The Weight of Gold
That is everything.
She looked away first. She looked at the rain on the window, the street beyond it going dark and shining, the silver maples at the far end standing in the downpour with the patient equanimity of things that know weather passes.
Marlene appeared with a plate of toast that neither of them had ordered. She set it between them and left without explanation, and Eleanor thought: she knows. Marlene, who missed nothing and commented on even less, who held the whole town in the photographs on her walls and the coffee in her grinder and the folded dish towels she produced without ceremony when people came in from the rain — Marlene knew, and had provided toast, and that was her ble