Free Whitethorn Woods by Maeve Binchy

all.
       "So will you be moving in together?" I asked. You could ask Vera that sort of thing even though she's nearly ninety or something.
       "No, no, that wouldn't do at all," she said unexpectedly.
       I was sorry I had asked now. "I didn't mean for sex, " I said, trying to take the harm out of it. "I meant for companionship."
       "No, there's no problem with the sex part of it, we'll probably have sex again after you've gone," Vera said matter-of-factly.
       I wondered what the problem was. Could he have a wife, another woman hidden away somewhere? Did he have a rake of children who wouldn't let him get together with Vera?
       Apparently not. It had all to do with being set in their ways. When you get old it seems that you don't want to change your way of going on, in fact you can't change it, much as you would like to. It has to do with space, and having your own things where they've always been.
       "I wouldn't mind where my things were if I was with a fellow I was mad about," I said.
       "Yes, but then you probably don't have all that many things and they haven't been in place as long as ours have."
       "What sort of things?" I wondered.
       "Oh it's all cracked, Sharon, there's things I couldn't bear Nick to touch, like my collections of pressed flowers, and my boxes of things I'm going to put into a scrapbook one day. And he is very odd about his tubes of paint, almost worn out with hardly a squeeze of anything left in them, and torn sketchbooks and boxes of letters and cuttings that he will throw out sometime but not now. We couldn't merge all that, Sharon, we'd be fighting in a week. What we have is much more important. We can't risk losing that by moving in together."
       Glenn and I talked about it when we left. It seemed a waste of two nice people not getting together for the time they had left. We sighed. No one had everything. We were just dying to live together and no problems about being set in our ways. It was just that we had no money, and we'd never find a place to live.
       "Could I not move into your house, Sharon? Share your room? At least you have a room—I have to share with my brother," Glenn pleaded.
       "No, Glenn, believe me, no. It won't work. My dad's a wino and a gambler."
       "Well, sure, mine is a religious nutter, I told you, it doesn't matter."
       "It would if you were living there."
       "I could bring in some money, couldn't I?"
       "Ah, no, Glenn, it would just go towards getting more drink for my dad."
       "So what will we do, then?" He seemed defeated.
       "We'll think of something," I said, sounding much more confident than I was. I watched my mam's life and was determined I would never settle for anything remotely like it. She cooked and washed and cleaned up around my dad and the boys every hour that she wasn't working cleaning office floors or washing greasy plates.
       "I'm happy enough, Sharon," she would say if I questioned it. "I mean, I love him and we've got to remember that he didn't walk away when I was expecting you."
       A lifetime of gratitude that he had acknowledged what was after all his child too. Twenty-four years of saying thank you and calling that love.
       I met Alma from time to time. She said that Todd was definitely seeing someone else, but she loved him and would do anything to get him back. He was seeing another woman and she knew it but whatever she felt for him she called love.
       And then I would talk to Vera as well and she talked about loving Nick and what a delightful person to meet in the late afternoon of her years, yet at the same time she was prepared to lose it all over books of pressed flowers or his tubes of paint. It seemed a very peculiar definition of love to me. And there were Glenn and myself who really did love each other and wished the best for each other and we hadn't a chance of getting a place to live together.
       It didn't seem fair or just somehow. But there