Sarah washed another plate and handed it to me, her pink nails shiny with suds. “Why don’t you let Leanne dry now?” she said.
Last Thanksgiving, we’d all gathered at the old house. Leanne and her husband had picked up my grandmother at Essex Meadows on the way over, and my mother had gone to the manor to get Del. Sitting in a rocker on the cold front porch, I waited for them to return. My mother and I had potted mums the month before, and their colors were bright against the painted gray boards and against the dried grass of the lawn. Inside the house, my grandmother oversaw preparations, and Leanne and Sarah’s husbands watched football in the den. When the Cadillac turned down the pebbled drive, I stood and went to the car. Del hadn’t come.
“She wouldn’t get in the car,” my mother said. “She wanted to know where you were.”
My hands and face were numb from standing outside. “You told me it was better if you went alone.”
“How could I know?” she said. Her eyes were angry and sad at once. I followed her onto the porch and she tore off her gloves. “It’s probably for the best.”
Inside the kitchen my grandmother sat at the scarred farm table, her arms covered in flour. Leanne crimped the pastry crust. “A chore for a three-year-old,” Del might have said. I knew that as long as I was separated from Del, I would channel her dry observations.
Yesterday, on the phone, as my mother put together her green bean dish, I’d paced my small apartment. Del hadn’t mentioned going home for Thanksgiving—she hadn’t acknowledged the holiday at all. Perhaps she knew her absence had become part of our family’s holiday ritual, and Leanne, this year’s Thanksgiving hostess, wouldn’t have wanted to change that. Del often knew more than I gave her credit for.
“Don’t worry about us,” I’d said. “And don’t worry about Christmas, either. We’re fine here. We have a lot of friends to make plans with.”
Appropriating Del’s new life seemed perfectly acceptable. I’d had no plans to mention William to my mother, who had attempted a protest before I’d hung up the phone. Still, I’d worried. Should I have convinced Del to go home? Even if we would have arrived at the big, empty house, and headed upstairs to our old bedroom as if we were visitors to some roped-off scene from our childhood—we belonged there more than at Anne’s. I felt in some ways like a fugitive.
16
After the meal, Anne sat in the living room on her green velvet couch with a glass of sherry. She wore a red head scarf, a white sweater, and white wool pants, and she looked beautiful, if drained. Alice was there, along with Lucie, and Kitty, another girl, whose parents owned a farm in Cortland. Kitty’s mother sold Mary Kay cosmetics, and Kitty wore lipstick I was certain came from her mother’s product samples—tuscan rose or sienne brulee. I greeted them all in a friendly way, but they were cool toward me. They’d been so open the night I met them. I could only surmise that it had something to do with Del.
Anne patted the couch next to her, and I sat down, and all of the girls but Alice got up and disappeared down the hallway to the kitchen. Anne took a sip of her drink and set it down on the coffee table next to a small wooden box painted to look like a miniature bookcase. I asked Anne what it was, and she told me to push the button on the front. When I did, a mechanism lifted a panel at the top, and a black dog holding a cigarette in his paws emerged to the tinny sound of “Smoke Gets in My Eyes.”
“It was my mother’s,” she told me. “Isn’t it funny?”
I told her I liked it, and she grew serious.
“It’s yours then,” she said. “When I die.”
Although I tried to object, she pushed the button again, and the melody played and the dog’s head appeared. Anne took the cigarette and handed it to me. I couldn’t say I didn’t smoke.
“It was going to be Mary Rae’s, but now it will be yours.”
I accepted the light she gave me, and then I held the cigarette between my two fingers like an actress playing a part. Alice sat on a pillow in the corner of the room, braiding the pillow’s fringe. I knew she had to have been listening.
“Maybe one of the others might like it,” I said.
The girl stood, unfolding like an agile bird, and left the room to report to everyone in the other kitchen, I assumed.