There was one more conversation I had to have, and I had it by myself, in Marlene Whitmore’s kitchen, on a Thursday.
I asked her what she had seen at the lake house on the Fourth of July.
She made tea for a while. Then she sat down and told me that she had gone down the back hall for a towel and had seen her younger son standing in a doorway, and had seen her granddaughter not able to get past him, and had gone back to the porch and sat down and told herself she had seen two people talking.
“I made a decision,” she said, “in about four seconds. And then I had to keep making it every day so the first one stayed true.”
I asked her what she thought would have happened if she had stood up off that porch.
She said she had thought about that every night since. That she would have had to lose a son either way, and that at seventy-three you start doing sums about which years you have left and who is going to be in them, and that she had done that sum on a porch in July with a towel in her hand and had gotten an answer she could live with for eleven months and not one day longer.
