Mrs. Leighton brought soup on a Thursday evening in late October and found Eliot in a good mood, which she noted with the pleased alarm of someone who has grown accustomed to managing carefully around fragility.
She was seventy-two, with white hair and the direct conversational style of a person who had outlived most of the things that warranted delicacy. She had been his neighbor since he moved into the building three years ago, first as a cautious acquaintance and then, following his father's death and her delivery of soup number one, as something closer to a quiet guardian.
She set the soup on the counter — lentil, from the smell of it, which was good — and looked at him with her appraising eyes.
'You look different,' she said.
'Good evening, Mrs. Leighton.'
'Don't good evening me. You've had a haircut and you cleaned the kitchen. What's happened?'
He considered denying that anything had happened and decided it would not work. 'I've been spending time with someone,' he said, with the measured understatement that the situation, in its current ambiguity, seemed to warrant.
'Someone.' Mrs. Leighton pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down with the comfort of a person who has been invited, even when she hasn't been. 'From the university?'
'Yes. A composer. She's visiting this year.'
'What's her name?'
'Mara Cielo.'
Mrs. Leighton repeated it. 'That's a name,' she said approvingly. 'Cielo. Italian?'
'Her father is. She grew up in Oregon.'
'And you like her.' It was not a question.
He opened the soup, which was easier than answering directly. 'I find her — very easy to be around,' he said. 'Which I hadn't expected. I'd gotten used to—' He paused. 'I'd gotten used to needing a lot of effort.'
Mrs. Leighton nodded, slowly, as if receiving a report she had been waiting for. 'Your father's been gone two years,' she said. 'And before that the business with Claire. You've had a hard couple of years, Eliot.'
'I know.'
'It's all right for it to get easier.' She said it the way she said the important things, plainly, without ornament. 'It's allowed.'
He stood at the counter with the soup ladle and felt, in an unguarded moment, the truth of it — that he had been holding something braced, had been living in the posture of anticipating the next difficulty, and that lately, in the faculty lounge on the days she was there, the bracing had eased.
'Thank you for the soup,' he said.
'Bring her by sometime,' Mrs. Leighton said, standing. 'I'll make lamb stew. I'll assess her.'
He laughed. 'I'll tell her she's being assessed.'
'Don't you dare,' said Mrs. Leighton, and let herself out.