Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Anna was pulling the lasagna out of the oven when Margo came through the front door.
“We’re in here,” Meg called from the kitchen. She was at the counter chopping parsley for the garlic bread, which she had taken over from Anna because Anna had, in Meg’s opinion, been “chopping it wrong on purpose.”
Anna hadn’t thought she’d been chopping it wrong on purpose. She had been chopping it the way she always chopped it, which was apparently wrong, and Meg had taken the knife and the cutting board and reassigned Anna.
“Hello, everyone,” Margo said, coming in with her coat still on, a small bouquet of pink roses in one hand and a pale blue envelope in the other.
Anna looked up from the bread and smiled. “You brought roses.”
“Thought the place could use something.” Margo set the roses on the counter and put the envelope down next to them.
Anna saw the handwriting and her hands went still.
Sam’s long slanting letters. The same handwriting that had been on every note Sam had ever left on the kitchen counter—the notes that meant she was gone again, the postcards from cities Anna had to look up on a map, the one letter that came when Anna was fifteen that she’d read once and put in a drawer and never read again.
“For Bea,” Margo said. “It’s from Sam.”
Their eyes met for a second. Then Margo took off her coat and went to hang it in the front closet.
From the living room, Luke laughed at something Tyler said. Michael said something Anna couldn’t hear, and Luke laughed again.
Meg glanced at Anna without stopping. “Kitchen’s under control. If you need a minute.”
“I don’t need a minute.” Anna picked up a loaf of bread and started slicing it. “I need a cutting board.”
“You have one.”
“I need a different one.” She didn’t, actually. She needed something to do with her fingers.
Meg handed her one without comment.
Bea came in from the patio, where she’d been sketching Stella and Joey arguing about something that probably involved napkins.
She had graphite on her left cheek. Anna had stopped pointing out the graphite two years ago because it never made a difference—Bea just wiped it and got more on the other cheek and looked at Anna like she didn’t understand the problem.
Stella came in behind her, camera bag over one shoulder, and leaned against the doorframe.
“Something smells amazing,” Bea said, bumping Anna’s hip on her way to the sink.
“It’s just lasagna.”
“There is no ‘just’ lasagna, Mom.”
Anna laughed. “Go wash your hands.”
Bea was already at the sink. Margo, who had come back from the closet and settled into a kitchen chair, said, “Bea. There’s something for you on the counter. From your grandmother.”
Bea dried her fingers on the dish towel and crossed to the counter. She picked up the envelope and turned it over, touching the handwriting with her thumb.
“She wrote me.”
“Yes, she did,” Margo said.
Bea slid her finger under the flap, pulled out the card, and opened it. Anna recognized the expression from her own childhood—the wide eyes, the mouth falling open, the way everything else in the room stopped mattering.
“She remembered,” Bea said quietly. She cleared her throat and read it aloud.
My dear Bea,
I am so sorry this is late. I was in Oaxaca for the first week of February and the mail situation was what it was.
Seventeen. I can’t believe it. Your mother was seventeen once too and she was already better than me at everything.
Happy birthday, darling girl. I hope you’re painting. I hope you’re seeing the world.
Love, Sam.
Bea pressed the card against her chest and smiled. “This is so nice.”
Margo looked down at her lap rather than at Bea. Or Anna.
“There’s a P.S.” Bea looked down again and read it aloud.
P.S. I’m in Sedona for the month. I took a little place out past Oak Creek. If you ever wanted to come see the red rocks, I would love for you to visit.
— S.
Bea looked up. “She invited me to Sedona.” She held the card in both hands. “I want to go.”
Anna set down the bread knife. She hadn’t realized she was still holding it. In the living room, the men had gone quiet—not a sound, exactly, but the absence of one. Luke had stopped laughing. Tyler had stopped talking.
Joey came through the patio door carrying two empty glasses, took three steps into the kitchen, and stopped. Meg’s knife was still. Nobody was moving.
“What’s happening?” he said.
“Nothing,” Meg said.
Joey set the glasses by the sink and went back out to the patio without another word.
Bea was looking at Anna, waiting. Across the room, Stella caught Bea’s eye—a quick look, the kind they’d been trading since Stella arrived in Laguna. What’s happening? Bea’s face said. Stella’s said I don’t know either, and she shifted her weight against the wall and kept watching.
“Mom?”
“Nothing, honey.”
“It’s not nothing. Everybody got weird.” She looked around the kitchen—Meg standing still with the knife, Margo studying her lap, Stella at the edge of the room, Tyler who had appeared in the kitchen doorway with his beer. “Sam sent me a birthday card and now everybody’s acting like someone died.”
“We’re not—”
“She invited me to visit. In Sedona.” Bea’s voice wasn’t angry—it was the voice of a seventeen-year-old explaining something to a room full of adults who were being slow about it. “What’s the big deal?”
Anna sighed and looked at her daughter.
She’d been carrying this moment since Bea was six and had asked, for the first time, why Grandma Sam wasn’t at Christmas.
She’s traveling, Anna had said, which was true.
Is she coming back? Bea had asked. I don’t know, honey.
Also true. Eleven years of building on that answer without ever saying the rest of it—that Sam left when Anna was ten, that she didn’t come when Bea was born, that she called for Bea’s tenth birthday because Anna had reminded her and didn’t call for the eleventh.
Years of protecting Bea from that math so that when Bea thought of Sam, she thought of a grandmother who lived far away and sent postcards and remembered birthdays, sometimes.
And now Bea had a card in her hand and she was happy, and Anna was terrified—not of the card, not of the visit, but of the moment when Bea would learn that Sam’s warmth was the exception, not the rule.
That it came in brilliant flashes and then went dark, and there was no predicting when the light would move, and by the time you noticed it had, you’d already built your whole day around it.
“It’s not a big deal,” Anna said. “We were just surprised.”
Bea watched her face for a second. “So can I go?”
The kitchen was quiet. The oven ticked as it cooled.
Anna found Tyler in the doorway. Tyler was looking somewhere to the left of Bea, which Anna knew from thirty-five years of Tyler meant he was going to be absolutely no help.
Meg had put the knife down. Margo was looking at Bea with the steady expression that meant she wasn’t going to intervene no matter what anyone wanted her to do.
Anna looked at her daughter, who was waiting.
“That’s yours to decide,” she said.
Bea put the card back in the envelope. Carefully, the way she handled things that were important to her. “Okay. I’ll think about it.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to go get my sketchbook from the table.” She went out through the patio door, and they heard it close behind her.
Stella looked at Tyler. Tyler looked at the floor. Stella pushed off the doorframe and followed Bea outside.
Nobody spoke for a long moment.
“Well,” Meg said finally, very quietly. “That was awful.”
Tyler set his beer on the counter. “I need some air,” he said.
Anna looked at Margo. Margo looked back.
“You did the right thing,” Margo said.
“Did I?”
“Yes. You let her have what she has.” Margo turned her coffee cup on the table. “People find what they need to find. Even when it’s not what you expected.”
Anna nodded. The lasagna was cooling on the counter.
Somewhere outside Tyler was probably having whatever conversation he was having with himself, and on the patio Bea was sketching and Stella was sitting beside her and Joey was probably reorganizing the outdoor napkin station because that was Joey.
The kitchen smelled like garlic and heat and, very faintly, pink roses.
“I need a minute,” Anna said.
“Okay,” Meg said.
Anna went into the pantry and closed the door. It smelled like onion skins and flour and the cardboard boxes Meg kept her overflow dry goods in. She didn’t turn on the light.