But for once I push myself to speak. “I saw you last week. At the reservoir,” I whisper. I put the towel down. My hands are shaking. “I saw you talking and laughing with someone, a woman, and then I saw you kissing that woman.” I take a deep breath and let it out slowly, one last pause before ripping off the rest of the Band-Aid. “You looked happy. The way you used to look.” I stare at him, at his big green eyes and his sharp jawline and silvering hair, trying to see him the way she does, the way I used to. “That’s what I want for you. You deserve it. I think we should do whatever it takes to make that possible.”

He nods slowly, processing. “Are you saying you want me to move out?”

I think of Glenn. “I’m saying that life is short. I’m saying that if you have another chance at happiness, you should take it.”

Making Plans

I bring fresh blueberry muffins from Flour, Glenn’s favorite bakery, and a few single-serving containers of her favorite full-fat grass-fed locally sourced maple-flavored yogurt. I also bring the card that Teddy made the night before and slipped to me in the car on the way to school—a bulging envelope barely taped shut because he’d put a small LEGO figurine inside to go along with the card. “That’s the Cancer Monster,” he’d said when I took the envelope from him at drop-off before he left the car. “To scare away her sickness.”

“Oh, Teddy.”

“Tell her I hope she feels better but I understand if she can’t come to Spotlight.”

I nod. And for what feels like the twenty millionth time this week, my eyes blur with tears.

“It’s okay, Mom,” he says, patting my arm, just like he used to when each of my parents was sick. “It’s okay.”

When I get to Glenn’s house I let myself in with my key, then walk through the quiet of the living room, full of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, walls filled with framed art and photographs of past husbands and authors she worked with. A clock somewhere, maybe in the kitchen, ticks. I listen to it mark time, counting the days and hours and minutes and seconds left, measurements of a life shutting down and coming to an end.

Upstairs, Glenn has no appetite, so I put the card on the nightstand and let Charlotte out of her sling, lift her and Lucy onto the bed, and then find a spot for myself. “I brought you something,” I say, opening my tote bag. “It’s an activity. Something we can do together.”

The old Glenn would swear at me, tell me we’ve never needed an “activity” to do together—like playing cards or knitting or even playing Scrabble—“isn’t talking the activity?” she would always say. But today I get no such back talk as I pull out coloring books and crayons. I give her one—Mindful Mantras and Mandalas—and take Creative Coloring Meditations for myself. Flipping through my book and cracking open the big box of Crayolas with the built-in sharpener makes me think that coloring in a giant geometric design is the most perfect and peaceful thing to do in this sad and awful moment: we will literally fill the emptiness with color.