Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
I had barely gotten the boxes into the cottage, when the doorbell rang.
Tammy was standing on the porch when I opened the door, holding a casserole dish and a bottle of wine and looking at me with the expression of a woman who had not been invited but did not consider that relevant.
“Lori called,” she said, pushing past me into the hallway. “Said you went to your ex-husband’s house to get some boxes. So I brought chicken tetrazzini and a Malbec, because nobody should open sad boxes on an empty stomach.”
Tammy set the casserole on the kitchen counter with the authority of a woman reclaiming territory. “Lori’s parking. Jill’s bringing napkins because she broke my last set of cloth ones on Tuesday and feels terrible about it.”
“She broke napkins?”
“Launched them into the ceiling fan. I didn’t even know napkins could get tangled in fan blades, but Jill finds a way.”
By the time Lori arrived with her tea thermos and Jill arrived with a twelve-pack of paper napkins and an apology she’d clearly rehearsed in the car, Tammy had heated the tetrazzini and poured four glasses of wine with the efficiency of someone who could set up a dinner party in a hurricane.
We ate at the kitchen table with the boxes visible through the doorway, all of us pretending we weren’t looking at them.
“So,” Tammy said, setting down her fork. “We doing this or what?”
Jill insisted on being the one to open the first box. “I need the practice,” she said, standing over it with her hand extended, fingers splayed. “Fine motor control. Lori says I need to work on finesse instead of just—”
“Launching things,” Lori supplied.
“Directing energy enthusiastically.”
She closed her eyes. Did the breathing. The cardboard flaps trembled.
One lifted, then another, folding back with the careful slowness of someone defusing a bomb.
The third flap opened. Jill smiled—actually beamed—and then the fourth flap ripped clean off and a shower of Christmas ornaments erupted from the box like a seasonal volcano.
Glass balls arced across the living room.
A felt reindeer Nick had made in second grade hit the lamp.
A star made of popsicle sticks pinwheeled toward the ceiling.
Three painted wooden angels launched in different directions, and Jill’s hands flew up, trying to catch them telekinetically, which only redirected half of them toward the kitchen.
Lori, without looking up from her tea, reached out and caught a glass ball six inches before it hit the floor. Just plucked it from the air like she was picking an apple.
Tammy was already on her feet gathering ornaments off the couch, the bookshelf, the top of the refrigerator. “Well. Now it’s a party.”
“I’m sorry, I’m so—the flap compromised the structural integrity of the—I mean, the box was overpacked, and the velocity of the—”
“Jill.” Lori held up the glass ball. It caught the lamplight, red and gold, one of the nice ones Sal’s mother had given us the first Christmas after we were married. “Not broken.”
Jill sat down on the floor with her back against the wall and pressed her palms to her eyes. “I was a senior litigator. I managed depositions for Fortune 500 companies. And now I can’t open a box of Christmas ornaments without redecorating the house.”
“You’ll get there,” Lori said. “It took me eight months before I could shake someone’s hand without diagnosing their blood pressure.”
“That sounds useful, honestly.”
“Not at cocktail parties. Believe me.”
We opened the rest of the boxes by hand.
Thirty years of marriage fits in surprisingly few boxes when someone else decides what you get to keep.
Box two was the recipe tin—my grandmother’s, dented brass with a latch that stuck. Inside, handwritten cards in her cramped Italian cursive, splattered with olive oil and tomato sauce and forty years of Sunday dinners. Tammy pulled one out and held it up. Nonna Rosa’s braciole.
“We’re making this,” she said. It was not a question.
Box three was photo albums. The pre-digital ones, from before everyone’s lives moved onto phones. I set them on the coffee table and Tammy opened the first one while Jill gathered ornaments from behind the couch cushions.
“Oh, honey.” Tammy was looking at a page near the front. “Is this you?”
I leaned over. The photo was from my wedding day.
June 1992. I was twenty-two, standing outside the church in my mother’s altered dress, squinting into the sun with a bouquet of white roses and a smile so wide it looked like it might split my face open.
Young. Certain. Not yet aware that certainty was something you could lose.
I stared at her. At me. At whoever that woman was.
“I don’t remember looking like that,” I said.
Nobody responded right away. Tammy’s hand found my shoulder. She didn’t squeeze, didn’t say anything wise or comforting. Just rested it there. Warm.
Lori had picked up a second album and stopped on a page near the middle.
Josie’s first birthday. Nick in his high chair with frosting in his hair.
Carmen not yet born. Me in the background of every shot, holding things, carrying things, serving cake, pouring drinks.
Always in motion. Never the one in front of the camera.
“You know what I see?” Lori said, studying the page over her glasses. “A woman who held that whole family together. Every picture. You’re the one making sure everyone else is having a good time.”
“That was the job.”
“That was the job you were told was the job. Not the same thing.”
Box four was books—my books, the ones Sal had relegated to the guest room and then to the garage.
A mix of novels and self-help titles with cracked spines.
Women Who Run with the Wolves. The Awakening by Kate Chopin, which I’d read three times in my thirties and underlined so aggressively the pages were soft.
Jill picked it up and fanned through it.
“I had this in my office,” she said quietly. “On the shelf behind my desk. Fourteen years. Nobody ever asked me about it and I never brought it up because I was afraid they’d think I was—” She stopped. “I don’t know. Something.”
“Awake?” Tammy offered.
“Yeah. That.”
Box five was the junk drawer of a marriage.
A tangle of old phone chargers that fit nothing we currently owned.
A stack of Carmen’s drawings from kindergarten.
A dried corsage from a benefit Sal and I had attended a decade ago, pressed flat between two pieces of cardboard.
I couldn’t remember the event. I couldn’t remember if I’d had a good time.
Tammy picked up the wedding album again. Her eyes had gone slightly unfocused, the way they did when she was reading something the rest of us couldn’t see.
“Your aura in this photo,” she said. “I know it’s old and I’m reading a picture, so take this with a grain of salt.
But you were bright, Gina. Really bright.
Gold and pink and wide open.” She looked at me.
“You’re getting that back, you know. It’s coming in different now—deeper, more red than pink, some orange in there that I’d bet is the fire thing. But it’s coming back.”
“Can I tell you all something terrible?” I said.
“Always,” Tammy said.
“I don’t miss him. I keep waiting to miss him and I don’t.
I miss the relationship I had with my kids before he made me out to be the bad guy in the divorce.
I miss who I thought I was going to be. But Sal?
” I set the mug on the table. “I can’t remember the last time I missed him.
I think I stopped years ago and didn’t even notice. ”
“That’s not terrible,” Lori said. “That’s honest.”
“My first husband,” Tammy said, leaning back and cradling her wine, “was a man named Derek who believed that mercury was in retrograde every single day of our marriage, which would explain why nothing ever worked.” She took a sip. “His aura was the color of expired mustard. I should have known.”
Jill snorted. “My ex-boyfriend told me I was ‘too much’ for having opinions about restaurant menus. Restaurant menus, Tammy. I have opinions about everything. He had no idea how much I was holding back.”
“My second husband was wonderful,” Lori said, and the room gentled.
“Frank. He didn’t understand the healing thing—not really, not the way Amelia did.
But he’d hold my hand after a bad session and bring me tea and never once made me feel like I was broken for being different.
” She adjusted her glasses. “I miss him every day. But I wouldn’t trade what I have now for what I had then.
That’s not disloyal. That’s just living. ”
Jill was holding the popsicle-stick star she’d fished from behind the bookshelf. She turned it over, reading the back. “This says ‘To Mom, love Nick, age 7.’” She looked up. “Do you still have his handwriting? On your phone or anything? I bet it looks nothing like this.”
“It doesn’t. He writes like a doctor now. Illegible.”
“Dentist,” Jill corrected.
“Same handwriting.”
Jill set the star on the mantle, propped against the wall where it could catch the light. She did it carefully, with her actual hands, and nothing broke.
From the hallway mirror, Rosaria had been watching the entire operation with the compressed silence of a woman cataloging complaints for later deployment.
“That is not how you fold tissue paper,” she said, as Tammy wrapped the glass ornaments for storage. “You are going to crack every one of those by spring. The tissue must be doubled. Doubled, Gina.”
I ignored her. Which, given that I was the only person in the room who could hear her, was the only sane option.
“And that recipe tin needs polishing. Your grandmother would be appalled. She polished that tin every Sunday after mass without fail.”
I continued ignoring her. Tammy glanced at the hallway mirror and raised an eyebrow at me.
“She’s doing the thing?”
“She’s doing the thing.”
“Tell her the tissue paper technique is fine and I’ve been wrapping ornaments since before she was haunting bathrooms.”
“She cannot hear me and she is wrapping them wrong,” Rosaria said, her voice climbing. “This is why I never let anyone touch my Christmas decorations. This is exactly why.”
I turned to the hallway mirror. “Rosaria. We’ve got it.”
She huffed. Actually huffed, which was impressive for a woman without functioning lungs. Then her gaze drifted to the coffee table, where the wedding album was still open to the photo of twenty-two-year-old me in my mother’s dress.
She went still.
Not the rigid stillness of disapproval. Something else. She was looking at the photo the way you look at a road you took a long time ago, knowing you can’t go back to the fork.
“You were so young,” she said. Quietly. Not to me, exactly. To the room, or to herself, or to the version of her that had stood at that wedding and told her son he was making a mistake. “I forget that. How young you were. How young we all were, before we became the people our choices made us.”
Then she said, “Your bouquet was wrong for the season. White roses in June. Gardenias would have been far more appropriate,” and disappeared.
I stood there looking at the empty mirror. Lori was watching me with those clinical eyes, and I knew she’d felt the shift in the room even if she hadn’t heard the words.
“She said something real,” Lori said. Not a question.
“For about three seconds. Then she criticized my wedding flowers.”
“Three seconds is a start.”
Tammy had finished wrapping the ornaments—tissue paper doubled, because she’d heard me relay the critique and wasn’t about to give a ghost the satisfaction of being right.
Jill was stacking the photo albums on the shelf next to Aunt Amelia’s books on mediumship.
My grandmother’s recipe tin sat on the counter next to the herbs, brass and dented and smelling faintly of olive oil, and it looked like it belonged there.
Like it had been waiting for this kitchen.
Lori pulled on her coat. Tammy collected her casserole dish. Jill lingered in the doorway, holding the paper napkins she’d brought and apparently forgotten to use.
“Same time Tomorrow?” Jill asked. Then caught herself. “Sorry. That sounded like I was scheduling a meeting. Old habits. What I mean is—this was nice. Can we do this again? Not the ornament explosion part. The rest of it.”
“Tomorrow night at my place,” Tammy said, squeezing my arm on her way out. “But this was good too. Sometimes you need to make a mess in somebody’s living room to feel like you belong there.”
They left. I locked the door. The cottage was warm and smelled like chicken tetrazzini and wine and the faint cedar of old cardboard, and the five boxes were empty and broken down by the recycling bin, and the things that had been inside them were on shelves and mantles and counters where I could see them.
On the mantle, Nick’s popsicle-stick star caught the lamplight. The wedding album was closed, spine out, a woman I used to be tucked between the covers.
I finished my wine. It was the good stuff—Tammy didn’t bring anything that wasn’t—and I drank it standing up, leaning against the counter, looking at a kitchen that was finally starting to look like mine.