She sat with her hands on the wheel and looked at the house she had built for herself piece by piece out of forty-two years of careful labor, and she felt something settle in her chest that she recognized as the ending of a particular kind of patience. Not anger, not yet. Something older and clearer than anger. Recognition, and the decision that comes after recognition when you have been watching something long enough to understand exactly what it is.
She turned the engine off and stepped out and closed the door with the quiet precision of someone who has made up her mind.
The front door had been propped open. Laughter came out along with music, the two mixing in the way of parties that have been going on long enough for inhibition to have loosened considerably. Someone had carried her porch chairs into the yard. A cooler sat on the stone walkway Henry had laid himself, one summer afternoon thirty years ago, measuring each stone twice and setting them carefully in the sand before mortaring them down. The cooler was leaking melted ice into the gaps between the stones. She looked at it for a moment, then stepped past it and went inside.