“I don’t know. I should, somebody should build her a monument or something.”
“Like the General? Your mom would have had a good laugh about that.” Marian pulled her arm around me. “I know what you mean. She’s not there, she’s here.”
She held out her hand, and I pulled her up. We held hands all the way back to the archive, as if I was still a kid she was babysitting while my mom was at work in the back. She pulled out a thick ring of keys and opened the door. She didn’t follow me inside.
Back in the archive, I sank into the chair in front of my mom’s desk. My mom’s chair. It was wooden, and bore the insignia of Duke University. I think they had given it to her for graduating with honors, or something like that. It wasn’t comfortable, but comforting, and familiar. I smelled the old varnish, the same varnish I’d probably chewed on as a baby, and right away I felt better than I had in months. I could breathe in the smell of the stacks of books wrapped in crackling plastic, the old crumbling parchment, the dust and the cheap file cabinets. I could breathe in the particular air of the particular atmosphere of my mother’s very particular planet. To me, it was the same as if I was seven years old, sitting in her lap, burying my face in her shoulder.
I wanted to go home. Without Lena, I had nowhere else to go.
I picked up a small, framed photograph on my mom’s desk, almost hidden among the books. It was her, and my father, in the study at our house. Someone had taken it in black and white, a long time ago.
Probably for the back of a book jacket, on one of their early projects, when my dad was still a historian, and they had worked together. Back when they had funny hair, and ugly pants, and you could see the happiness on their faces. It was hard to look at, but harder to put down. When I went to return it to my mom’s desk, next to the dusty stacks of books, one book caught my eye. I pulled it out from under an encyclopedia of Civil War weapons and a catalog of native plants of South Carolina. I didn’t know what the book was. I only knew it was bookmarked with a long sprig of rosemary. I smiled. At least it wasn’t a sock, or a dirty pudding spoon.
The Gatlin County Junior League cookbook, Fried Chicken and Sass. It opened, by itself, to a single page. “Betty Burton’s Buttermilk Pan Fried Tomatoes,” my mom’s favorite. The scent of rosemary rose up from the pages. I looked at the rosemary more closely. It was fresh, as if it had been plucked from a garden yesterday. My mom couldn’t have put it there, but no one else would use rosemary as a bookmark. My mom’s favorite recipe was bookmarked with Lena’s familiar scent. Maybe the books really were trying to tell me something.
“Aunt Marian? Were you looking to fry up some tomatoes?”
She stuck her head in the doorway. “Do you think I would touch a tomato, let alone cook one?”
I stared at the rosemary in my hand. “That’s what I thought.”
“I think that was the one thing your mother and I disagreed on.”
“Can I borrow this book? Just for a few days?”
“Ethan, you don’t have to ask. Those are your mother’s things; there isn’t anything in this room she wouldn’t have wanted you to have.”
I wanted to ask Marian about the rosemary in the cookbook, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear to show it to anyone else, or to part with it. Even though I had never and probably would never fry a tomato in my entire life. I stuck the book under my arm as Marian walked me to the door.
“If you need me, I’m here for you. You and Lena. You know that. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you.” She pushed the hair out of my eyes and gave me a smile. It wasn’t my mother’s smile, but it was one of my mother’s favorite smiles.
Marian hugged me, and wrinkled her nose. “Do you smell rosemary?”
I shrugged and slipped out the door, into the gray day. Maybe Julius Caesar was right. Maybe it was time to confront my fate, and Lena’s fate. Whether it was up to us or the stars, I couldn’t just sit around and wait to find out.
When I walked outside, it was snowing. I couldn’t believe it. I looked up into the sky and let snow fall on my freezing face. The thick, white powdery flakes were drifting down with no particular purpose. It wasn’t a storm, not at all. It was a gift, maybe even a miracle: a white Christmas, just like the song.
When I walked up to my front porch, there she was, sitting bareheaded on my front steps with her hood down. The moment I saw her, I recognized the snow for what it really was. A peace offering.
Lena smiled at me. In that second, the pieces of my life that had been falling apart fell back in place.
Everything that was wrong just righted itself; maybe not everything, but enough.
I sat down next to her on the step. “Thanks, L.”