Richard was everything I needed him to be after my mother died.
We flew to Florida with Aunt Charlotte for the burial, and he rented a hotel suite with adjoining rooms so we could all stay together. I remembered how my mom had looked when she was happiest—in the kitchen, clattering pans and tossing spices into a dish, or on her good mornings, singing me a goofy song to wake me up, or laughing as she wiped away the water Duke had splashed on her face after we’d bathed him. I tried to picture her on the night of my wedding, walking barefoot in the sand, her face turned toward the setting sun, as I said that final good-bye. But another image kept intruding: my mother as she’d died—alone, on the couch, with an empty bottle of pills by her side and the television blaring.
There was no note, so we were left with questions that could never be answered.
When Aunt Charlotte broke down at the gravesite, blaming herself for not knowing that my mother had taken a bad turn, Richard comforted her: “None of this is your fault; it isn’t anyone’s fault. She was doing so well. You were always there for your sister, and she felt your love.”
Richard also sorted through the paperwork and arranged for the sale of the little brick rambler where I’d grown up, while Aunt Charlotte and I went through my mother’s personal belongings.
The rest of the house was relatively neat, but my mother’s room was a mess, with books and clothes piled on every surface. Crumbs on her bed told me she’d recently been taking most of her meals there. Old coffee mugs and water glasses crowded her nightstand. I saw Richard’s eyebrows lift in surprise when he noticed the disorder, but the only thing he said was “I’ll have a cleaning service come.”
I didn’t take many of my mother’s belongings: Aunt Charlotte suggested we each select a few of my mother’s scarves, and I chose a few pieces of her costume jewelry as well. The only other possessions I wanted were our old family photographs, and two of my mother’s battered, beloved cookbooks.
I also knew I needed to clear out a few things from my old bedroom, which had been turned into the guest room. I’d deliberately left some items on the shelf in the back of my closet. While Aunt Charlotte wiped down the refrigerator and Richard was on the phone with a real-estate agent, I brought in a step stool and reached onto the dusty ledge. I tossed a sorority pin in a trash bag, then threw in my college yearbook and my final transcripts. I put my early-childhood-development honors paper into the trash bag as well. I reached to the very back of the shelf for my diploma, still rolled into a cylinder and tied with a faded bow.
I threw it away without even looking at it.
I wondered why I’d even saved any of it, after all these years.
I couldn’t look at the pin or yearbook without thinking of Maggie. I couldn’t look at the diploma without thinking about what had happened on the day I graduated.
I was knotting the top of the bag when Richard entered my old bedroom. “I thought I’d run out and pick up some dinner.” He looked at the bag. “Want me to toss that for you?”
I hesitated, then handed it to him. “Sure.”
I watched him cart away the last remnants of my college days, then I looked around the empty room. The water stain still marred the ceiling; if I closed my eyes, I could almost picture my black cat curled up beside me on my pink-and-purple-striped comforter while I read a Judy Blume book.
I knew I would never see this house again.
That night back in our hotel, as I soaked in a hot bath, Richard brought me a cup of chamomile tea. I took it gratefully. Despite the heat of the Florida day, I couldn’t seem to get warm.
“How are you holding up, sweetheart?” I knew he wasn’t just referring to my mother’s death.
I shrugged. “Okay.”
“I worry you haven’t been happy lately.” Richard knelt beside the tub and reached for a washcloth. “All I want is to be a good husband to you. But I know I haven’t always been. You’re lonely because I work such long hours. And my temper . . .” Richard’s voice grew husky. He cleared his throat and began to gently clean my back. “I’m sorry, Nellie. I’ve been stressed. . . . The market’s been crazy, but nothing is as important as you. As us. I’m going to make it up to you.”
I could tell how hard he was trying to reach me, to bring me back. But I still felt so chilled and alone.
I stared at the water dripping slowly from the bath tap as he whispered, “I want you to be happy, Nellie. Your mother wasn’t always happy. Well, mine wasn’t, either. She tried to act like she was, for me and Maureen, but we knew. . . . I don’t want that to happen to you.”
I looked at him then, but his gaze was distant, his eyes cloudy, so I stared at the silvery scar above his right eye.
Richard never talked about his parents. This admission meant more than all of his promises.
“My dad wasn’t always good to my mom.” His palm kept moving in circles on my back, in a gesture a parent would make to soothe a child who was upset. “I could live with anything except being a bad husband to you. . . . I have been, though.”
It was the most honest conversation we’d ever had. I wondered why it had taken my mother’s death to bring us to this place. But maybe it hadn’t been her overdose. Maybe it had been what happened two days before we’d learned about it, when we’d come home from the Alvin Ailey gala.
“I love you,” he said.
I reached out for him then. His shirt grew damp from the bathwater transferred to it by my wet arms.
“We’re both orphans now,” he said. “So we’ll always be each other’s family.”
I held on to him tightly. I held on to hope.
That night we made love for the first time in a long while. He cupped my cheeks between his palms and stared into my eyes with such tenderness and yearning that I felt something inside me, something that felt like a tight, hard knot, release. As he held me afterward, I thought about Richard’s gentle side.
I recalled how he’d paid for my mother’s medical bills, how he’d attended Aunt Charlotte’s gallery openings, even if it meant skipping a client dinner, and how he always came home early each year on the anniversary of my father’s death with a pint of rum raisin ice cream in a white paper bag. It was my father’s favorite flavor, the one he ordered when we went for drives together on my mother’s lights-out days. Richard would serve us each a scoop, and I’d tell him details about my father that would otherwise grow dusty and forgotten, such as how despite his superstitions, he’d let me adopt the black cat I’d fallen in love with as a little girl. The ice cream would melt on my tongue, filling my mouth with sweetness, on those nights. I thought about how Richard had generously tipped waiters and taxi drivers and donated to a variety of charities.
It wasn’t hard to focus on the goodness in Richard. My mind fell easily into those reminiscences, like a wheel latching comfortably into the grooves of a track designed for its rotations.
As I lay in his arms, I looked over at him. His features were barely perceptible. “Promise me something,” I whispered.
“Anything, my love.”
“Promise things won’t get bad for us again.”
“They won’t.”
It was the first promise to me he’d ever broken. Because things got even worse.
As our plane lifted off and began to head toward New York the next morning, I stared out the window at the topography that grew ever smaller and shuddered. I was so grateful to be leaving Florida. Death surrounded me here like concentric rings. My mother. My father. Maggie.