20. Willow
— ? —
Willow
Pia arrived with two of the cousins’ wives, both of whom have names beginning with J and neither of whom I have ever got right, and announced that we were going out.
“I’m not going out.”
“You are going out. It’s arranged. There’s a table and a wine list and three women who have cleared their afternoons.”
“Pia, I’ve got a two-year-old.”
“There’s a plan for the two-year-old,” said one of the Js. “Levi has him.”
“Levi has him?”
“Levi has him and a schedule,” said the other J, “and I need you to hear that he read it aloud to us in the car, twice, doing a voice like a man announcing a horse race.”
So I went out.
It started as lunch and it did not stay lunch. Partway through it turned into a campaign, and I was the subject of the campaign, and there is nothing you can do about three women who have decided to be kind to you at the same time.
“You’ve lost weight.”
“I’ve not.”
“You’ve lost weight and you’re going to eat all of that.”
“I’m eating.”
“Willow, we know what’s in that fridge,” said Pia, “because Levi went in it looking for a beer and he came out looking like a man who’d seen something upsetting.”
So that’s what this is. This is a fridge intervention with a wine list.
“He had no business in my fridge.”
“He had every business in your fridge. He’d been sent.”
“By who?”
“By me,” said Pia, entirely unashamed, and refilled my glass to the brim so I could not pick it up quickly.
“What did he report?”
“He said there’s a jar of something and half a lemon and a lot of yoghurt for a small boy.”
“That’s a functioning fridge.”
“Willow, that is a fridge belonging to a woman who has stopped counting herself as a person who eats.”
“Oh, bloody hell.”
“There she is,” said one of the Js, and clinked my glass without being invited to.
They were funny about their husbands. They were funny about Kristina. One of the Js did an impression of Prentice at a Christmas party that made me put my fork down and keep it down.
“He does this,” she said, and did it again with the hand. “He puts the hand on the shoulder. And then he says something that is technically a compliment and you have to carry it home in a bag and open it there to find out what it actually meant.”
“He does the hand at Michael.”
“He does the hand at everyone. He did it at my husband at a funeral.”
“Whose funeral?”
“Their father’s,” said the other J, and there was a beat where nobody was sure whether we were allowed to laugh, and then all four of us went at once and I had to hold on to the table.
Nobody mentioned Michael after.
That is a thing you have to organize. Three women do not simply forget to mention a man.
“Say it,” I said, eventually.
“Say what?”
“Whatever it is you’ve all agreed not to say.”
Pia put her chin on her hand.
“We agreed not to say anything about my brother,” she said, “because you’ve had everybody on this island having opinions at you for a season, and we thought you might like an afternoon of nobody doing it.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. Oh.”
“That’s-”
“Don’t.” Pia picked her glass up. “You’ll say something grateful and then I’ll have to be nice back and the whole thing collapses. Eat your fries.”
“Pia.”
“Fries.”
“I want to ask you one thing and then I’ll stop.”
“Go on.”
“Is he all right?”
Pia held her glass in front of her face for a moment and I watched her decide something.
“You’ve asked me that,” she said, “and I’m going to tell you the truth, which is that I don’t know, because he has stopped saying, and he never used to stop saying.” She drank. “Now eat your fries, because I am not doing the next part of that conversation in a restaurant.”
Kristina was in my lane when I got home, standing by the car, with a tin in her hands, in shoes that had already lost an argument with the surface.
“You’ve been drinking.”
“I have.”
“Good. There’s tea in this, and you’re going to have some, and you’re going to be very annoyed with me by the end of it, so drink it while it’s hot.”
That is the most honest opening I have ever had from that woman.
She came into Ruth’s kitchen. She did not comment on the kitchen. She sat down at the table with the short leg and pressed a hand down on it, once, the way everybody does, and found it steady, and did not comment on that either.
“I have something to give you,” she said, “and it isn’t a thing you’ll want.”
“Then don’t.”
“That is not how this works.”
She poured the tea. She did it properly and slowly and I let her, because I could tell she was using the time to arrange something in her head.
“The sunroom,” Kristina said.
Everything in me went very still.
“I’m not doing the sunroom. I’ve done the sunroom for years without any help from you and I’d like to keep the arrangement.”
“You have been doing the sunroom for years,” she said. “You have been doing it in my kitchen and at my table and at every party you have ever stood on the edge of. You did it at a benefit last month with your shoulders around your ears. So we are going to do it once, properly, and then it is done.”
“Kristina.”
“I told you a story about a girl in Providence.”
“You did.”
“There was no girl in Providence.”
The clock in that hall does a thing on the half hour. It did it then and neither of us moved.
“I made her up,” Kristina said. “I made her up sitting in that chair with a jug of iced tea in front of me and I watched a seventeen-year-old work out what I meant, and she was very quick, and she had it before I had finished the sentence, and I have thought about that more than you would believe.”
“Why?”
“Because I was you,” she said.
I put the cup down.
“My father had a chandlery and it went,” Kristina said.
“It went badly and it went publicly. I married into this family from a house with a lien on it, and I stood in rooms exactly like the one you stood in at that tent, and I learned what to do with my shoulders because a woman took me aside and told me, and she was not kind about it, and it worked.”
“You could have told me that.”
“Yes.”
“You could have just told me that, in that sunroom, instead of being a bit-”
“I could have. I chose not to.” She turned the cup around on the table.
“I decided you were not going to survive it and that it would be kinder to end it before there was a child in it. I was wrong about the first part and I was too late on the second, and I have not apologized for it and I am not going to start now, because I would do it again with the information I had.”
I nearly liked her. She held it for the length of a cup of tea and then she couldn’t help herself.
“That’s a horrible thing to say.”
“It is true, though,” said Kristina. “You would rather have true.”
And I would. That is the trouble with that woman.
She was not finished. I could see she was not finished, because she had not touched her own tea.
“Now the other thing.”
“There’s another thing.”
“There is another thing and it is worse and it is why I came.” She looked at the window over the sink, which looks at nothing at all. “Ruth told me about the Parker girl.”
I did not say anything. I could not have.
“She told me a long time ago, at that table, in this room, and she told me because she was furious and had nobody to be furious at, and then she made me swear I would never use it.” Kristina’s voice did not change at all.
“I never used it. I did not use it when I wanted you gone, which is when it would have been worth most, and I would like exactly no credit for that.”
“You’ve known.”
“I have known since before there was a wedding.”
I got up because I could not stay sitting down. There was nowhere to go, so I stood at the sink with my back to her and put both hands on the edge of it, which is a thing I do.
“Does Michael know?”
“No.”
“You’re certain.”
“I am completely certain, because I have watched that boy walk into every room on this island for years with no idea what is in it, and a man who knew would not have hired her.” Kristina stood up.
“He knew she was your friend in any way that mattered, but he does not know why it stopped, and he does not know that his own grandmother knew before he did.”
“How did Ruth find out?”
“She did not say and I did not ask,” said Kristina. “Ruth had the entire island in that kitchen at one point or another and most of them talked. That is what the chowder was for.”
“Then tell him. That wouldn’t matter now.”
“No.”
“Kristina-”
“No.” She put her sunglasses on inside the house, which is how that woman leaves a room.
“I carried it because Ruth asked me to. I will not hand it to my son to make his life easier, and I am not handing it over to make yours easier either, because the second he has it he will do something enormous with it and it will be about him within the hour.”
“So it just sits there.”
“It sits there until you pick it up,” she said. “That part is yours. It has always been yours. It is the only thing in this entire mess that nobody can take off you and do badly.”
She got to the door.
“The tea’s the one Ruth kept in the left cupboard in our house,” she said. “Your husband found it in Boston. He has been buying it in quantity and leaving it on walls all over this island like a man baiting a trap, and I took a tin off him, and I would rather you heard that from me.”
And she went down the lane to that car without saying goodbye, and I stayed where I was for a long time with a cup of my dead grandmother-in-law’s tea going cold in front of me and a name in my mouth that I have not said out loud since I was nineteen.