Chapter 1 #8
Although Evie and I text all the time, we have a standing lunch date once a week.
As we walk to the café, she fills me in on the reorganization of her department at work.
For as long as I can remember, she’s been with Hasbro in Pawtucket in Girls Gaming (which was not, to my chagrin, RPGs about leveling up to a Supreme Court justice, or World of Warcraft—-but rather than quests, players go to Taylor Swift concerts).
Instead, her marketing team covers My Little Pony and Littlest Pet Shop, while Boys Gaming centers on Nerf guns.
“My new supervisor is probably still playing Pretty Pretty Princess.” Evie sighs.
“Straight out of Wharton, but she’s only twenty--eight.
” She looks at me. “It is so weird getting old.”
“You’re not old,” I say. “Fifty is the new thirty.”
“My knees have not gotten that memo.”
“Says the pickleball champion of Barrington.”
Evie’s face lights up. “Oh my God, did I tell you that your dad and I crushed the couple who live behind us and keep saying our willow tree is over their property line and they’re going to sue to cut it down? Mother ate and left no crumbs.”
I burst out laughing. “Since when do you speak Gen Alpha?”
“Since fifty is the new thirty,” Evie says, and we share a smile.
Evie was the one who had actually introduced my parents, during college.
They’d all moved to New York together after graduation.
The day my mother died, my father was flying in from a business trip in California and Evie was babysitting me.
My mother never came home, and Evie never left.
At first, she took care of me while my father trekked all over Manhattan putting up missing person flyers with my mother’s face on them.
She made sure that he got fed and that he slept; she fielded calls from reporters; she met with detectives who were assigned to my mother’s disappearance.
She organized the memorial for her, a month later.
She made herself so integral to the functioning of our family that I am not surprised my father fell in love with her.
How couldn’t he? Evie would never be Eloise Ambrose, but she was the next best thing—-a woman who loved his baby, who had loved his dead wife.
And me? Everyone assumed Evie was my biological mother, unless they learned otherwise.
Most of the time, that was how I introduced her. No step before the word mother, no hesitation. But every now and then, something stuck in my smooth thoughts like a splinter: the only reason Evie was my mom was because I’d lost my first one.
When I was fourteen and taking bio, we did simple Punnett squares to determine hereditary features.
My teacher walked around the room, checking our work.
He looked at my little chart for curly hair dominance, and then at my poker--straight blond fall.
He had met both Evie and my dad at Open School Night, so he knew Evie had wild black curls.
“Your mom must have one recessive gene,” my teacher explained.
“My mom’s dead,” I said flatly.
Embarrassed, he told me I was exempt from the assignment.
That afternoon when I came home from school, I climbed up to the attic crawl space where my father kept my baby clothes and suitcases and boxes of old tax returns.
Evie found me there and sat down cross--legged.
“Should I guess what’s wrong or are you going to tell me?
” she asked. I shrugged, but she just leaned forward, her chin propped on her fist, and waited.
“We’re studying genetics,” I said finally.
“Ah.” Evie’s voice was small. “You know,” she said, “I miss her, too.”
She told me to follow her. In the bedroom she shared with my dad, she pulled a small Rubbermaid container from her closet.
Inside were photographs of my mother—-alone, as a girl; in a white dress beside my father; holding me in her arms with a faraway gaze in eyes the exact same shade as mine.
“She’s so pretty,” I whispered, and Evie smiled.
“Where do you think you get it from?” she said.
She let me sift through the box—-which held my hospital baby bracelet, broken shards of ceramic, strange files and saws that looked like instruments of torture, tickets to Broadway shows and a Billy Joel concert.
Evie picked up a string of photos, the kind you get from a booth at a fair, of my mother and her mugging at the camera.
They looked only a few years older than me.
“That,” she sighed, “was one of the best days. We went to the Washington County Fair in Richmond, summer of 1998. She’d never had cotton candy!
What twenty--two--year--old has never had cotton candy? ”
I let the ceramic pieces tumble through my fingers. “What are these?”
“The tools of her trade,” Evie said. “There were a lot of great artists who got their start at RISD, but I’ve never seen anyone do what she did with mosaics.
Even when they were set in grout, they seemed to be alive.
She was just getting her start commercially when she found out she was having you.
I think she would have eventually been famous, if she .
. .” Evie looked up. “I hope you know that I would give anything to have her sitting here with you, instead of me.”
“If you miss her so much,” I asked, “then why did you put all these pictures away?”
Her face softened. “Because you were so little, and it confused you. And because every time your father was forced to remember she wasn’t in the world anymore, it broke his heart.”
I wondered if she ever felt like she was betraying her best friend, falling in love with her husband. And then I immediately chastised myself. Everything Evie had ever done had been for my benefit. If she’d grown to love my dad, that only meant I grew up in a happy home.
It was why, I realized, I felt so guilty when I thought about Eloise Ambrose. It felt like I was being disloyal to Evie.
Three red ribbons, all cut the same length, curled in the bottom of the box.
In the photo of Evie and my mom, her hair was woven through with a ribbon.
As I looked at each picture, I saw the same thing—-that stripe of red, twined with her white--blond hair, like a candy cane.
I touched my finger to it. “She wore her hair like that every day,” Evie told me.
“From the first moment she showed up at our dorm room to the morning she left for her doctor’s appointment. ”
I curled the ribbon around my finger. “Could you French--braid mine?” I asked.
Evie moved behind me and combed her fingers through my long corn--silk hair. She wove the ribbon through, tugged and twisted, tying off the bottom with a rubber band from her nightstand. “There,” she told me when she was done. “You look just like her.”
I’m thinking of this when we are finally seated at the Italian restaurant, the behemoth backpack between my feet as I fiddle with the frayed edges of the red ribbon falling over my shoulder.
Evie braided my hair like that for a year, until I learned how to do it myself.
“Thank you for the Panera delivery yesterday,” I say.
Out of the blue, an Uber Eats driver had showed up at my desk with a you--pick--two meal I hadn’t ordered.
“How did you know I was even in the office?”
She takes a sip of her water. “Because you’d texted me four TikTok videos in an hour, and you only do that when you’re avoiding paperwork.”
She’s not wrong.
“When I saw that the autumn salad was back on the menu, I couldn’t resist.” She hums in delight. “The squash and the cranberries . . .”
“I don’t know why it’s not available year--round —-”
“Ladies?” The waiter interrupts our reverie. “Have you had a chance to decide?”
We glance at the menu, but I say, “We’ll both have the chicken parm.”
As the waiter steps away, Evie shrugs. “The tagliatelle looked good but, you know.”
I nod gravely. “Unwritten rule.”
“If there’s chicken parm on the menu—-”
“You have to get it,” I finish.
Evie smiles, nodding.
“Oh!” I reach into my purse and hand her a Tide pen.
She looks down at her chest. “Did I spill already?”
“No, but you’re having red sauce.”
“You’re right. Fait accompli,” Evie says. “Thanks for looking out for me.”
“Comes with the job,” I reply with a shrug.
“Emergency preparedness?”
I shake my head. “Daughterhood.”
I drink the last of my water and look over my shoulder to see if the waitress is around for a refill, which is when I notice the entire back wall of the restaurant: a mosaic mural.
Evie follows my gaze. “Hers were nothing like that,” she says gently.
“That’s . . . pedestrian. Your mother’s mosaics looked like the inside of Sagrada Família.
She made a mermaid from reclaimed wood from shipwrecks, and copper pennies.
There was an archway in an admin building she designed with graduated blue stones that curled overhead like a wave, so it felt like you were surfing your way inside. ”
I prop my chin on my fist. “What’s the coolest installation she ever did?”
“Easy,” Evie says. “I came home one day from class when we were seniors and found her in the courtyard outside the dorm. She had boxes full of mirrors—-wall mirrors, hand mirrors, mirrored trays, you name it—-and she was hurling them against the brick of the building. I mean, it was like she had invented those rage rooms you can go to nowadays. She was dating your father by then, and I thought maybe something had gone wrong, and then I realized she was wearing gloves and safety goggles. It was for her senior project.” The waiter sets down a basket of bread.
“It was about as tall as she was—-a Valentine heart.”
“That doesn’t sound revolutionary.”