The house was quiet for the first time in twenty-three years.
He'd known it was coming, of course. Had been told by everyone who'd been through it: you'll be surprised how quiet. He'd smiled and said he was looking forward to it, because that's what you said. He wasn't sure he meant it.
His youngest had left for university on a Sunday in September. He and his wife had driven her there and helped with the boxes and eaten lunch in a pub near the campus and then driven home on the motorway in unusual silence and arrived back at five in the afternoon to a house that contained only the two of them.
He went through the rooms.
He didn't know what he was looking for. He went into each room and stood in it for a moment — the daughters' rooms, still holding the shapes of their occupants in the particular disorder they'd left. The bathroom with its complicated collection of products. The kitchen with the too-much food in the fridge for two people.
In the living room his wife was sitting in the good chair looking out at the garden.
"Well," he said.
"Well," she said.
They sat together in the quiet that had twenty-three years of noise in it. The quiet that was their house, breathing differently now. The quiet that was the next thing.
After a while she said: what do you want for dinner?
He said: I don't know. What do you want?
They looked at each other. Two people who had not, for a long time, simply asked each other what they wanted.
They ordered pizza. They ate it on the sofa. They went to bed without having solved anything.
It was a beginning.
The silence after is not empty. It is full of the next thing.
