Kara Was Here. William Conescu

spoon scraped against the pot with each rotation. Then she said, “Did I even know Kara had a sister in Chapel Hill?”

      “She doesn’t live here yet. She was just visiting for orientation. She’s going to UNC in the fall. She’s done with exams already,” he added.

      “Lucky her,” Val said, and she pushed through the kitchen door into the dining room.

      Brad wondered if he should follow or leave her alone, but a second later she was back. “Are you doing alright with your—with Kara’s death? I mean, you didn’t say much after the funeral, and now you’re having lunch with her sister.”

      “I’m fine, yeah. I was just trying to be nice. She doesn’t have a big sister who can tell her about Chapel Hill anymore, and it was easy enough for me to buy her lunch. I thought I mentioned it this morning.”

      “No.”

      “I’m sorry.”

      Val opened a cabinet and pulled out two bowls and set them out on the counter. “It’s okay,” she said. “I get it. That was a nice thing to do. It must be hard for you.”

      “I’m fine, really.”

      Val hesitated, then met his eyes. “I would like to not be the fifth person to find out you’ve started wearing glasses, okay? You can ask me to go to LensCrafters with you. You really can. I can handle that.”

      Brad tried to wrap his arms around her, but she resisted. Behind her, the soup bubbled over the rim of the pot and sizzled on the stovetop. “Shit,” she said, turning her back to him.

      “Let me get that.”

      “I can handle it.”

      “I know you can, but . . .”

      Val shifted the pot to a cold burner. “Just give me a couple of minutes to finish dinner.”

      Brad walked out to the dining room and carefully started moving Val’s piles to make space for two placemats.

      He didn’t like being dishonest with her. It wasn’t the way their relationship worked. He’d have been glad for the help picking out frames. That could have made it fun. But he didn’t want to have to explain his unusual prescription because that would have required explaining the tumor he didn’t have and the appointments he hadn’t mentioned.

      This was temporary, he reminded himself. By the middle of June, they’d be able to talk like a normal couple again. And they had a lot to discuss. Last time, by this point, they’d already stenciled the extra bedroom with circus animals. He’d built the crib and attached a mobile to it, and Val had started looking at fabric for curtains. Almost every meal seemed to revolve around names or day care, or some child development book one of them was reading, or what they’d do if their child wanted to ride a motorcycle. He wanted to have those conversations again. Soon. Only about two more weeks.

      Val came out of the kitchen carrying two bowls of soup. “Careful, it’s hot.”

      Brad leaned over his bowl to sniff, and his glasses steamed up almost instantly, so he took them off and wiped them on his shirt. Val couldn’t help smiling. “Smells good,” he said again.

      “Thanks.”

      He followed her back into the kitchen and got silverware for the table, and she began assembling a salad. Maybe later, he thought, in a few weeks, when she was in a better frame of mind, they might sit down to dinner and he might tell her about his little scare.

      But then what would be the point, he asked himself, as he lay out the silverware. If a car nearly runs you off the interstate, what sense is there in rushing home to tell your wife about it?

      Better to focus on the future. Next time he needed a pair of frames, he’d simply invite her to help him. And if Val asked about the particularities of the prescription, noticed that he wasn’t exactly nearsighted or farsighted, discovered that his doctor wasn’t a typical ophthalmologist—

      But why bother thinking that far into the future? By the time he needed another pair of glasses, they’d have a baby on their hands. At that point, the nuances of his glasses prescription would be the last thing on anyone’s mind.

      Gwen Tinsley stopped outside the doorway of her sister’s old bedroom and looked at the writing on the graffiti wall. All of the names of Kara’s friends were on the wall. And favorite bands. And favorite movie stars. “Pink Ladies” was written in large pink script above the headboard. It dated back to when Kara was in a high school production of Grease. She’d played Frenchie. Gwen wasn’t even born yet.

      No one was in the house but Gwen, so she entered the room and pulled back the nightstand. Behind it, scrawled in her own little girl handwriting on the bottom of the graffiti wall, were the words, “Gwen was here.” She’d drawn a smiley face beside her secret message.

      Below it was Kara’s reply: “I know, and she better not be here again.”

      Gwen opened a drawer of the nightstand and fished out a purple pen. “Now, she’s back,” she wrote. Something about the statement looked lonely, so she added, “Ha. Ha. Ha.”

      The house felt quiet.

      If she ever saw this wall again, Gwen knew it would be painted over. The whole room would be white. The posters would be gone, the Mardi Gras mask that was thumb-tacked above the closet. Her mother had chosen their trip to the mall yesterday to tell Gwen about the plan to sell the house. As Gwen was packing for New York, her mother said she might want to box up anything personal and throw away anything she’d outgrown. “You never know with these things,” her mother said. “Some houses take a year to sell, and some sell in a day.”

      I could give you the name of a good realtor, Gwen was tempted to say.

      The boys were getting older, her mother explained. Soon they’d be in junior high, and she and Randy wanted them in a better school district.

      “Kara and I went to school at McKimmons. It was good enough for us.”

      “You know what I mean,” her mother insisted. “It’s different now. New Hanover County is getting all sorts of attention for its new schools. And besides, it’s time for the boys to have their own rooms.”

      Gwen knew what was happening. A part of her wasn’t surprised. “Is this because no one wants to move into Kara’s room?” she asked.

      “No,” her mother insisted. “We’ve been talking about this for years. Long before . . .” Dot-dot-dot.

      Her mother seldom said anything about Kara’s death that didn’t end with dot-dot-dot. When she told people the news, her mother would say that Kara had died in her sleep, dot-dot-dot. “She was a free spirit,” she might add, dot-dot-dot. Or, “She lived a hard life . . .” Only Randy seemed willing to use the word “drugs.” “You may think grown-ups lay it on thick when we talk about the dangers of drugs, but look what happened to your sister. It was your mother’s worst fear.”

      Yes, obviously it was smoking pot that did her in, Gwen wanted to say. But she didn’t.

      There had been times during Kara’s rebellious periods—which covered much of Gwen’s life, now that she thought about it—when talking about Kara was unofficially off-limits. Her mother wouldn’t mention Kara, even if she’d just gotten off the phone with her, and would hardly respond if Gwen said something about her. The Bobbies barely knew Kara, the age difference was so great, and Randy didn’t matter. Even when she was alive, Kara sometimes seemed like a ghost, haunting conversations in which her name was never mentioned. Not talking about Kara now felt familiar.

      These past three weeks, when Gwen’s mother was on the phone, it was easy for Gwen to tell when the subject involved Kara. Her mother’s answers would be short and breathless and vague. Behind them was an obvious desire to change the subject or end the conversation:

      “I