Chapter Six
Preteen boy clothes are disgusting, Diana thinks as she loads Duncan’s basketball shirts into the washer. It’s best to do the laundry each day, lest the odor kills them all.
There is much Diana hates about maintaining a house: mopping the children’s breakfast crumbs from the kitchen floor, managing the unending saga of dusting, and scrubbing toilets. The list of her least favorite chores is tiresome and infinite. Laundry, however, is an altogether different task.
Diana loves the way clothes smell brand new when they first come out of the dryer, and she appreciates the satisfaction of folding towels into a perfectly straight pile, all the corners lining up.
Most of all, she loves the brief look back at the days that have already disappeared as shown through her family’s clothes: her daughter’s muddy leggings from playing tag with the neighborhood kids, her son’s basketball jersey damp with perspiration from one of his many games, her kitchen towels marked with traces of Lakshmi’s latest meal.
When Diana drops the items, one by one, into the washing machine, she says a soundless goodbye to those rapidly fading moments and watches as the clothes swirl together, preparing for what is yet to come.
With those images clear in her mind, Diana closes the washer door, fills the dispenser with detergent, and turns on the wash cycle.
Then she heads upstairs with a white plastic basket piled high with clean clothes.
Arriving on the landing outside their bedrooms, Diana checks on the kids.
Phoebe is already asleep, with Bear Bear in her arms and lullabies playing on Tom’s old iPod.
Duncan sits at his bedroom desk, finishing up his homework.
While they haven’t discussed the letter since last night’s conversation on the basketball court, he gave her a long hug this morning as he left for school, embracing her so fiercely her ribs ached afterward.
Diana puts the laundry basket on her bed and begins folding. Occasionally, when she comes across items of Tom’s the kids have taken as their own—his law school sweatshirt, a pair of cozy argyle socks—she groups them separately, as if forgetting he no longer needs them.
After Duncan agrees to listen for Phoebe and go to bed as soon as his homework is done, Diana leaves for Lakshmi’s.
Once she’s inside her friend’s house, Diana’s tension fades away.
Unlike her own home, which is more of a way station, at Lakshmi’s, she finds succor and stability. She can leave her life behind.
Lakshmi is in front of her stove, stirring a bubbling pot and dancing to pop music playing from her phone.
Diana pauses to take in Lakshmi’s artwork, framed in gold and arranged together on the wall.
The paintings are only ten by ten inches, and the subject matter is prosaic—a peony in full bloom, a pile of books, a beach ball—but the canvases have a liveliness that draws people in.
Diana’s favorite of Lakshmi’s pieces hangs in her own kitchen.
It’s an earlier work, and while Lakshmi’s technique has improved since then, to Diana, it’s by far her best. Three peaches nestle in a blue bowl, sunlight falling across them with a shadow at the edge.
Diana has added the painting to the list of things she’d save in an emergency, a categorization at which Lakshmi, ever humble, scoffs.
Lakshmi glances up. “How long have you been there?”
“A minute or two. Looking to see if you’ve added any new paintings.” Diana holds out a bottle of wine. “Pinot grigio.”
“My favorite, thank you.” Lakshmi accepts the wine and gestures to the stove. “I’m making chai. Or would you prefer the wine?”
“I can’t handle caffeine this late.”
“I made it decaf,” Lakshmi says, her smile indicating she anticipated that concern. She places the wine inside the refrigerator and hands Diana a bowl of pistachios. “Why don’t you settle in, and I’ll be over with our drinks.”
Diana dumps her tote bag on a chair and takes a seat at the oval kitchen table. “Celine Dion?” she asks, gesturing to Lakshmi’s phone.
“Of course, Celine. I keep telling Ramesh we have to go to her concert in Las Vegas, but he’s not as big a fan as me.
” Lakshmi turns down the volume on the music and hands a cup of steaming chai to Diana.
“Celine lost her husband, too. She took some time off from performing afterward, but thankfully she’s returned to the stage. ”
Diana holds the mug up to her face, letting the chai’s steam warm her skin as she inhales its luscious ginger-and-cardamom scent.
“I’m afraid I’m not up to speed on the ins and outs of Celine Dion’s life.
” Hoping to change the subject, she points to the corner of the room, where a canvas sits on an easel in front of a north-facing window.
A profile of a person is sketched in the center, the lines tentative, as if the artist is still formulating her idea. “A new piece?”
Lakshmi crosses her arms as she examines the easel. “I’m trying to paint Ramesh. Capturing him is hard, though. He’s too impatient to sit for me. I thought I could do this from memory, but I may have to refer to a photograph. Or maybe I have to give up and start another project.”
That’s the secret of painting, Diana has learned from Lakshmi: If you don’t like the direction of a new piece, all it takes is a paintbrush to wipe it away so you can begin again.
Begin again. Diana lets that thought roll around in her mind until it’s close to the surface.
What if she could begin again? What if she could relive all the years with Tom?
How would they be different now that she knows he had a secret so significant he kept it from her until he was gone?
That he withheld part of himself? That he didn’t trust her?
She pushes away these thoughts from their hold on her and returns her focus to Lakshmi.
“Does Ramesh want you to paint him?” She considers what it would be like if Lakshmi asked to paint her. She’d be flattered. And nervous to have her friend look that closely at her.
“He doesn’t have a choice,” Lakshmi says, grinning. “I’m the artist, after all.”
Lakshmi hasn’t always been an artist. Before painting, she was associate general counsel for a tech company in Boston.
One late night at the office, her boss hit on her, and when Lakshmi turned him down—“as kindly as I could,” she explained to Diana—he retaliated.
Her office was reallocated without explanation, rumors spread that Lakshmi slept around, and she was blamed for a colleague’s mistake when all the evidence was to the contrary.
With her reputation and career in jeopardy, Lakshmi sought Tom’s help.
When her company learned she was willing to forgo the public embarrassment of a lawsuit for a quiet, yet lucrative, settlement, Tom made sure the matter was speedily resolved.
Afterward, Lakshmi enrolled in a painting class to lift her spirits, and she turned out to have a natural inclination for matching color and light on canvas. She now teaches the class that ignited her interest and finds herself busy with commissions and pieces of her own.
Lakshmi takes a seat next to Diana. “How are you? I’ve done all the talking since you arrived.”
“Work is hectic,” Diana says. “I miss Tom all the time. It’s like I’m not remembering him as much as I’m imagining.” She runs her tongue along her teeth, trying to clear the sourness that fills her mouth when she speaks of her grief.
“Imagining?”
“What life would be like if he was still here. Or what could have happened. It’s as if my future memory bank can’t turn off.
I see him at Duncan’s high school graduation or walking Phoebe down the aisle at her wedding or holding our someday grandchildren.
He’s there, part of our lives, not only in our memories.
” Tears roll down Diana’s cheeks and onto her scarf.
She wipes them away with the chunky fringe.
“You’d expect I’d be better at responding to a simple ‘How are you.’ It’s been eighteen months, after all. ”
Lakshmi puts her hand on Diana’s forearm. “It’s all right, I’m the one who asked.”
“You did. It’s your fault.”
“Yes,” Lakshmi says, smiling. “It’s all my fault.”
Diana returns Lakshmi’s smile, and the two women fall into a comfortable quiet.
They’ve been close since Diana and Tom moved in next door, their friendship an unforeseen boon no real estate agent could have predicted.
In the days after Tom’s death, when Diana felt herself drifting, unable to function, she listed the people who were still in her life, saying their names over and over, like a mantra: Phoebe and Duncan; her parents; Andrea, Evan, and Noah; Camille; Lakshmi, Ramesh, and Mira.
Lakshmi clears her throat. “Can I make a suggestion? What about trying therapy again? Maybe it might help this time?”
Diana tried therapy once, joining a grief support group after Tom died.
It met on Sunday nights at Saint Florian’s, a church in a town where she knew no one, sharing space with AA meetings.
An untouched box of sugar wafer cookies sat on the table in the center of the room, and paintings by the church’s nursery school students lined the walls.
The group was run by a social worker whose voice sounded like an oboe, wistful and expressive.
It was clear from the way the members diligently attended, always on time, that many found the group beneficial.
Slowly, though, what was supposed to be a tool to lift Diana up became an albatross, weighing her down.