Twenty-seven years ago Miriam Ashby drove up the Mendocino coast in January with a broken heater and arrived in the dark to find the boiler out. She brought it up slowly. By morning the house was warm and she had the job. Now she has written the six pages that close it. St. Brendan's House has hosted marriages and reconciliations, silent retreats and choir weekends, one incident involving communion wine and the water tower, and seventy years of women who came for something they could not name. The foundation is failing, the insurance has doubled, and Miriam is the only person on the board with the nerve to say so. Everyone assumes the church put her out. She lets them. The liquidator is Judith Rusk. She has cleared the cottage and the tower and the surplus beds, and once drove up the coast to appraise a piano nobody asked her to appraise. She photographs every room before she touches it. She has been backing out of Miriam's driveway for four years, and Miriam has been holding the gate. Then the rain comes and does not stop. Eleven days of it. Highway 128 goes under the Navarro, the movers cannot get through, the ground above the water tower begins to move, and two women who have spent their lives being useful to other people are alone in a house with seventy-four mugs, a bed that talks, a painting everyone hates, a cat with four names, and a pair of red shoes that are the first thing Miriam has bought for after. The Last Room is a sapphic love story for grown women. It is explicit, unhurried, and written for readers who want the bodies to be real. Its two women are sixty-three and fifty-nine. It does not end with a wedding. It ends in the last room of the house, on the one thing in it that was never priced, with the future left exactly where these two would leave it.
