Chapter 14

Connie

The Li household found its new shape in the third week of March and settled into it the way water settles — without announcement, filling the available space until the new level simply became the level.

Bill came to breakfast now.

This was the most visible change and in some ways the most significant. He had always been gone before anyone else was downstairs, out the door with his travel mug and his briefcase and the particular forward lean of a man whose day began at the office. Now he came down in his robe on weekends and sat at the kitchen table and drank his coffee with Margaret and waited for his daughters to appear. On weekdays he delayed his departure by thirty minutes. It didn’t seem like much. In the Li household it was seismic.

He didn’t say a great deal. That wasn’t going to change — Bill Li was not suddenly going to become a man who talked easily about his feelings over scrambled eggs. But he was present. He looked at Serena when she came downstairs in the morning and his face did something it hadn’t done in months — it simply showed what was there. No management. No careful blankness. Just a father looking at his daughter.

Serena noticed. She didn’t comment on it. She just started sitting beside him at breakfast instead of across from him. A small gravitational adjustment that said everything without saying anything.

Margaret noticed everything, the way Margaret always had, and said nothing about any of it, the way Margaret had learned to say nothing about the things that were finding their own level.

The park remained theirs.

They went every morning that Serena felt well enough, which was most mornings, the cold beginning its slow retreat as March progressed, the bare trees along the path developing the first faint suggestion of buds that weren’t there yet but were coming. Gerald had opinions about the change of season that he expressed primarily through increased territorial behavior around the bread supply.

“He’s getting worse,” Connie said one morning, watching him shoulder aside two smaller ducks with the confidence of a creature who had decided this bench and these two women were his personal property.

“He’s established dominance,” Serena said approvingly. She threw him an extra piece. “I respect the hustle.”

“You’re enabling a tyrant.”

“I’m supporting strong leadership.”

Gerald accepted the bread with the regal indifference of someone who had expected nothing less.

They sat in the thin March sunshine with their travel mugs and the bread bag between them and Connie watched her wife’s face turned up toward the light and felt the particular quality of love that had been building since the day she came home and had somewhere in the past weeks stopped being something she could manage or contain or even fully describe.