This last question, and the answer, made Sylvie realize for the first time why her mother had always frowned at her and not at her sisters. Rose recognized in Sylvie what had always bothered her about her husband. “Ugh, Whitman,” Rose would say in disgust when Charlie recited his lyrical lines. Not because Rose cared about Walt Whitman, but because she blamed the poetry inside Charlie for his lack of success in life. The reason his salary stayed small, the reason he refused to get upset when the furnace broke and yet would drag her outside to admire a full moon, the reason he didn’t care what people thought of him and yet hundreds of people turned out for his funeral. Sylvie was spiked with the same stuff Charlie was, and so when Rose looked at her daughter, she didn’t see Sylvie; she saw the failure of her own marriage and her personal failure in convincing Charlie to be who she’d wanted him to be. Sylvie thought of Julia, who had so much of Rose inside her. She knew that any glimpses Julia caught of the faltering sentences inside William would also be despised.
With her eyes closed, Sylvie placed herself on the wide expanse of her brother-in-law’s uncertainty. It resembled one of the foggy, rambling moors she and her sisters had loved in Victorian novels. Sylvie felt at home on the rough terrain, filling her lungs with murky air. Since Charlie’s death, she’d felt like she was spilling out of her edges and messily trying to scoop herself up at the same time. Her sisters and mother were safe, with their aspirations and routines; Sylvie was her heartbreak and loss. William wasn’t safe either, and his questions kept Sylvie company. She and her brother-in-law were both struggling to inhabit their own skin, a goal that would sound absurd to almost anyone else.
When Julia appeared, Sylvie scooched over and hugged her older sister harder than usual.
“Are you okay?” Julia whispered.
Sylvie shook her head and buried her face in her sister’s neck. She could feel the baby flutter inside her sister and then into her own flat belly. She needed this hug, and she was also buying time before Julia asked her questions and Sylvie tried her best to answer.
“Is the manuscript good?”
“Yes and no.”
“Will it help him get a professorship?”
“No.”
“What does it mean…what is it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never read anything like it.”
* * *
—
Rose called a family meeting on a Saturday when Julia was eight months pregnant and Izzy was four months old.
“A family meeting, including Cecelia?” Julia had asked, when she visited their mother in her garden. (“Her getup has gotten even worse,” Julia told Sylvie that night. “She wears Daddy’s pajamas under the baseball equipment.”)
“Of course not,” Rose had said. “You, William, Sylvie, and Emeline.”
The listed people turned up at the house at four o’clock on the designated day. All three sisters paused on the front step and glanced down the street toward Mrs. Ceccione’s house. None of the sisters had told Cecelia about this meeting—they couldn’t bear to tell her she’d been excluded—but of course she knew. Sylvie had gotten Cecelia a part-time job at the library, and their shifts often overlapped. Emeline slept on a cot in Cecelia’s room, and Julia called Cecelia once a day to see how she and the baby were. Cecelia, like all of them, listened to everything her sisters said and everything they didn’t. This meeting had been so clearly omitted, this hour wiped off the shared calendar, that it might have been the only thing Cecelia knew for sure.
Rose was already in her spot at the dining room table when they came in. She looked thinner in the cheeks and was wearing a faded housedress.
“I have to sell this place,” she said, when they were seated around her. “I can’t afford to live here anymore.” She waved her hand casually, to indicate the walls, bedrooms, and history that surrounded them. “I don’t need its size either.”
Sylvie leaned back in her chair. It had never occurred to her that this house could be sold. When Rose and Charlie were first married, Charlie had gotten a great deal on the purchase, probably through a drinking bet—though that was never clearly stated—during a period of racial tension in Chicago, when a lot of white people were fleeing the city. Closing this deal had been perhaps the greatest achievement of Charlie’s life, in Rose’s eyes.
Sylvie’s sisters looked as shocked as she felt: Julia’s face had gone white, and Emeline was blinking more than normal, which is what she did when she was scared or surprised.
“I thought you owned the house outright,” Julia said. “Daddy always boasted about not having a mortgage.”
Rose frowned. “I had to take one out about ten years ago, so we could feed and clothe you girls.”
This sank in. The saints on the walls stared down at them. There was a blank spot where St. Clare of Assisi had been. They all knew that the framed image now lived under Cecelia’s bed down the street.
“You can’t leave your garden,” Emeline said. Julia, William, and Sylvie nodded with relief. That statement was true. What was Rose without her garden? Rose’s existence had always taken place in the garden, as if her roots sat beside those of the herbs, lettuce, and eggplants.
“Too much work,” Rose said. “I’m finished. This house is finished. You’ve all moved out.”
She didn’t look at Sylvie when she said this, but Sylvie felt the dart her mother had thrown twist into her chest. You said you wanted to be alone, she thought. I did what you asked.
“I’m moving to Florida,” Rose said. “To a condo on the beach. I know a few ladies from the neighborhood there, and they’re setting me up. With the sale of this house, I’ll be fine.”
“Florida?” This was the first word William had spoken since they’d sat down. “You can’t do that.”
Rose fixed her eyes on him.
“Your daughters need you.” He took a breath. “Mom. We need you.”
“I’m about to have the baby,” Julia said. “You need to wait, please.”
The air in the room felt strange: heavy yet about to move, as if on the threshold of a storm. The Padavano girls shifted in their chairs. They could all feel Cecelia down the street, holding her daughter as if she was a life preserver, trying to listen to words she couldn’t hear.
“I wanted to let you all know in person,” Rose said.
Where are you? Sylvie thought. Are you already in Florida? She remembered her glimpse of Charlie in the coffin—waxy and gone. This was almost worse. Her mother was in front of them, blood pumping through her body, but she was absent. She’d taken leave: Perhaps since the day of the funeral? While Sylvie sat on the floor beside her, right after the news? Or had she been wanting to be somewhere else for years, and now she saw the chance to break free?
Emeline said, “We all miss Daddy. We should be together. I brought pictures of Izzy, Mama. She’s so beautiful.”
She pulled the photos out from under the table, but the mention threw Rose onto her feet. She was walking away while she said, “Feel free to take some food from the garden on your way out.”
Three of the four Padavano girls were left gripping the dining room table, as if everything were being pulled away from them at once.
William