Part Six: Elaine
Happiness, Owen had learned, does not arrive and then remain unchanged. It requires tending. It exists in a world that has opinions about it, and those opinions press in from various directions with varying degrees of force.
Elaine Mercer arrived in February without calling ahead, which was how she had always operated — a woman of sufficient confidence in her welcome that the formality of warning struck her as unnecessary. She was sixty-eight years old, impeccably maintained, and possessed of the particular authority of a woman who had run a substantial household and a charitable foundation for four decades and had never seriously been given cause to doubt her own judgment.
She came into the kitchen and found Lila making lunch and the girls at the counter doing what had become their habitual Saturday occupation — painting, talking, arguing amicably about whose mountain range was more convincing — and Owen at the table with coffee and a set of drawings he had brought home from the office.
He saw his mother read the room and he watched her arrive at her conclusions with the speed of a woman who had been reading rooms since before he was born.
Lunch was polite. The girls were pleased to see their grandmother and showed her their paintings, which she praised with genuine affection — whatever else she was, Elaine loved her granddaughters without qualification — and for an hour the conversation covered the easy ground of family update and news. But Owen knew his mother, and he knew the difference between a postponed conversation and an avoided one.
After lunch, while the girls were in the garden and Lila had gone upstairs to change the sheets, Elaine set her coffee cup down with the precise decisiveness of a woman arriving at her point.
“You hired a housekeeper,” she said. “Not a companion. Not a —”
“I know what I hired,” Owen said.
“She’s twenty-four years old, Owen. She is an employee.”
“She was,” he said.
His mother looked at him. “What does that mean?”
“It means the situation is different than when I hired her.”
“And you think Claire would —”
“Please don’t,” he said quietly. “Don’t use her for that. Claire would have wanted the girls to be happy. They are happy. She would have wanted me to be functional. I am — more functional than I’ve been in over a year.” He looked at his mother steadily. “What Lila has given this house — the girls, me, this whole — what had become a very dark and very quiet place — I will not apologize for that. And I will not ask her to be less present in our lives to satisfy an expectation that I don’t believe is serving anyone.”
Elaine was quiet for a moment. She had the expression of a woman revising an argument she had prepared.
“I want you to be happy,” she said finally. Less certainly than she had said most things.
“I know,” he said. “This is what that looks like.”
Elaine stayed for three days. By the end of the second day, she had sat in the garden with Lila and asked about her mother, and listened to the answer with the attention of a woman who, whatever her reservations, was not capable of being incurious about a person who interested her. By the end of the third day, she had asked Lila to show her how to mix the green the girls had been using for the mountains.
She did not reverse her reservations entirely, and Owen did not expect her to. What happened was more modest and more real than that: she saw what she saw, and she adjusted, and she stayed.
