Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
My kitchen smelled like everything good.
Carmen had arrived Wednesday evening with a pie carrier in each hand and a rolling suitcase and the expression of a woman who had been waiting for this specific Thanksgiving for approximately three years and was not going to let anything about it be less than exactly right.
She had taken over the kitchen at seven in the morning with the decisive efficiency of a general occupying favorable terrain, and by ten o’clock there was a turkey in the oven and two pies cooling on the counter and something with cranberries reducing on the stove that she refused to let anyone touch.
Nick had driven up from Boston with his new girlfriend Sofia, who was quiet and observant and had brought a very good bottle of wine, which told me most of what I needed to know about her.
He had his father’s hands and his grandmother’s stubbornness and he had been teasing Carmen about the cranberries since nine-thirty, which was its own form of love.
Josie had arrived last.
She came in the way she always came in — keys in hand, already talking, the particular energy of a woman who processed the world at a slightly higher speed than everyone else.
She had driven up from Providence and she was cold from the car and she accepted the coffee I handed her and looked around the kitchen at Carmen and Nick and Sofia and Tony at the table with the newspaper, and she took it all in the way she took things in — completely, in one go, without needing to be eased into it.
Then she looked at me.
“Hi, Mom,” she said.
Two words. But the way she said them — the way she had always said them before things had gotten complicated and difficult and distant, the way that assumed I was simply her mother and she was simply my daughter and everything between those two facts was navigable — undid something in me that I had not known was still tied.
“Hi, sweetheart,” I said.
She hugged me. She smelled like cold air and the particular shampoo she had used since college, and I held on for a moment longer than was strictly necessary, and she let me.
Rosaria was in her chair.
She’d mostly been sitting there when she wasn’t appearing as a reflection in the toaster to monitor the proceedings with the air of a woman attending a performance she had personally arranged and was prepared to be satisfied with.
She had views about the cranberry situation, which she shared with me in an undertone when I refilled my coffee, and she had views about Sofia, which were positive, and she had views about Nic’ks haircut, which were less so, and she had delivered all of these assessments with the brisk competence of someone conducting a thorough inspection.
She was entirely herself. Entirely, solidly, permanently herself.
The thinning had not returned. Lori checked, quietly, every week — a question and an answer between two women who knew what they were looking for — and every week the answer was the same.
The mooring held. Ada’s remedy, written in careful brown ink inside a dip pen barrel, had done exactly what Ada had intended it to do.
The door was not open. The key was found.
Rosaria had reported, in the weeks since the Hunter’s Moon, that Robert was steadier and Clara was clearer and Olive Marchetti was becoming, by degrees, someone Eileen could hear as well as see.
She delivered these reports with the manner of a woman managing a situation she had taken personal responsibility for, which was accurate.
The other side, apparently, did not run itself.
She had made this clear on multiple occasions.
We ate at two o’clock.
The table was too small for six people, which Carmen had known and had solved by adding the folding table from the hall closet and covering the whole thing with a tablecloth that had belonged to my mother and which I had not seen in four years and had not known Carmen had.
The turkey was perfect. The stuffing delicious.
The cranberry sauce was extraordinary and Nick apologized for doubting them and Carmen accepted the apology with grace and only moderate smugness.
Tony sat across from Josie and they talked about Providence, where he had worked briefly twenty years ago, and discovered they knew the same coffee shop on Thayer Street, which was either coincidence or the universe making a point, and either way it made Josie laugh in the open uncomplicated way she had when something genuinely surprised her.
Nick told a story about something that had happened at his firm that was both professionally inappropriate and extremely funny and Sofia laughed the hardest, which settled the question of how I felt about her.
Carmen cried a little during dessert, briefly, in the way she cried when she was happy — not sadly, just with the overflow of someone whose feelings were larger than the usual containers for them.
She said she was fine, she was absolutely fine, this was exactly what she had wanted, and Nick handed her a napkin and Josie squeezed her hand and Tony quietly refilled her wine and I thought: yes. This. Exactly this.
Rosaria watched from her chair.
She watched Carmen cry and be fine. She watched Nick and Sofia. She watched Josie and Tony negotiate the last of the apple pie with the ease of two people who had decided, independently, to be on the same side. She watched me watching all of it.
When I caught her eye she looked at me with the expression I had come to know best — the one that said something had met her expectations and she was choosing not to make a production of it.
But underneath the expression, visible to me now after several months of learning to read every register of that face, something warm and specific and entirely unguarded.
Glad. She was glad.
Later, after the dishes were done and Nick and Sofia had taken the sofa and Carmen had the guest room and Josie was in her old room with the door ajar the way she always slept, I stood at the kitchen window with the last of the coffee and looked at the harbor.
November dark, the lighthouse turning, the boats settled, the town quiet and intact and going about its business exactly as it always had.
Tony came and stood beside me. He didn’t say anything. He put his arm around me and looked at the harbor and that was enough, that was more than enough, that was the specific thing I had not known I was waiting for until it was simply there.
Rosaria was in her chair.
“Stella says,” she said, in the particular tone she used when she was relaying messages she had personal views about, “that your young man is very handsome for a detective.”
Tony could not hear this. He was looking at the harbor.
“Tell Stella,” I said, quietly, “that I agree.”
Rosaria looked at the two of us at the window and at the harbor beyond the glass and at the kitchen behind her full of the sleeping evidence of a family that had found its way back to the same table, and she settled into her chair with the air of a woman who had seen enough of the world, from enough sides of it, to know when something was right.
“Yes,” she said. “I think so too.”
The lighthouse turned. The harbor moved. The town held.
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