‘That was right around when I did that walk for breast cancer,’ Stella said. She glanced at me, sheepish. ‘Or, well, started that walk for breast cancer. There were too many people to finish. I thought it would be more like…oh, I don’t know. A parade. Everyone was walking so damn fast! I would think you’d want everyone to look at you, not just whiz right by.’
The cuckoo clock in the dining room chimed out the hour. The truth about the breast cancer walk was that Stella had been in terrible pain that day. She’d stood at the start, all ready to walk, but then went pale and grabbed my hand. ‘Honey,’ was all she needed to say. We moved to the sidelines fast. Children stared at us. Other people looked away. Shortly after that, the doctors put her on a low dose of morphine.
Samantha ran her hand through her hair. ‘I brought you a present, Stell.’ She pulled out a fat romance novel. There was a woman on the cover, her breasts tumbling out of her corset. She had windswept hair and a troubled, I-have-to-make-a-huge-life-or-death-decision-about-my-kingdom expression. ‘You used to love this series, remember?’
‘She’s not reading that much,’ I butted in.
Samantha looked at me sharply. ‘Well, why not? It’s probably good for her.’
‘It’s true, I’m not reading much,’ Stella admitted. ‘TV is far more interesting these days. My favorite show is Road Rules.’
Samantha wrinkled her nose. ‘Really?’
‘Oh, it’s so good,’ Stella said. ‘We’ll have to watch it later-it’s so deliciously nasty. It’s just the kind of show you’d like.’
One of Samantha’s eyebrows shot up. ‘I don’t think so.’
Stella pursed her lips. ‘Well. Maybe not anymore.’
There was a catch in her voice. Samantha looked startled, as though she’d been slapped.
My gaze ping-ponged from Stella to Samantha, not sure what would happen next, but hoping, maybe, for an altercation. But Samantha just stared down at her purse, running her fingers along its brass grommets.
According to Stella, Samantha left Cobalt when she turned eighteen. Just disappeared. Stella had a lot of excuses for it. She was like that when she was young, after all-she never played by the rules. Then, during the time my father was suffering through the worst of his depression, Samantha called Stella out of the blue. She was working as a legal secretary, she said. She’d just gotten married on a cruise ship to a man named Chris; he developed townhouses in Central Pennsylvania.
I asked Stella if she’d seen Samantha since she took off, and Stella shrugged and said Samantha had only come back once to retrieve her savings bonds from the safe-deposit box and haul away the rosewood chest that had belonged to her parents. When she visited, she dropped off a few wedding photos, and, after enough pestering, Stella finally showed them to me. I was stunned to discover that all of Chris’s family had attended the wedding ceremony, boarding the cruise ship for the afternoon when it docked in Miami. Stella slowly pointed out each family member, saying both very little and so very much. ‘Here’s his mother, his father, his grandmother, his great-aunt,’ she recited. She squinted viciously at the great-aunt. ‘Good Lord. What idiot wears black to a wedding at sea?’
‘Do you want something to eat?’ I asked Samantha, heading toward the kitchen. ‘A sandwich? A soda?’
‘Oh, goodness, Chris forbids me to drink soda,’ Samantha said quickly, desperate to break the conversational void. ‘Do you have any fruit?’
‘We have grape jelly.’
‘I want a glass of wine,’ Stella called from the living room.
Samantha ran her hands over the crystal candy dish, which had a fine layer of dust on its bumpy edges. ‘I don’t really drink wine, either,’ she said quietly. ‘It gives you wrinkles.’
‘Sweetie, you’re so pretty, you have so many years until you get wrinkles,’ Stella called out. ‘Summer, get us wine, okay?’
‘We don’t have any.’
‘Break out that bottle on the top of the fridge.’
I walked back into the living room. ‘You can’t have wine. You can have an iron pill. That’s it.’
Stella rolled her eyes. ‘I’ll sip. Slowly. Give me a thimbleful.’
I turned back for the kitchen. There was the same peeling alphabet wallpaper that had been here when I visited for my grandmother’s funeral. The same lopsided cabinets, an even bigger accumulation of thermometers and bags of charcoal and garage sale crap on the back porch. There was indeed a dust-covered bottle of wine on top of the fridge. I pulled it down and searched the silverware drawer for a corkscrew. Samantha hovered near the kitchen table, pulling her cell phone’s antenna in and out. I could hear Stella grunting in the other room, and hoped she wasn’t trying to come in here. It always took a huge effort for her to move from room to room. ‘Are you okay?’ I called to her.
‘I’m fine, fine,’ she said.