Then he yawned wide, showing all his tiny teeth and pink tongue, and blinked in a way that suggested he had taken her statement under advisement and found nothing urgent in it.
Eleanor laughed. Quietly, almost without sound. Her shoulders lifted and fell, and something warm moved in her throat. She could not remember the last time she had laughed like that—not at a joke, not at anything in particular, but simply because. Outside, the storm opened up in earnest, rain coming down in sheets the way it only does in summer.
Eleanor called Mike two days before the volunteers were due to arrive. Thursday morning, while Gray was chasing Quiet around the kitchen table and the two of them were somehow making more noise than their size should have allowed. Mike answered right away.
— Mom? — he said. — Everything okay?
