Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
NAOMI
When I came downstairs at eight, the kitchen door was shut with a strip of blue painter's tape across it. On the tape, in block capitals: CLOSED. GO AWAY. HAPPY BIRTHDAY.
A mug of coffee sat on the hall table next to it. The blue one, milk already in.
See, I thought, picking it up. He remembered the mug.
Then I took a sip. He'd let it sit too long, and it was cold.
"Go somewhere!" Graham called through the door over something sizzling. "Come back at six. And don't come in the back way. I'll know."
I drove to the Wissahickon and walked Forbidden Drive for three hours in my old boots.
The trees along the creek had turned all the way now.
Every time the wind moved, whole sheets of yellow leaves came down and spun into the brown water.
Runners passed me, a man on a horse, a woman pushing twins in a stroller, both babies asleep with their mouths open.
At noon my phone buzzed.
Lila: HAPPY BIRTHDAY NAY!!! See you tonight!! xoxo
Noon, probably from the car, the way she always did it. I put the phone back in my pocket without answering.
When I got home at 5:45, the tape was gone from the kitchen door, but the door was still shut. The house smelled like butter, garlic, something dark and earthy, like turned soil after a rain.
I stood in the front hall with my coat half off, breathing it in.
No onions. None of that low, sweet, three-hour smell of onions going brown in the big Dutch oven. No beef. No rosemary.
It's the potatoes, I told myself. It's too early. He does the soup last now. He changed the order.
Upstairs, I showered and put on the green wrap dress Graham liked, the one he said made me look like I was about to fire someone. My hand wasn't quite steady putting on lipstick.
My mother arrived at 6:30 in a cloud of Chanel, carrying a gift bag stuffed with tissue paper. Inside was a cashmere scarf in a soft pink I was never going to wear.
"It's so you," she said.
Tess came at seven in a black jumpsuit and very serious earrings. She hugged me hard in the doorway, then held me at arm's length to look at my face.
"You okay?"
"I'm forty-one."
"That's not an answer."
Lila came at 7:05, looking better than I'd seen her in months, her hair blown out glossy past her shoulders, a cream-colored dress, color in her cheeks. She came up the front steps with a bottle of wine in a paper bag and a small wrapped box.
"Happy birthday, Nay." She hugged me, fig and tuberose, holding on a second longer than usual. "You look beautiful."
"Thanks."
She went past me down the hall to the kitchen. The door opened a crack. I heard her, low and excited.
"Did the fish guy come through?"
"Six fillets," Graham said.
"Oh my God. You're amazing."
The kitchen door swung shut. I stood in my own front hall holding a pink scarf.
The dining room was beautiful. Graham had washed every glass shade on the chandelier and set the table with our wedding china, the white plates with the thin silver rim that we'd used maybe six times in twelve years.
Candles ran the whole length of the table between low glass bowls of flowers, white ranunculus tight as fists, dozens of stems of tuberose, so heavy and sweet the room was drenched in it.
Graham put me at the head of the table, with my mother on my right, Tess on my left, and Lila next to my mother.
He came in wearing an apron over his dark shirt and carrying a bottle. He looked nervous, happy, like a man who'd been building something in his garage for months and was about to pull off the sheet.
"Okay," he said. "Something new this year."
The wine came out pale, almost green-gold in the candlelight.
"Oh, Graham," Lila said softly.
"Sancerre!" My mother clapped. "Lila's favorite."
He poured my glass last. I looked at it and didn't pick it up.
When he came back from the kitchen, he was carrying five plates at once, a trick he'd taught himself working catering in college, and he set the first one in front of me.
Roasted beets, dark red, sliced into rounds, with crumbled goat cheese, candied walnuts, a glossy drizzle of balsamic.
"Roasted beet salad," Graham said. "Chèvre. Candied walnuts."
"Grandma Ruth's beets!" My mother leaned over to look at my plate. "Naomi, you used to eat those straight out of the jar, standing in the kitchen with the refrigerator open."
"When I was eight."
"You loved them."
For twelve years, whenever a salad came to our table in a restaurant with beets on it, Graham's fork would come across and take them. He didn't even look up to do it. He'd be in the middle of saying something else, and his fork would just come over, take the beets, go back.
I looked up at him.
He was standing by the sideboard, watching me, waiting, with his face wide open. He looked the way he had at our wedding when I came down the aisle.
I ate the goat cheese and a walnut, then pushed the beets to the side of the plate, where the juice ran out of them onto the silver rim like something bleeding.
Tess ate her whole salad very fast without saying a word.
The plates went away, and the next ones came. A small, perfect square of fish with its skin seared golden, sitting in a pool of brown butter, capers scattered on top.
"Sea bass," Graham said. "Brown butter. Capers."
Lila put a hand to her chest. "Graham. This is Lucca's."
"Enzo gave me the method." He was grinning now. "I had to promise him a table at the next Eagles game."
"It's perfect. It's exactly it." She took a bite and closed her eyes. "Mama, try it."
My mother tried it and said it was divine.
I picked the capers off my fish one at a time and lined them up along the silver rim of my wedding china. My mother watched me do it and didn't say anything.
I ate one bite of the fish. It was beautifully cooked. I could taste the hours he'd put into it.
Graham went around topping off everyone's Sancerre. My glass was still full.
"Not a white night?" he asked lightly.
I looked at him. He smiled, unsure, and moved on to Tess.
Then the smell came.
It got there before he did, rolling down the hall into the dining room over the tuberose, thick, musky, wet earth and gasoline, straight into the back of my throat.
He carried in a big white platter with both hands. Fresh tagliatelle heaped in glistening golden nests, with black truffle shaved over the top in thin, dark, frilled slices.
"The main event," he said. "Truffle tagliatelle."
"Real truffle," Lila told my mother. "Not oil. He found a guy in the Italian Market."
"Oh, Graham," my mother said.
He served me first, a big nest of pasta with the truffle shavings sliding down the side. The smell sat on my plate and in my mouth.
Gas station, I thought, so automatically my lips moved.
"Sorry?" Graham leaned toward me with the serving fork. "What, Nay?"
"Nothing."
For ten years we'd said it to each other, at weddings, at restaurants, at a friend's fortieth in Old City where the fries came out soaked in it. Gas station. One of us would fake a gag, and the other would kick them under the table.
He didn't remember.
I put my fork down. Under the table, Tess put her hand on my knee and left it there.
Lila was eating with her eyes half closed. My mother was telling Tess about a truffle risotto she'd had in Florence in 1987. The candles flickered, and the tuberose breathed its heavy white breath over everything.
Nobody but Tess noticed that I didn't eat the pasta. Graham was busy pouring.
When the plates were cleared, the lights went down.
Graham had turned off the chandelier from the switch in the hall.
The room went dim and gold, just candles, as he came through the doorway carrying a glass trifle bowl with one tall candle burning in the center.
Layers of pale cream and dark sponge, dusted thickly with cocoa.
They started singing, my mother loudest, then Lila, Tess only mouthing the words and watching me.
Graham set it down in front of me. The flame bent and straightened.
"Tiramisu," he said, when the song was over.
"Oh, just like when the girls were little!" My mother pressed her hands together. "Naomi's birthday cake, every year. Blow it out, sweetheart. Make a wish."
I looked at the candle. Wax had started running down the side. A drop fell, sinking into the cocoa, leaving a small pale crater.
I didn't blow it out.
Nobody knew what to do. The candle kept burning. The silence went a second too long, then two, and Graham's smile started to slip at the corners.
"Who chose this menu?" I asked.
I asked it quietly. I didn't raise my voice at all.
Graham was still holding the cake knife. He didn't look guilty, only confused, like a man who'd been handed a question in a language he'd once studied and couldn't quite remember.
"Lila helped," he said. "She said these were your favorites."
I turned my head and looked down the table at my sister.
Lila's face had gone white. She was still holding her fork.
"Nay," she said. "You always— When we were little. You loved the beets. You used to?—"
"Beets," I said. "Sea bass. Sancerre. Truffle. Tiramisu."
Lila opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
"That's what you love," I said.
"Naomi," my mother said, "don't make a scene."
Graham set the cake knife down, looking from me to Lila and back again. I watched him try to understand. I watched him reach for the thing that would fix it, find it, and hold it out to me like a gift.
"I thought you two liked the same things," he said.
The candle was still burning.
He'd asked her. For my birthday, he had asked my sister what I wanted. Her phone calls, her coffee order, her stomach, her eleven pounds, he knew all of it. She'd told him about herself, and he hadn't noticed the difference.
I folded my napkin in half and set it on the table next to the full glass of wine. Then I stood up.
"Thank you for coming, Mom," I said.
"Naomi. Sit down."
"Thank you, Tess."
Tess was already on her feet.
I walked out of the dining room, down the hall past the kitchen, where every pot and pan we owned was stacked in the sink. In the mudroom I took my coat off the hook and found my keys in the bowl. My hands were perfectly steady.
"Naomi." Graham had followed me down the hall, and his voice was rough. "Nay. Wait. Please. Tell me what I did."
I turned around.
He was standing in the mudroom doorway in his apron with cocoa on his thumb. His face was stripped bare and scared.
"You don't know," I said.
It wasn't a question, and he heard that it wasn't.
When I opened the door, the cold came in around my ankles. I went down the back steps to my car with my coat over my arm in the dark. The duffel was still in the trunk under the rain boots, so there was nothing I had to go back in for.
Tess came out behind me with her keys already in her hand.
"Go to my house," she said. "I'm right behind you. The door code's Ben's birthday."
I got in and started the car.
As I backed down the steep drive, I could see the dining room windows in the rearview mirror, gold and candlelit, with the shapes of my mother and sister sitting very still at the long table. And Graham, in the lit doorway of the mudroom, standing where I'd left him.