Chapter 3 #2
Claire had taken a photo of it for her fridge, and Nina had seen it when it came through on her phone, lying in bed at 11:30, wearing David’s sweater. She had stared at it for a long time, feeling as if she were seeing a stranger wearing her face. Who was this woman with the dead eyes?
She had printed it out the next morning. She did not know why. She just felt like she had to.
“What is that?” Lucia asked, following her gaze.
“It’s a pact. Claire, Harper, and I made it on our birthday.”
“A pact to do what?”
“One scary thing a month for a year.”
Lucia stared at her, then she looked back at the napkin photo. Then she looked back at her mother. There was a look on her face that Nina could not quite place.
Maybe surprise, or hope, or the careful guardedness of a girl who had learned not to get excited about her mother’s plans because her mother’s plans often dissolved before they even started.
“Scary like what?”
“I don’t know yet. I said I’d pick the first one, though.”
“Wait, you volunteered to go first?”
“Is that so hard to believe?”
“Yeah, kinda.”
It should have stung, but it did not because Lucia was right. Nina, or at least the Nina of the last eighteen months, did not volunteer for things.
She did not initiate.
She just showed up when she had to, went through the motions, then came home, sat on the couch, and watched TV until she no longer cared how late it was, before justifying going to bed.
That Nina would never have signed that napkin on a porch at 10:30 at night and told her friends she wanted to go first.
But she had.
She had signed it, and she had meant it.
She did not entirely understand why, except that when Harper held up the napkin, something in Nina’s chest had shifted. It wasn’t a big shift, not the kind you could see from outside.
More like a window cracking open just an inch in a room that had been sealed shut for a long time. The kind where dust coughs out between the cracks and chokes you.
“I think it’s cool,” Lucia said.
She said it kind of casually as she spooned out her yogurt, not looking at Nina, because teenagers deliver their most important statements without looking at their parents.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
A pause.
“I think Dad would think it was cool, too.”
Nina’s grip tightened around her coffee mug. Lucia rarely mentioned her father. When she did, it was brief, bright, and over before you could brace yourself.
“He would,” Nina said. “And he’d probably want to come.”
“Oh, he would definitely want to come,” Lucia said, laughing.
“And then he’d be terrible at whatever it was and love every second of it.”
They smiled at each other for a brief moment.
Lucia picked up her backpack. “I gotta go. The bus comes in ten minutes.”
“Do you have money for lunch?”
“Mom, nobody uses cash.”
“Okay, well, is your account thing loaded?”
“It’s fine.” She paused for a moment at the door. “Go to the grocery store. For real this time.”
“I will.”
“And don’t sit in the parking lot for forty-five minutes before you go in.”
Nina hadn’t realized that Lucia knew about that. Of course she did, though. Lucia noticed everything the same way David did.
“I’ll try,” Nina said.
“That’s all I’m asking.”
Lucia gave a small wave and then was gone, the screen door banging shut behind her.
Nina stood alone in the kitchen with her one cup of coffee, the sound of the marsh, the napkin on the fridge, and the daughter who had just asked her, in the most Lucia way possible, to please come back to life.
Elena arrived at eleven with a casserole dish and a purpose, as usual.
Nina heard the car before she saw it because Elena drove a fifteen-year-old Honda Civic that announced its presence the way a brass band might in a parade.
The engine rattled, and three mechanics had failed to fix it, but Elena refused to buy a new car because this one had been David’s last car.
It was the one he had driven the day he died, and Elena would sooner walk to Beaufort barefoot than let it go. She acted as though it were a classic car that would be worth a lot of money one day.
That was very doubtful.
She came through the back door without knocking, which was exactly what Elena always did. And Nina had spent years learning to accept it.
Elena had a key. She used that key whenever she felt like it, which was very often, and she always brought some kind of food, which made it a little harder to complain.
“Mija,” Elena said, setting the dish on the counter. She gave Nina a quick, practiced glance, one she had perfected over decades of mothering David. Although Nina was her daughter-in-law, as far as Elena was concerned, she was her daughter.
She checked her for weight loss, dark circles under her eyes, signs that she wasn’t eating, sleeping, or doing the basic work of just remaining alive.
“You look thin.”
“You always say I look thin.”
“Because you are always thin. This is not a mystery.” She opened the refrigerator and made a sound that was a bit of a sigh, but had a little judgment and prayer mixed in. “Nina, there’s nothing in here.”
“There’s yogurt.”
“Yogurt is not food. Yogurt is what food eats.” She closed the refrigerator. “I brought mole con pollo. You will eat it today, not tomorrow. Not a maybe. Today.”
“Elena, don’t—”
“I promised my son, in all my prayers, that I would take care of his family, and I cannot take care of a family that lives on yogurt and frozen waffles.”
There it was.
Her son.
Elena always said it in the way she said everything about David, with a fierceness that left absolutely no room for argument. One did not argue with Elena. There was no reason to because you would never win.
Her grief was very different from Nina’s.
Nina’s grief was a fog, gray and suffocating, muffling everything around her. It was a monster that stole every good thing.
Elena’s grief was a bonfire, loud, visible, and consuming. She carried it not as a burden, but as a badge of honor, as proof that she had loved someone so big and survived losing him, and she intended to honor him every single day until God took her too.
Nina sometimes envied Elena’s grief. At least Elena could feel hers. She could feel emotions. She still had a purpose, even if that purpose was driving Nina crazy.
Elena was moving through the kitchen now, wiping down counters that did not need wiping, rearranging things that did not need rearranging, her small hands always busy because Elena’s hands could never be still.
She was barely five feet tall, but she filled every room she entered. David had gotten his warmth and stubbornness from her.
“I heard about the birthday,” Elena said.
“It was nice. Claire cooked. We had cake. It was great.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Lucia told me about the napkin.”
Well, of course she did.