“You have to move these things,” my mother announced, sweeping into the dining room with the grandeur of a duchess arriving for dinner at Buckingham Palace.
“I’m realizing that.” I put my hands on two boxes and carefully—and clumsily—clambered out from between them. Pulling a chair out from the dining room table, I collapsed into it. I had been on my feet nearly nonstop, either painting or packing or carrying boxes up from the basement for my mother to sort through, and the exhaustion hit me, sudden and strong. Upstairs, a carpenter moved from room to room, fixing the molding, the comforting buzz of a saw and the intermittent thwack of a hammer punctuating my thoughts.
My mother was still standing with her hands on her hips, as though she expected me to magic the boxes away.
“I’ll put them in the basement. I’ve cleared out half the stuff down there and once you look at what’s left and decide what you want to keep, I’ll call someone to haul the rest away.”
“You can’t. Remember? Sharon says it has to look like there is a lot of storage space downstairs.”
“There is a lot of storage space downstairs.”
“Yes, but it has to look like it.”
Leaning forward, I pushed the chair at the head of the table out for her. “Have a seat, Mother. Take a load off.”
With a movement somehow both reluctant and grateful, she sank down into the chair as well, looking as happy to be off her feet as I was, though she most emphatically would never have referred to it as “taking a load off.” My mother was always in motion, on the phone or writing letters or rushing off to a meeting or a fundraiser or a function. I had never even thought my mother had the capacity to be tired or stressed, and yet here she was. Despite her makeup, I could see shadows under her eyes, and there was a slump to her shoulders that made her seem even smaller than she was.
“I shouldn’t be sitting. There’s so much to do,” she said. She folded and refolded her hands in her lap.
“There’s less than yesterday,” I said. Above us, the carpenter’s saw bit into a piece of wood. There was a clatter, then silence again.
“Did you need something?”
“We can’t just talk?”
“Well,” my mother said, as though that were an answer.
I nodded over at one of my grandmother’s notebooks, sitting on the edge of the table. “Grandmother wanted to be a writer. Did you know that?”
“Did she?” My mother’s interest was polite.
“She had some stories and poems published, in high school and college. The literary magazines. I’ve read them. They’re pretty good.”
“Where did you find those?”
“Up in the attic. You’ve never read them?”
“There’s so much junk in the attic—who knows what’s up there?”
“Did she write? I mean, do you remember her being a writer?”
My mother looked at me as though I were simple. “She didn’t have time. She practically ran the Collegiate Women’s Society in Washington, and she was on the boards of the symphony and the library, and they needed to entertain because of my father’s work. If you’re having senators and diplomats over for dinner, there’s not a lot of time for scribbling.”
It broke my heart a little to hear my mother call my grandmother’s writing “scribbling.” She sounded like my great-grandmother, Margie’s mother. I thought about telling her what I had read, about Margie’s trip to Paris, about her daydreams and her friendship with Sebastien, about her writing, but I kept my mouth shut. Telling Henry hadn’t bothered me at all, but telling my mother seemed like a betrayal. I knew she wouldn’t approve, and I wondered again how the woman in those journals had raised this woman, how the woman in those journals had become the Grandmother I knew, stiff and formal and reserved. She had been so happy in Paris—what had taken that from her? What had made her stop writing? What had changed?
“We could arrange to have these things shipped home to you,” my mother said, smoothly changing the subject. “Instead of taking them down to the basement just to bring them back up in a few days.”
The casual nature of the offer made me freeze, my stomach tensing. “What do you mean, a few days?”
“When you leave. You’ve been helpful, but don’t you need to be getting back to Phillip?”
There was a pause, heavy and expectant, between us. We hadn’t spoken about Phillip, or about me, or about anything serious, really, since our conversation the other day, and the idea of arguing with her made my chest feel tight. “I’m thinking about it,” I said. Though I wasn’t, really. It was odd how little I thought of him, how comfortable I felt without him.
“He called here, you know. He said you weren’t answering your cellular phone.”