At first, she’d surprised me by making plans to go home on her own, but now I was glad. I guessed my mother and Del had kept up a regular conversation, regained ground they’d lost, and now I was on the outside of things. I drove Del to the airport, and said good-bye in the car. Before she got out she handed me a folded piece of paper. “It’s Alice’s phone number,” she said. I put the paper in my bag, but we both knew I wouldn’t use it. I watched Del enter the airport’s glass doors and had a fleeting, childish resentment that she was going and I was not.
True, I wouldn’t have to endure my mother’s elaborate preparations for our arrival—the cut-glass bowl of pastel mints, her suit and her pumps and her hairdo. My grandmother would hold court in a chair in the living room, talking about the past as if it were the present. I didn’t understand how my mother could continue to live in that place. The old house hadn’t fallen into disrepair; my mother wouldn’t let that happen. It was simply deserted; its many rooms filled with dust, were cleaned, and slowly refilled with dust. Dust clung to chair skirts and caught in bedspread fringe. Dust filmed my grandfather’s books, Sarah’s and Leanne’s yearbooks, and my English Lit paperbacks. Dust coated my grandmother’s antiques, Leanne’s collection of porcelain butter plates, and Sarah’s sea glass.
In my and Del’s room the shelves were bare save for an odd stuffed animal or two won from the Catholic church carnival, a wooden box with two miniature drawers filled with old earrings and periwinkle shells.
“Do you even go into the rooms upstairs?” I’d asked my mother once.
“I sleep upstairs.” She’d yanked open a kitchen drawer, hunted through matchbooks, twine, and dried-up pens. “I’m up and down those stairs twenty times a day.”
The old neighborhood housed the same old families. The same old children, grown into adults, returned for visits with their own children. But there was less socializing and a kind of closed-off feeling to the neighbors’ homes tucked behind their privet hedges. The cocktail parties on summer patios, my mother’s friends mixing their whiskey sours—all of that had been eradicated by divorce and alcoholism. The flight from Ithaca to Hartford had a stop in Philadelphia, and I assumed my mother would tell Del to take a cab to the house. By that time, Sarah, who’d been waiting with her new baby to see Del, would have already left. Leanne, more patient, and childless, would have progressed to her second or third sherry. They’d have eaten pizza from the Greek place in town, the same pizza from the same place we had ordered out from when we were children, where we’d meet with friends as young teenagers. The pizza was heavy with tomatoes and strewn with oregano. The ancient jukebox played “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” and the boys sat red-faced and gangly in the booths, while we girls made chains out of chewing gum wrappers.
I couldn’t imagine the taste of that pizza without remembering David Pinney, how his death had stained everything that came after. When a boy leaned over to kiss me in a dark car it would be David Pinney’s lips and the pressure of his hand on my breast. I’d sequestered myself in the tomb of a house during my teen and young adult years, sealed off from anything that might trigger my memory. And what was that memory, exactly? Whichever version of the past might not match Del’s. I had rid the world of a violent boy, but she once claimed she knew what she was doing, that the sex had been her idea. “That doesn’t make what he did right,” I’d said. And at the look on my face, she’d changed her story to match with mine.
*
IN MY APARTMENT, the little travel clock let me know that by now my mother would have met Del by the door, would have given Del one of her usual hugs, applying a faint and cursory pressure with her sinewy arms. My mother would have invited Del to sit down in one of the wing chairs, and would have tried to appear as if she weren’t evaluating her—jumping to gather drinks from the kitchen, to offer snacks, to close the windows so the breeze wouldn’t blow the napkins around the room. My mother would be kind and accommodating, and would exhaust herself with the effort.
Del’s pregnancy would be immediately apparent, and my mother would know I had slipped in my responsibilities in more ways than one. She would suspect this was the reason I hadn’t come, and it had been, originally. I didn’t want to face my mother’s disappointment in me. Since it was late, my mother would soon usher Del into our old bedroom, where the cold, spring night air would come in, smelling of forsythia and sap. The spread would have been turned down on one of the twin beds, the same spread that had been on the beds for years—white, with raised threads that made intricate designs on your skin if you slept on them.