But Ambrose had been kind to me from the first week and he had never once been anything else.
Not familiar. Not over-friendly. Kind, in the specific way of somebody who notices that you are having a bad day and then makes it slightly easier without mentioning it.
And one afternoon in that kitchen he said:
I know I’m a great deal older than you and you might laugh in my face. But I’ve fallen in love with you, and I don’t want to spend what I’ve got left pretending otherwise. So I’m asking you to marry me.
And I saw a rope.
What was I supposed to do?
I said yes.
I was thirty-five. He was seventy-two.
PART 2
Five years.
I am not going to write about that marriage the way people want me to, because the version people want is either grim or saintly and it was neither.
He taught my daughter chess at that kitchen table and she is now better than both of us and has been since she was eight.
He sat up all night with me the time her temperature would not come down, in a chair by the door, not saying anything, just there.
I made his coffee the way he liked it, which took me about four months to get right and which he never once corrected.
And when he could not walk any more I took him round the garden in the chair, every afternoon, including the ones where neither of us said a word.
There was a long stretch in the middle — about two years — where I stopped thinking about the arrangement at all.
I have had to be honest with myself about what that means and I have decided it means exactly what it looks like.
There is a specific afternoon I would give a great deal to have back.
The August before last. He was in the chair by then and we were at the bottom of the garden where there is a bench, and he had been quiet for about ten minutes, which was not unusual.
And he said: do you ever think about before?
I said before what.
And he said: nothing. The light’s going.
That is all. Eleven words and then he asked me to take him in.
I did not follow it up because it was a nice afternoon and I did not want to be in a conversation about the home, which is what I assumed he meant, because that is the conversation I have spent my life not having with people.
