Tidal Flats. Cynthia Newberry Martin

there something in particular you miss?”

      Lois peered at her through her old lady, mother-of-pearl frames. “I keep thinking about my red heels. They have this diagonal strap across the top. Richard bought them for me in Italy. Our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. I haven’t worn them in twenty years.”

      “Let me see what I can do.” Cass turned to Ella. “May?”

      “Not feeling well this morning.”

      “Again,” Atta said.

      Ella, who worked 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., raised her eyebrows and held onto her coffee. Her mother was Spanish, and Ella had inherited that Spanish flair. She was young and still lived at home and did not yet have a mind of her own. But she was smart and dependable and loved the Fates almost as much as Cass. “It started Saturday,” she said. “Fanny’s been taking her a tray.”

      Cass pushed the scissors back from the edge of the table as Atta reached for the biscuit on her plate and added a giant spoonful of strawberry jam.

      “So,” Ella said, her dark eyes wide, “does absence make the heart grow fonder?”

      “More importantly,” Atta said, “How was the sex?”

      “Atta,” Ella said. “Boundaries.”

      “I’m against them,” Atta said. “I wonder how many years it’s been since I had sex. That could be another one of your improvements, Cass, another service offered by Howell.” And she popped the loaded biscuit into her mouth.

      Cass and Ella laughed. Fanny was laughing in the kitchen. “Request noted,” Cass said. “Are the two of you sharing lipstick?”

      “It wouldn’t hurt you to put on some, too,” Atta said, holding a napkin in front of her mouth so she could continue chewing and talk.

      “You don’t give up, do you, Atta?”

      “I do not.”

      Some women had to learn to be more self-sufficient, like Ruth Ann who had asked permission for everything, and others, due to the restrictions of age, had to make peace with being less, like Atta. Wherever they were in the process, Cass wanted them to have things to look forward to. She wanted Howell to be about living.

      “Who’s doing something fun today?”

      “I’m walking in Piedmont Park,” Atta said. “The van leaves at 9:30 if anybody else wants to go.” She glanced over at Lois. Now that Ruth Ann was gone, Atta was their youngest at eighty-three.

      “I do,” Lois said.

      Fanny, in her sun yellow carpenter’s apron, stepped into the breakfast room to say she’d fixed a couple of bags of old bread for the ducks.

      “I’m going to exercise,” Atta said.

      “I’ll take a bag,” Lois said. And then to Atta, “In case I can’t keep up with you.”

      The duck pond at Piedmont Park was where Ethan had first told Cass he loved her. While he was taking photos, she’d been watching the squawking ducks flap their wings. He’d come up behind her, lifted her long hair off her neck, and whispered into her ear. She leaned back against him, needing his warmth. The last person to tell her he loved her had been her father. Cass turned and looked into Ethan’s dark eyes. She loved him too and told him. Then she turned away again, pulling his arms around her and holding on to them, searching out beyond the pond as far as she could see and trying to see farther, wondering how long it would be before he was gone too.

      4

      Cass’s father had been a lieutenant general hoping for a fourth star. Ten years ago, just after he died, she’d flown to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, where he’d been stationed before he deployed. She couldn’t find his book of Rumi’s poems anywhere. A month later, when the box of his things arrived from Afghanistan, there it was.

      When she’d left the apartment this morning, everything was the same; now she was returning home in charge of Howell. Once in the door, she went straight to her desk for her father’s leather-bound copy of Rumi. The spine was broken, the pages torn and discolored, but in a book of 225 pages, only five passages were marked, each by two lines, one in the white space to the side of the passage and one under a word in the passage. Cass knew all five by heart. When she was a child, her father had read to her, not from children’s books but from Rumi. Since her father died, she’d read the book a crazy number of times. And every time, only those ten ruler-straight lines. Each time she came across an underlined word, she placed her finger on it. Emptiness, love, wings, darkness, fire—this was the order the words appeared in the passages of the book, but often she rearranged them, trying to turn them into a message.

      She placed Rumi back on top of the stack of books on her smoky white desk, the only piece of furniture that had made the journey from house number fourteen in Columbus to her college dorm suite in downtown Atlanta. In her Virginia Highlands apartment, the only place the desk had fit was next to her bed, saving her the cost of a separate night table. Now next to her bed was the only place her desk felt right—fueling her dreams and standing guard.

      In the den, she stretched out on the sofa not looking toward the French doors that opened onto the world of the city where, with all the metal and glass, everything seemed alive—quick, sharp, shiny—but looking toward the motionless front door. At the scratching sound of a key in the lock, she looked up, and there was Ethan—and as if she were a match he’d struck, a spark ran through her body, from her eyes through her heart to her toes. The shock and pleasure of it. His coming home and her being here. Marriage.

      Before she could get up, he bent to kiss her, sliding his hand down her arm until his fingers slipped between her fingers—making her want to reverse time so she could watch to see how their fingers knew which way to go.

      As he straightened, he pulled a bottle of champagne out of a brown paper bag. “Congratulations to the new director,” he said.

      She grinned and pulled him down for another kiss. “Thank you,” she said. “Although it’s terrible about Bev.”

      “She’s tough. I bet she comes through even stronger.”

      He dropped his computer and camera cases on the wheelbarrow bench—made from an Afghan wheelbarrow with one side cut off and a blue cushion added. With a sigh, he collapsed on the sofa that backed up to hers. They had two identical sofas, one facing the fireplace and the other facing the TV.

      “How was your day?” she asked, words she loved saying. She reached over the low backs of the sofas and rubbed his shoulder through the black cashmere sweater she’d given him before they were married.

      “I got the photos off to Boston. Only a month late. And listen to this. I’m just going to use one room, square, with one glass door. Nineteen photos. All the same size. All hung at the same height. Black frames, of course. Five photos on each wall—except the wall with the door.” He sat up on his elbows as if he wanted to make sure she was listening. “The photos—of the war, the people, the land—no beginning or end.”

      “I love it,” she said, climbing, as she often did, onto the tops of the sofas, leaving one leg on her side and wedging the other one in beside Ethan, who dropped his head back to the sofa arm. “I do want to go with you.”

      “That’s my girl,” he said. “I’ll see about getting you a ticket.” He picked up her foot and placed it on his chest. Then he peeled off her sock and held onto her bare foot.

      In their galley kitchen, he stood there, his hands in his pockets, while on their small island she assembled the mustard, pimentos, softened cream cheese, and bowl of grated cheddar. He loved it when she made her grandmother’s pimento cheese.

      “How’s the new Fate?” he asked, leaning toward her.

      “Lois. She’s eighty-six. She has children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”

      “I