17. Aria
ARIA
My mother has never once let a silence sit undisturbed in her life, God love her.
She'd texted from the airport two hours before her flight, informing me she had a layover long enough to steal a proper visit and not nearly long enough for me to talk her out of it.
By the time I got the message, she was already in a cab, already narrating the whole drive to whoever would listen, and there was nothing left to do but clean the kitchen and brace myself.
"Aria Grace." She swept through my front door trailing a rolling suitcase and a scarf that had clearly been chosen for drama rather than weather.
"Look at this house. Look at you. You look happy. When did you get happy?"
"Hi, Mom."
"Don't hi Mom me, answer the question. You've got color in your face I haven't seen since before Lily was born."
"It's called sunscreen, Mom."
"It's called a man, and don't insult my intelligence by pretending otherwise." She set her suitcase down in my hallway like she owned the place, which, in her mind, she probably did.
"Where's my granddaughter? And where's this neighbor Carol keeps texting me about?"
"Carol texts you?"
"Carol and I have an arrangement. She keeps me informed since you clearly won't."
I decided not to unpack that particular betrayal and instead let her sweep past me into the kitchen, already opening cabinets like she was conducting an inspection, already asking questions faster than I could answer them.
Lily solved the introduction problem by barreling in from the backyard, hair full of grass, and my mother dropped to her knees on my kitchen floor without a second's hesitation, arms wide, delight written all over her face like she hadn't seen Lily in months instead of weeks.
"There's my girl. Look how tall you've gotten. Are you eating rocks? Is that how this is happening?"
"I don't eat rocks, Grandma."
"Well, something's working. Come here and tell me everything I've missed."
Lily obliged immediately, launching into a detailed account of the goose, Noah's sketchbook, and a bug she'd apparently named and buried a small funeral for the week before, and my mother received every word of it like breaking news, gasping in exactly the right places.
"A funeral. For a bug. Did you wear black?"
"I wore my purple dress. It was the fanciest one I had."
"That's the correct choice. Purple is very respectful."
"So," my mother said, once Lily had wandered off again in search of a specific rock she needed my mother to admire. "Tell me about him. The real version, not the version you've been giving Carol."
"There's nothing to tell that Carol hasn't already told you."
"I want it from you. Humor your mother." She leaned against my counter, arms crossed, patient in the particular way she got when she had no intention of leaving a subject alone.
"Is it serious?"
"I don't know. Maybe. It's still new."
"New doesn't mean nothing. You've got a look about you, Aria. I haven't seen it in years."
"What look?"
"The look of a woman who's stopped bracing for the other shoe. It's a good look. Wear it more."
I didn't have an answer for that, mostly because she wasn't wrong, and there was something about my mother's particular brand of bluntness that always managed to land exactly where I hadn't wanted it to.
"Just be careful with him, Mom. Tonight, I mean. He's a little shy at first."
"I am always careful. I am also always right, which you'll notice is a separate skill entirely."
"That's not remotely reassuring."
"It wasn't meant to be. It was meant to be honest." She patted my cheek once, fond and a little smug, and went to go find Lily's rock before I could argue further.
I had exactly enough time to make coffee and mentally prepare myself before I heard Jake's truck in the driveway, right on schedule, because I'd invited him for dinner before I'd known my mother would be crashing it, and it was too late now to uninvite either of them without an explanation neither deserved.
"Jake's coming for dinner," I told her, bracing for impact.
"The neighbor?"
"That's the one."
"The one Carol says looks like he stepped out of a catalog for men who fix things?"
"Carol needs a hobby."
"Carol has several hobbies, and apparently gossip is her favorite one. I like her already." My mother patted her hair into place, entirely too pleased with herself.
"Well. I suppose I'll get to meet him properly this time."
Jake knocked before letting himself in the way he'd taken to doing over the summer, Noah trailing behind him with his sketchbook, and I watched my mother's whole face light up in the particular way it did when she'd found a new audience.
"You must be Jake." She was across the kitchen and shaking his hand before I could even do the introduction myself.
"Diane. I've heard entirely too much about you from a woman named Carol who I've never actually met in person."
"All good things, I hope."
"Mostly. She did mention something about a goose."
"The goose and I have a complicated relationship."
"Don't they all." My mother kept his hand a beat longer than necessary, studying him with the frank, unhurried appraisal of a woman who had raised a daughter alone and trusted her own judgment about people more than most.
"You've got kind eyes. I notice these things."
"Mom."
"I'm allowed to notice things, Aria. It's one of the few privileges of old age nobody can take from me."
Dinner went easier than I expected, my mother folding herself into the chaos of two kids and a table too small for five with the same effortless charm she brought to everything.
She told stories that made Noah laugh so hard he nearly choked on his pasta, and asked Jake question after question about the contracting business with genuine interest rather than interrogation.
"So how long have you been doing this?" she asked him, gesturing vaguely with her fork. "The building, the fixing, all of it."
"About nine years on my dad's crew now. Started swinging a hammer around the place long before that, if we're being honest."
"Nine years. That's dedication. Your grandfather couldn't hang a picture frame straight to save his life, if I remember right, not that he stuck around long enough for me to test the theory more than a few times."
She pointed her fork at Lily without missing a beat, softening it for her sake. "Terrible with tools, sweet girl. I'll give him that much."
"Was he funny?" Lily asked, entirely invested now.
"He had his moments, before he decided the rest of us weren't worth sticking around for." My mother turned her attention back to Jake, unwilling to let the thread drop, some old edge in her voice sanded down for company.
"You, at least, are still here. Teach her which end of a hammer to hold. Somebody in this family ought to."
"I'll do my best," Jake said, smiling in a way that didn't quite reach all the way up.
"See that you do." She studied him again, the way she did, cataloging something I couldn't quite see.
"You know, you remind me a little of someone. I can't place who."
Something in Jake's posture changed, small and quick, gone almost before I registered it.
"People tell me I have one of those faces," he said, easy, reaching for his water glass.
"Maybe that's it." My mother let it go, mercifully, and turned her attention back to Lily's plate instead. "Eat your vegetables, sweet girl, or I'm telling your mother you skipped them."
"I'm eating them. Look."
"I'm watching. Very impressed."
I relaxed a little, thinking the moment had passed, and went back to my own plate while the conversation drifted toward Noah's latest drawing, something involving a dinosaur riding a bicycle that required a full explanation from the artist himself.
"You know what this reminds me of," my mother said later, once dessert had appeared and the kids had wandered off toward the living room with a promise of one show before bed.
"Aria used to draw constantly at that age too.
Every summer up at the lake, she'd fill up an entire sketchbook before we even got home. "
"Mom, nobody wants to hear about my crayon phase."
"I want to hear it," Jake said, and I caught the way his eyes flicked toward me for half a second before settling back on my mother, something careful in it I couldn't quite name.
"Oh, she was relentless about it. She drew everything. The lake, the cabins, that terrible little dock the owners never fixed properly."
My mother waved her fork, warming to the topic in the way she always did once she found a story worth telling.
"One summer she drew this boy she used to argue with constantly. He was older than her and worked on the dock crew. She drew him about a dozen times, if I recall, though she'd never admit that to save her life."
"Mom."
"What? It's true. You had the worst crush on that boy and you'd have denied it under oath."
"I did not have a crush on him. I told him he was terrible at his job."
"That was the crush, sweetheart. That was exactly the crush." She turned to Jake, delighted with her own memory now that she'd gotten rolling.
"He had this ridiculous name too, something I can never quite remember. It started with a J, I think. Or was it a T?"
My stomach did something strange and small, though I couldn't have said why, some old instinct stirring that I didn't have a name for either.
"It doesn't matter, Mom."
"It's on the tip of my tongue. I hate when this happens." She frowned at her own memory like it had personally wronged her, snapping her fingers twice in quick succession like that might shake the name loose.
"Jack. No. Jake, maybe. Something like that."
The kitchen went very quiet in a way that had nothing to do with volume and everything to do with the sudden, careful stillness of everyone at the table.
I glanced at Jake without quite meaning to, some instinct pulling my attention his way, and found him gripping his water glass a little too hard, his jaw set in a way I hadn't seen on him before, not even the night he lost the footrace to the goose.
"Small world if it was Jake," I said, mostly as a joke, mostly to fill the silence that had gone strange without my fully understanding why.
My mother's phone buzzed before she could answer, and she checked it with a groan, already gathering her scarf and her purse before she'd even finished reading the message.
"That's my ride. I have to go or I'll miss the flight." She pulled me into a hug, tight and quick, that smelled like the same perfume she'd worn my whole life, entirely too brief for someone who'd just left a name hanging in the air without noticing it had landed anywhere.
"Tell Jake it was lovely meeting him properly."
"I will."
"And tell him I'll figure out that boy's name eventually. It'll come to me. It always does."
"I'm sure it will, Mom."
She swept back toward the door, suitcase rattling behind her, already dialing someone to complain about traffic before she'd even reached the driveway, and I stood there for a second too long, some part of me still turning over a name that had almost surfaced and hadn't quite made it.
It was a strange, small ache, the kind I couldn't fully explain, like a word sitting right at the edge of my tongue that refused to come when called.
I told myself it didn't matter. Names from that long ago rarely did, not really, not once you'd built an entire life on top of them without ever needing to say them out loud again.
"Jake?" I said, turning back to the table.
"You okay? You went kind of quiet there."
"Yeah. Sorry, long week catching up with me. Ignore me."
Jake went rigid in his chair. Her flight left in fifty minutes. So, apparently, did the truth, right out the door behind her, without either of us catching it.