My mother looks like she always does when she is navigating the arrivals terminal of the Raleigh-Durham airport—crazed and fearful that she might not find me standing among the throng of waiting passengers. She honks three times and waves, even though I’ve already seen her behind the wheel of her red Camry and my grandfather seated in the passenger seat.

“You brought Lucy,” she says when I reach the car.

Lucy, my border terrier, barks at her name. She’s been sleeping—a curled eleven-pound fur ball—in the kennel. She lifts her head and her furry black ears perk up before she lays her head back down on her front paws. My mother does not like pets in her home, but I needed to bring Lucy since Stephen refused to watch her.

“I had to,” I say, setting the kennel in the backseat along with my suitcase. I get in, feeling the tiredness of travel, though the flight from Virginia was short.

“Leah, it is good to see you,” my grandfather says. He turns and stretches his hand across the console towards the backseat to grasp my hand. He is as I remember him from his last visit in 2018: the bald head, the gray, curling eyebrows, and the glasses, except he seems to have aged decades. He wears a short-sleeved button-down shirt in a green-blue color, and in his lap sits a bag of Cheez-its, the orange dust tanning his thumb and index.

“Baba,” I say. “I’ve missed you very much.”

“Thank you for coming,” my mother says. 

“Sure,” I say.

My mother called me two weeks ago and asked me to fly to North Carolina to take care of my grandfather during the day while she’s at work. After my grandmother died a year ago, my mother flew my grandfather from Nigeria to America to live with her for the summer. “Grandpa is seventy-six. He knows how to take care of himself,” I said to her when she asked. My grandfather is in relatively good health, sprightly and intelligent, moving without a walker, or a cane unlike other septuagenarians. The last time I saw him was when he and my grandmother came to visit my mother five years prior, and she drove them to D.C. to see Stephen and me. Stephen had pushed my grandmother in a wheelchair as we toured the White House and the Lincoln Memorial. My grandfather had climbed the steps of the memorial and walked for hours with Stephen, my mother, and me, not needing to rest any more than we did.  

“Yes, Baba is healthy,” my mother said, “but he’s very lonely. In America, nobody talks to you. Back home, your neighbors will come and greet you and spend time with you, eat with you. Your grandfather is sitting in the house alone every day. He has nothing to do.”

I had planned to visit my grandfather at some point during his stay in North Carolina. Just not this early and not for an entire month. A few days, perhaps, as I’m the owner and lead strategist of my event planning agency. Although I can do most of my work remotely, we are in the middle of spearheading a twenty-fifth anniversary gala for a local women’s foundation. A time when I would prefer to be home.

My mother holds both hands on the wheel at twelve o’clock. “How was your flight?”

“Quick,” I say to keep her undistracted.

She is unable to talk and drive at the same time. She taps her GPS with great impatience and releases anxious breaths, looking from the road to the GPS and back to the road, trying to figure out which highway signs to follow, though she’s driven this route a thousand times.

“It’s 40 West,” I say. 

“What?”

“West!”

“I know—It’s just, I can’t hear the voice on the GPS.”

I pull out my phone as a way to school my irritation. I craft a message to Amani, our vendor operations manager, who has pinged me about finalizing our plated menu with the caterers and confirming the count for the hotel room bookings for former foundation execs. As I type, I struggle to banish the memory of saying goodbye to Stephen, of pleading with him, wanting to know why our marriage is ending. I have broken the first rule from my search on what to do if your husband wants a divorce. Do not plead, the columnists advise. Do not pressure him. Do not show your desperation. Do not sleep with him. But we have slept together at my initiation. We are two people familiar enough with each other’s bodies to give each other pleasure but no longer two people in love. We are not fighting. We do not hate each other. And somehow, this is worse. 

Our marriage has failed over many things and over nothing. It is how we argue over money—my frugality, his profligacy. It is how we see the world. It is because we have little to say to each other, and we seem to have nothing in common anymore.

Since broaching the idea of a divorce, Stephen is happier than I’ve seen him in the last two years. He is no longer retreating. No longer staying late at work. He has refused couples therapy. “What would be the point, Leah? I know that I don’t want to be in this anymore, ” he has said. He has said he feels nothing in our marriage—none of the chemistry or romantic feelings he is supposed to have toward his wife, a woman he has pledged his life to. We are good friends, he has said, but he cannot imagine the rest of his life in a marriage that consists of friendship alone. I want to believe that this is the reason, but I can’t seem to allow myself to do so. I am the one who is broken, who continues to think of Stephen as I want to know him, not as he is now. The blind date was set up by a mutual friend where he and I spoke until the chairs in the restaurant were overturned on all the tables except ours. The husband who championed the start of my business. And the one who sat with my mother last year after my grandmother died, helping her write the eulogy, making phone calls on her behalf.

“What is Stephen doing while you are gone?” my mother says, once she’s on the highway, coasting in the middle lane and breathing calmly now.

“He’s at the hospital.”

“The two of you are always working and working. You know I’ll miss his stories.”

My mother is a terrible listener, yet somehow, she is enraptured by Stephen’s clinical stories about cataracts, and his operations on glaucoma patients. 

“I don’t know if I can call him anymore,” she says. “Can I?”

My grandfather says, “Why can’t you call him? Is he not your son-in-law?”

“Baba, don’t you remember what is happening? Stephen is leaving her.”

“Eh,” my grandfather says and eats a cracker from the bag.

“He’s not leaving me,” I say, offended.

Stephen and I have not signed any divorce papers. We must be separated for six months before we can file. We are living under the same roof though Stephen has spent many nights at a friend’s house and signed a lease on a one-bedroom condo in Logan Circle that will become available to him in September.

“Okay, well. I don’t know what you people call it nowadays,” she says.

“Nothing’s finalized yet, Mom. Things could change.” 

My mother says, “It’s because you lived together before marriage. I warned you, Leah.”

I’ve learned to half listen to my mother to blunt the sting of her words. Two weeks ago, she said the divorce was because of Stephen’s whiteness, how he had never seemed to enmesh himself fully in our culture. Before that, it was because Stephen and I had elected to have a destination wedding in Mexico years ago, one that was nowhere near my mother’s Nigerian community in North Carolina. She’s upset and frightened by the disaster she perceives in my life, what it means about her ability to have raised me on her own, or the decision she made to never marry or involve my father—who I met years ago on my sixth and then my tenth birthday—in raising me. You should fight for your marriage, my mother has said to me before, as if a single person fighting in a marriage is all it takes to save it.     

I think about the gynecologist visit I scheduled for an IUD removal and the fertility tests right before life unraveled, and the smile in the doctor’s voice when she called me about the count and quality of my eggs. “All clear,” she’d said. “The numbers are normal for your age.” These days, I’ve tried to think of Stephen’s expression when I told him I felt ready for us to start trying. I comb my memory for his reaction to everything I said during our celebratory dinner at a Thai restaurant where we toasted with sweetened, milky iced teas. I’m hoping I can find a clue that would have helped me then, but may be of no use to me now. What I recall is that Stephen laced my fingers in his and said, “I’m really happy, Leah.” Now, all his words ring with hidden meaning. Now, I think: What did it mean that he was “really” happy?

He wants us to remain cordial though he says he can no longer picture himself married to me for the rest of his life. I am acutely aware of his word choice— “picture.” Must he be able to picture us together for us to be together? Is our marriage reduced to threads because he possesses an underactive imagination?

“Leah!”

“What? Why are you shouting?”

“I’ve been calling your name,” my mother says. 

“What is it?”

“See how things have changed. Look around.”

I send a series of texts to Amani confirming a couple of the hor d’oeuvres—tuna tartare and prosciutto-wrapped persimmons with goat cheese—before looking up. The highway in Durham is nothing like the Beltway in D.C., but it is busier than I remember from my visit last winter. Property prices are rising, my mother says when I comment on the increase in traffic. Her house on Lucas Drive is now worth three times what she paid for it twenty years ago.

“You can move back to North Carolina, Leah.”

“I could,” I say. Anything is a possibility, which is frightening, not comforting.

It feels good to be back in a place I know so well. It’s changed, but each time I come, I relearn it and adapt. This is what life demands. This is what people fail to accept.

#

After my mother heads to work the next morning, my grandfather walks through the hallway in a polo shirt and ribbed sweater. America is too cold for him despite the open windows and summer weather. He ignores the TV in the living room, choosing a book from my mother’s shelf or to make WhatsApp calls to relatives back home. When I turn on the TV, he asks me to reduce the volume to a level so low that it does not seem worth it to have on. I can’t help but feel that he is a ghost in the house: restless, shambling, searching for something to haunt.

He asks if I can make him breakfast. He never learned to cook and fears turning on the gas stove. My grandmother and their house girl cooked for him in Nigeria. He shivers as he waits for the meal and pulls down the sleeves of the sweater. I crack a couple of eggs to scramble for him. I recognize my own hunger and open the refrigerator for three more eggs. Lucy sniffs underneath the stove and tramples on my feet as I cook.

“What’s happening with your husband?” my grandfather says, when we sit to eat.

“I don’t know,” I say.

He reaches for the black pepper and puts a forkful of egg away. “You don’t know? A man does not wake up and leave his wife without a reason.”

“Sometimes they do,” I say.

“You must have given him a reason.”

“You know, Baba, in America, you can’t blame the woman for everything.”

“Yes,” my grandfather says, “but he is the one who came to you and asked to go.”

I’m still thinking of reasons why Stephen wants out of our marriage. Stephen is a man obsessed with happiness. The disappointments of life seem to buoy him, not wear him down as they do me. A disappointment is an opportunity, he says and treats it as such. I wake and see gray skies where he sees blue. He has said on more than one occasion that he cannot see himself with someone who walks through life ringed with depression, and I am someone who makes him see the world as it is, when he’d rather see it as he hopes it to be. I have known depression in my past. I have not encountered depression in our marriage to the same degree as before. Only a little negativity or an approach to life that is more glass half-empty than he can bear.

Still, I imagine myself standing, depression a thing around my neck. 

Tiny irritations skewer Stephen’s happiness: the make-up wipes I throw in the toilet, which he’s asked me to stop doing, how I let Lucy sleep on our bed, how I leave my underwear on the bathroom floor after soaking in a bath, or my half-drunk mugs of coffee or bottles of kombucha he finds on the kitchen counter, coffee table, on the patio outside. 

I, too, can think of many reasons why I would leave him. His temper. He is slow to apologize after an argument. He is always sorry ten days later. Or the torn and empty envelopes he holds onto even after the mail has been read, his old-fashioned beliefs about who’s responsible for washing his socks, how his eyes follow the shape and saunter of women in coffee shops and waitresses in restaurants. He is also terrible with money, despite his exorbitant salary. I remember the fight we had over the espresso machine. It was priced at a thousand dollars, and Stephen ordered and shipped it from Williams Sonoma without discussion, knowing I would have argued for a less expensive version. Throughout our marriage, Stephen has wanted the best of everything, and the best has meant the most expensive. He is in competition with himself. Each year of his life must exceed the previous year. It’s why he leases a new car every January. It’s why he must upgrade to the latest phone or gun for the bigger salary and promotion. 

 But isn’t this an exercise in futility? You can always find reasons to leave a marriage. The harder thing is monogamy. The harder thing is holding on to reasons to stay.

“What will we do today?” My grandfather asks.

“Oh,” I say. “Baba, I need to make a few calls.”

“I thought you were coming to Durham so that you would spend time with me.”

“I have to work,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

He shakes his head. “In America, nobody is free. All they do is work.”

“After five, I’ll be free. I promise.” 

I shut myself in my mother’s bedroom, the only room with a desk. My day is full of calls and Zooms, putting out fires for the gala. Amani is on-site in DC and reports that our clients are having second thoughts about Hotel Washington and are interested in a waterfront location, near The Wharf. I tell Amani it’s far too late for a venue change, and I ask her to suss out the clients’ real concerns. She tells me next that our point of contact at the talent company has double-booked the string quartet, alleging to have never received the security deposit. I work through lunch, curbing hunger with a chocolate brownie Clif Bar. At one o’clock, when I have a little time, I walk out to see if my grandfather has eaten his lunch. My mother has shown him how to warm up his food in the microwave. She’s cooked fried chicken, scalloped potatoes, rice and beans, salmon fillets, and ponmo for the week. He’s sitting in the backyard with a plate. Lucy waits alert at his side as if she’s guarding him, when really, she’s waiting for scraps.

He seems okay, but the guest bathroom is adjacent to my mother’s bedroom, and when I take a break a couple hours later, I think I hear him weeping inside. 

Lucy makes her way to the bathroom and barks at the door. My mother has threatened to kick Lucy out of her home if she sees her inside a bedroom or bathroom. Lucy wags her tail like she knows and doesn’t care.

“Lucy-loo. Shhh,” I say. 

My grandfather opens the bathroom door, and his face is moist and wet.

“Leah, this dog of yours makes too much noise.” 

Lucy barks again and stands on her hind legs to paw at him. I hush her and call her to me. I am surprised when my grandfather bends down and scoops her up before I can. She licks his face with joy, and he jerks his head back, appalled.

“Sorry, Baba,” I say, taking her from him. “Bad dog.”

“Now, I must wash my face,” my grandfather says and closes the bathroom door.

“You’re a good dog, Lucy,” I whisper, and she nuzzles my cheek. And we both stay there and listen to the water running. It runs and runs, and we wait and wait, wondering if he’s okay.

#

The rest of the week is the same. In the mornings, my grandfather and I eat breakfast together, and we eat again at night when my mother returns from work. My grandfather goes for walks in the neighborhood while I work, and he takes Lucy with him. He feeds her in the morning and evening. He reads books I’ve purchased for him from online. He sits in the backyard, the hose on his lap and sprays the grass since my mother has no sprinklers. This is enough for him, I tell myself. I can’t be expected to spend working hours with him, not when there are tasks and meetings and expectations. It’s enough that I am here.

I hear my grandfather weeping again on a Thursday morning, and this time I am sure instantly that he is weeping. It happens before I must take a conference call, and when I come out of the bedroom after to see if he has eaten lunch, he is still in the bathroom. I knock twice. I turn the knob and find it locked. I stand and wait and find myself thinking that I could mourn for Stephen with the same pain with which my grandfather mourns my grandmother. 

I stand against the door until his weeping eases.

#

I take a half-day on Friday and drive my grandfather to Duke Gardens.

“Let’s walk around,” I say, clipping a leash on Lucy. 

I let my grandfather hold the leash since he has gotten used to walking Lucy, and they’ve taken a mutual liking to one another. We admire the azaleas and hydrangeas planted on the bottom of the steps before we climb up to the pergola. It is early enough that we’re the only ones there, taking in the view. My phone vibrates. It’s Amani calling to tell me the keynote has booked another engagement and will be available for less time than originally planned. Amani and I speak for fifteen minutes and run through a contingency list of back-up speakers. 

My phone vibrates again after my grandfather and I have left the pergola. I think it’s Amani, but this time it’s Stephen, and I feel as I did when we were dating—nervous, expectant, worried about what to say. The wind whistles, and it seems to carry through my lungs as I wait for Stephen to speak.

“Hey, Leah.”

I don’t know what I’m expecting these days. Hope is a thing that refuses to die within me despite my bent toward half-empty glasses. Each call is hope. Each time I see him, I hope. 

“I talked to Marc about putting the house on the market this week.” 

“What? I thought we decided we’d do it when I got back.”

There are issues we need to take care of in the house. Light bulbs need to be replaced, the dishwasher drain needs to be repaired, and the lock on the back door fixed. Stephen can complete the repairs without me and hire contractors for repainting in my absence. But I wanted to be present for the open houses and for any offers that came. 

He says he has taken days off to finish the repairs since I left. It’s close to ready to show, and there’s no point in waiting. “The quicker we do this, the better. It’s better to do it while we’re still legally married. You know, the write-off and all.”

“Why do we need to move this quickly, Stephen?”

“I need the money,” he says.

“What for?”

“I don’t have to answer that anymore—”

“What?”

“I don’t need to tell you what I need the money for.”

“We’re still married, Stephen. What are you talking about?”

He has assured me that there is no one else in the picture. He is not leaving me for another woman. It’s simply not working out between us. I struggle to understand this. I searched for evidence before coming to North Carolina. I went through his call records and his text messages. He is either phenomenal at covering his tracks or there truly is no other woman. I’d rather there be someone else than to know he’d rather be alone than with me, that there is no one else pulling him away from me, and I have managed to push him away on my own. 

“How’s your grandpa? How’s he liking Durham?”

“You’re changing the subject,” I say. “Don’t do that.”

Stephen cuts and then distracts. I turn to where I was standing with my grandfather before. My grandfather has walked closer to the fountain. He is holding on to Lucy’s leash, and she marks its perimeter. My grandfather looks up at me, questioning. I wave and walk farther away so that he does not overhear my conversation with Stephen.

“Would you rather argue?” Stephen says. “Aren’t you out?”

I sigh. “He’s good. My grandfather’s good.” 

“Are you making time for him?” he says.

“Of course, I am. What does that mean?”

“You get busy, Leah,” he now says in a tone I can’t quite read. “How’s your mom? Has she turned Lucy into a scarf yet?”

I laugh despite the fact that the pain, which is in my throat, is unbearable. 

“Lucy’s still alive.”

“Yapping,” he says. “Driving your grandpa mad?”

“Sort of, I think he likes her though.”

“Listen, I’ve got to head back to my office in a couple of minutes. Are you okay with this? I’ll put our stuff up in the attic. Prep it for the open house.”

“It’s my house, too,” I say. “And I’m not ready to do this yet.”

“I paid for the majority of the house,” he says. “I think that gives me more of a say—”

“You’re really playing this card, Stephen?”

I grip the phone. He used to say, “What’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine.” I realize now how these phrases have no meaning once you’re pitted against each other, once you need to go your separate ways. 

“You’re trying to hold on to this, and I’m telling you that I’m done.”

“Well, you don’t get to be done on your timeline.”

“Leah, let’s not do this,” he says.

“I need time,” I say.

“Okay, but I’ll call Marc,” he says, “I just won’t move on it yet.”

I turn to find that my grandfather is no longer near the fountain. I look up at the pergola, and I don’t see him or Lucy up on the steps either. The phone is still hugged to my ear. I shove it into the pocket of my linen slacks and go in search of them. 

I remind myself that Duke Gardens is not too big, and Lucy is with him, though I would feel more confident if she were a bigger dog like a boxer or Labrador. I walk quickly on the gravel and past a line of trees. I cross a bridge and find my grandfather with Lucy. She is unleashed and digging furiously at a soft spot she’s found under a tree. She sticks her snout in and wags her tail. My grandfather stands next to her, staring up at the paperbark maple, at the red-brown curls of peeling bark.

“Baba, are you okay? Do you need water?” I say, unzipping my bag to find my Hydro flask. “I thought I’d lost you. I’m sorry, I had to take a couple of calls.”

“I’m fine, but I’m hot now.” He smiles.

I uncap the flask and give him the water, which he drinks.

“We have to keep Lucy leashed in the garden,” I say. “It’s the law.”

He shakes his head. “So many laws in America, even for their animals.”

I call for Lucy, and she bounds over. I grab the leash from him and click it on.

“You know, there are 330 million people in this country,” my grandfather says, turning back to look up at the maple.

“Yes, I know.”

“And all of them are lonely.”      

I stand with him a moment before we make our way back across the bridge. 

#

Stephen texts me pictures of our home a few days later. It is pristine, staged and ready for the open house scheduled for Saturday at two in the afternoon. Stephen’s gadgets and baseball caps no longer clutter the coffee table and kitchen island. It looks exactly as it did when we first toured it. The stagers have kept our couches and the headboards in the bedrooms. The walls have been repainted, and the hardwood floors sanded and refinished in the living room and foyer. 

The artwork above my desk has also been removed. It’s a print of Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s Blend in — Stand out. The man and woman in the frame are not young lovers to me. There is something certain and humble in how she embraces him, in what she seems to know about him. Stephen says he’s stored the painting in the attic with a few pieces of furniture we’ll need to bring down when we stage the house. I think it could have been kept up for an open house. It will make a potential buyer feel what I used to feel whenever I looked at it as I worked—assured and restful. Secure. Now, I am terrified that you can feel cozy and wonderfully smug in marriage, and your lover can be biding his time to leave you.

Photographs of us have been taken down from the bedroom and living room walls, one of Stephen planting a kiss on my temple in front of our hotel when I accompanied him to a medical conference in Seattle. Another of us on our honeymoon in Vietnam, in Amanoi, is gone. It’s been replaced with anodyne art—a painting of three fat brushstrokes in primary colors—for the sole purpose of allowing someone else to imagine their lives in our home. The kitchen counters have been cleared of the espresso machine, my rice cooker, and our cacti plants. All the lights are on in the house so that it appears bright and wonderful and homey.

“See how much neater it is than my last visit,” my mother says.

She has peered over my shoulder and seen the photos of the house.

“When I was there,” she says, “there was so much on the tables. Everywhere! I would come and visit, and I would say, ‘Where in the world can I put my things?’”

I put the phone on the counter, screen down.

“You’ll find another home, Leah,” she says. “Don’t worry.”

I have never done well with newness. I’ll miss our neighborhood when we sell—the fledgling aspens, the fishing pier in its center, the low white fences that guard the front yards, and the wooded trails Stephen and I have walked with Lucy on Saturday mornings. The subtle, affected snobbery of the neighbors—I think I’ll miss this, too. Our development is a mishmash of houses and three-story townhomes in a well-to-do part of Virginia, where neighbors take their pre-teens to violin and cello summer camps. Not too far from us is a quaint shopping center with a MOM’s Organic Market I frequent only when I’ve forgotten an ingredient for dinner. There’s a hole-in-the-wall Korean eatery, where Stephen and I order bibimbap and chicken katsu for carryout on Friday nights. Or we used to, as our Friday nights are now spent apart. There’s a UPS in the shopping center, a dry cleaner I go to once a month, and the dental office where we get our annual cleanings. I know the real estate agent, Marc, will add these details to the listing when the house goes on the market. 

I look at the images again. I remember our arguments. I wonder if we’ve imbued our house with the worst of our memories. The unkind, unrepeatable words we’ve shouted at each other have seeped into the walls, sockets, bulbs, and doors of the house. And I wonder if the house will release these memories back to new owners one day.

I want to pack my suitcase and catch the next flight back to Virginia and stop everything from moving forward. Instead I send him a text that says: Go ahead. I wander into the bedroom that’s mine and scroll through the pictures again and again until I am hollowed by pain. 

#

I break for lunch one afternoon and teach my grandfather how to use the computer so that while he’s here, there is something new for him to do. He can read news about politicians in Nigeria or follow family members online. He can join forums if he wants. 

“What will it matter to learn?” he says.

“For the next few weeks, it’ll be good for you.”

He adjusts his glasses, pulling them forward from the lanyard around his neck and looks over the rims. I show him simple things. I teach him how to find the letters on the keyboard. I then show him how to log into the computer with my mother’s password. I show him how to do a Google search and how to see an aerial view of his and my grandmother’s town. 

He is confused at first and resistant to learning the keystrokes. He blinks at the screen as if it hurts his eyes. I go to Facebook and navigate to photos of our relatives so that he can see what they are posting and what’s happening back home. He smiles and for a second moves the mouse himself to click on a photo of his third cousin, a man I do not know, who is posing with a group of men in suits. We click through the photos until he is satisfied. I can see that it pleases him to be aware of what is happening at home, to see familiar places.

“Is there anything you want to know?” I ask.

“Know? At my age?”

“About America, or elsewhere? You can ask anything, and the answer will come up.” 

He grins. “I want to know why Americans let their dogs live inside their house.”

I laugh. “Grandpa, I can tell you why myself.”

“No,” he says. “Google it for me.”

“Okay,” I say, typing in his phrase exactly.

He is delighted with the results from Quora. I read him the responses, and he laughs at each one. There’s a woman in Texas who says Houston is way too hot for dogs to be left outside, and she’d rather her dog be safe and cool than die from the humidity or heat.

My grandfather chuckles at this. “Nigeria is hotter than here, and we keep our dogs outside. Are there no trees for dogs to lie under in this country?”

I read him a comment from Bruce J. who says dogs are like family members, and they deserve to be kept inside the house.

“Family members?” My grandfather laughs again. “What else, Leah?”

I have been hovering over him, typing across his arms. I pull up a chair, and I sit next to him, scrolling. We spend the next hour reading and laughing through comments.

#

My mother decides that we should take my grandfather on a trip to Calabash, a small fishing town on the coast of North Carolina that she loves to go to every couple of years. She says we can spend three nights in Calabash and return on Sunday morning. 

“It’ll be good for him,” she says.

“Why Calabash?”

“The seafood. Remember how good it was?”

The last time I went to Calabash with her was in the summer of 2015. I do not share my mother’s memories. I remember our trip, the fishy and briny smell of the water. I remember heat and mosquito bites on my neck and arms. I remember vomiting after eating a side order of clams at a seafood shack near the waterfront. I remember Stephen rubbing my back as I threw up. How he’d gone back to the shack and ordered me a ginger ale and asked the owner for a cool towel.  I remember his hand, steady and flat on my back, reassuring, comforting. He had given me a straw for the ginger ale, and I had sipped it, as he pressed the towel against my forehead.      

“It’s a good idea,” I say.

“We can’t bring Lucy,” my mother says.

“I’ll ask the Perrys to watch her.”

“No! They’ll do tit-for-tat, Leah.” My mother believes Americans calculate their favors. If they do something for you, they must have you return the favor.

“It’s either that or I don’t go with you,” I say.

We leave Lucy with the Perrys. 

In Calabash, we stay in a three-bedroom condo near the beach. A surfboard is mounted in the middle of the master bedroom wall, below the television, and a bowl of plastic oranges sits on the kitchen table. The condo is peaceful and spacious and surrounded by trees. We spend the first night unpacking and sitting on the balcony, smelling the breeze. 

Stephen calls later that evening while my mother has gone to the nearby grocery store to pick up ingredients for a quick dinner. 

“Oh, I didn’t know you were going to Calabash,” he says.

I bite my tongue to keep from a sarcastic comment about what he needs to know or not know, similar to what he’s said about his need for the money.

“It just happened.”

“Well, we got three offers.” He’s at the hospital on a break, and he’s heard from Marc.

“Really?” I thought the house would sit on the market for weeks at least.

“Yeah, from the open house.”

He goes into details about the offers. One is fifty thousand over the asking price, and another is willing to do part cash and part loan. He says it as if this should convince me of letting go and dispelling my anger at his having moved ahead to sell without me there. 

“I think this is going to be it, Leah,” he says. “The one that’s part-cash offer.”

“You didn’t say ‘yes’ to any, did you?”

“That’s why I’m calling you—”

“Okay, I need time.”

“Again?” He sighs. “Leah, don’t drag this out because you think I’ll change my mind or something. I’m not changing my mind—”

“I just need time.”

“All right. We’ve got forty-eight hours.”

“Okay,” I say. “Okay.”

#

     On our first morning in Calabash, we drive out to Holden Beach. We stand on the beach, listen to the sound of ocean waves, and find a diner for breakfast. In the afternoon, we visit a popular tourist gift shop called Callahan’s of Calabash where my grandfather considers a hat that reads “Stinky’s Fish Tacos.” My mother takes it from him and flings it into her cart. It is easy to mistake her cart for one belonging to a white Southern grandmother. She has filled it with bath towels imprinted with “Salty Toes and Kisses,” coral T-shirts with the words “It ain’t food if it ain’t fried” stenciled in white, cans of gourmet sea salt nuts, and three boxes of taffy.

“I love these,” she says about the nuts, tossing more cans into her cart.

#

There is no ghost-like shambling and weeping in the condo. But it seems my grandfather is as lonely in Calabash as he was on Lucas Drive. Lonelier without Lucy by his side. Lucy has appointed herself his guardian at my mother’s house. When he moves, she’s up trailing after him. When he uses the bathroom, she waits by the door. When he walks into the kitchen, she’s there, anticipating his next move.

On the third day, my mother takes my grandfather to a boutique and bookstore in town. I stay behind to catch up on emails. They return empty-handed and irritated with one another.

“What’s wrong?” I say, when my grandfather heads to his bedroom.

My mother says, “He doesn’t want to do anything. He just wants to sit and grieve.”

It sounds restful. Not needing to outrun something as big and all-consuming as grief. 

“You and Baba are different people,” I say.

She suggests that we drive to the aquarium near Myrtle Beach in the afternoon. 

“I’m still tired, dear,” my grandfather says to my mother when he awakens from his nap.

“You’ll like it, Baba,” she says. “All the fish and everything. You’ll see.”

I can see my mother’s train of thought: if she keeps him moving, he’ll not ossify. If she keeps him moving, she won’t lose him, as she has her mother.

I appoint myself as driver for the thirty-five minute drive to the aquarium, because in new places, my mother is jumpy and unnerved behind the wheel, seeing threats that do not exist. 

When we pull up to the aquarium, it’s big and bright, orange and blue, and my grandfather takes off his glasses as if to protest not only the colors but also the whole outing. We park the car, and we get our tickets and head inside. 

My grandfather and I walk alongside each other on the lower level of the aquarium, and my mother walks ahead like she’s an explorer on an expedition. I can’t tell if my grandfather is interested in or annoyed by the noise and the people and the children oohing and pointing at the costumed animal statues.

“So, Leah,” he says. “All this time, and you still don’t know?”

“Know what? About the offer?” I assume he must have heard my discussion with Stephen. I have not called Stephen back with an answer. I’ve not actually made up my mind about what to do. “I just need time to know if it’s the best one.”

“Leah, I am talking about your marriage—”

“Baba,” my mother calls. “Come and look at the fish.”

“I am coming,” my grandfather says.

“Baba!” my mother calls again.

He shakes his head and walks with crossed arms toward my mother. My mother is standing near a tank, and according to the sign, it’s filled with all kinds of fish—flounder, butterflyfish, striped beakfish, Garibaldi damselfish, and blue tang. My grandfather is mesmerized by the simulacrum of the ocean floor. He is more awed with this than he later is with the stingrays or the tunnel that mimics being underwater or the penguins. We return to see the fish tank again at the end of our time.

My mother is pleased. “Didn’t I say you would like it, Baba?” 

“It was very nice,” my grandfather says.

Before we leave, we stop at the gift shop. My mother walks past stuffed penguins and sea turtles, and grabs three T-shirts that read, “Myrtle Beach Ripley’s Aquarium.” 

“We’ll wear them tonight,” she says, and no one argues with her.

#

It’s our last night in Calabash. We go to a seafood restaurant with a view of the Calabash River for an early dinner. My mother says there is no point in looking at the menu, and when the server comes, she orders crab, jumbo peel-and-eat shrimp, fried clam strips, mashed potatoes, and corn on the cob. We have worn the bright pink Ripley’s T-shirts. They are all extra-large because my mother did not look at the tags before she purchased them. My grandfather wears the baseball cap that reads, “Stinky’s Fish Tacos,” and his ribbed sweater over the shirt.

“Was this where we ate last time?” I say, looking around at the décor.

“No, that was another one,” my mother says. “Shack something.”

The platters arrive at the table, and I find myself hungry, eager to dig in. 

“Baba, eat,” my mother says, pushing the plate of corn towards him.

“Your mother wants to fatten me to happiness,” my grandfather says.

“You’ve not been eating,” she contends.

I look at my grandfather. It’s true that he has slimmed, even in my two weeks here.

“You cannot outrun sadness,” my grandfather says. “Your mother keeps wanting me to be happy. I will never know happiness again, but I will be fine, and sadness will depart.”

It scares me, this idea that one can exist without happiness. How can he accept a state that is not happiness or sadness—that simply is?

“Leah, you will know happiness again.”

“How do you know?” I ask.

“You have decades ahead of you. Me, I have five or six years, maybe—”

“Baba,” my mother says.

“Maybe less,” he says.

My mother urges my grandfather to taste the fried clam strips and dip them in cocktail sauce. She spreads butter on his corn and shunts the platter of shrimp so far his way it seems destined for his lap. My grandfather looks at me as if to say, “See? Fattening me to happiness.”

We eat. Feast. Our table is a mess of butter and cocktail sauce drippings, ripped shrimp tails, hollowed crab legs, and kernels of roasted corn. 

All the while I think about my grandfather’s question at the aquarium, and I know it has been easier for me to pretend not to know or see my own need for happiness in this marriage with Stephen. Stephen has pursued happiness, and I—I’m not sure what it is I have pursued. At some point, I have stopped considering happiness, and maybe I have sunk into sadness without realization. I have been where my grandfather is now even before Stephen asked for a divorce, and Stephen has known this. If there is a spectrum, I’m not sure where it is I fall. But I know it has been long since I searched for happiness.   

I excuse myself from the table. The hostess gives me a curious look as I exit the restaurant wearing the giant T-shirt that hangs to my knees and a bib with an enormous crab claw. There are other diners outside, sitting on iron-wrought chairs in the outdoor seating area and lingering near the dwarf palmettos. The balminess and setting sun make them reluctant to end the evening, to head to their cars and drive back to their homes.

I call Stephen.

“Did you decide about the offer?” Stephen asks.

“I haven’t listened to you, Stephen,” I say.

“What?”

“I thought we were both busy,” I say, “but you’ve tried, and I just, I’ve been in my own world, not paying attention to you. Or to myself. I’m sorry.” 

Stephen is quiet, and I sense I’m touching on something close to truth. “It really isn’t the only reason, Leah. I needed more out of this marriage, and I think this is it for us.”

I don’t say anything.

“I’m not perfect either,” he says. “I haven’t been the best husband. But, my God, Leah, it was all so hopeless at one point, and I guess this is what I knew to do.”

It is a vulnerability that emerges because I have admitted a flaw. I do not expect reconciliation. It is naïve. The house is ready to be sold. There are people eager to move in and create memories in place of ours. Yet, we are not completely beyond repair. 

“I think we should accept the offer,” Stephen says before I can speak again. “I’m buying the condo in Logan Circle. That’s why I need the money.”

He is buying, not leasing. It is a permanent decision, and there is nothing I can actually do to change his mind. I look inside the restaurant, and I see my grandfather and mother, walking arm in arm toward the double doors, to-go boxes in hand.

“Leah?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you okay with us accepting the offer?”

My mind is spinning, but I find a way to speak. “I need more time. Tomorrow.”

“Okay, tomorrow,” he says. 

“Okay—”

“Leah?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m really sorry.”

We both drift off in silence so that it seems an invisible finger ends the call for us.

My mother and grandfather push open the double doors. “Here is your food, Leah,” my mother says, accusingly. “You were taking so long. What were you doing?”

She says she wants to see the river before we return to the condo. We’ll be leaving early tomorrow morning and going inland and north to Durham.

“You can go. I’ll just wait here,” I say.

My grandfather says he’ll wait with me. He’s too tired to walk after all that food. My mother leaves us with the boxes and takes off alone, strolling toward the boat lights that shimmer on the river. My grandfather and I find an empty bench and sit. 

“What if Lucy were here?” he says after a while. “What would she be doing?”

“Scavenging for leftovers,” I say.

We laugh together and sit quietly under the restaurant’s arch. While I have been visiting, I have felt often that he and I are both siloed in our loneliness, but it feels less so in this moment. Sadness has arrived with a vengeance, and happiness seems a wish so far off that like him, I think I must be open to what is beyond sadness, accepting of what awaits me in this in between. My grandfather seems to know this, and he takes my hand gently and squeezes it in his.