“You knew that?”
“Every Thursday for eight years,” she said. “Twelve o’clock. Peanut butter, mostly. Sometimes turkey. You sit in the front seat and look at the oak tree.” She pulled out a chair for me. “I watched you from the upstairs window. Every week, I thought, This time I’ll go down and ask her to come
in. And every week, I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
She sat down across from me. She unfolded her napkin and laid it carefully in her lap.
“Because I’m a stubborn old woman who doesn’t know how to say things,” she said. “Ask Susan. She’ll tell you.”
I sat down. I unfolded my napkin. My hands were shaking a little.
We ate chicken salad sandwiches. They were good. She said she’d made them herself, from her mother’s recipe, with grapes and walnuts. We talked. Really talked, for the first time in eight years. About the move. About her new apartment in Oregon, which had a window that looked out at a
mountain. About Susan’s kids, who were in college now. About the young family who was buying the house.
“Three little boys,” she said. “I told them about the bird’s nest in the attic window. The father said
