"That's solitaire," he said.
* * *
I made chili. There was, as Lily had predicted, too much of it.
Bellows ate like a man who'd spent forty years eating alone and had no strong feelings about conversation at meals. It suited Lily fine. She talked, he listened, and his occasional single-sentence responses seemed to satisfy her completely.
At some point she put her fork down and looked at the empty chair across from her—the one that had been Maddie's, three weeks ago, the one that had been empty since.
"You came for dinner," Lily said to Bellows, with the air of someone establishing a precedent. "Maddie came for dinner too. She's a doctor." She paused. "She hasn't come back, though." She turned that level, five-year-old gaze on me. "How come she hasn't come back?"
"Is that right," Bellows said. Not a question.
"Uncle Jack hasn't called her," Lily said. "Even though she came all the way over when I was sick."
The table was quiet.
"Lily," I said.
"I'm just saying." She picked her fork back up and stabbed a kidney bean. "Gerald thinks it's been long enough."
Bellows looked at me. I looked at my bowl.
After dinner, Lily went upstairs for her bath. I handled the dishes while Bellows sat at the table with his coffee—black,no sugar, accepted without a word. The house settled into the evening quiet, broken only by the muffled rush of water pipes and the occasional car hum from the street outside.
"How long have you been back?" Bellows asked.
"Two months, give or take."
He nodded, slowly rotating the mug between his calloused hands. "Town treating you alright?"
"Fine," I said. "People have been decent."
He nodded again. It was a rhythmic, patient movement. I’d learned at the garage that when Bellows nodded like that, he was building toward something—lining up his thoughts like parts on a bench.
"The doctor," he said.
I didn't look up from the sink. I just kept scrubbing. "Old history."
"Mm." He drank his coffee. "Kid seems to think it's current."
"The kid is five."
"Five-year-olds aren't usually wrong about these things," he said. Like this was just a known fact, something he'd observed over a long life. "They don't have the same investment in being wrong that we do."
I dried my hands. Turned around and leaned against the counter.
Bellows looked at me steadily over his mug. Not pushing. Just—there, the way he was always just there, taking up exactly the space he needed and waiting for things to come to him.
"It's complicated," I said.
"Usually is," he said.
"There's history."
"There's always history." He set the mug down with a definitive click. "Question is whether it's the kind you're carrying, or the kind that's carrying you." He said it the way he said everything: flat and without drama, like a practicalobservation about load-bearing. "Only you know which one it is."
Upstairs the water stopped. The small sounds of Lily getting herself ready for bed: the bathroom door, the creak of her room.