She says, “I can’t tell if this thing’s done. Does it look done to you?”
Alice steps forward, though she’s still halfway across the kitchen from the oven. “Yeah. Sure.”
“Alice.”
“Mom. I’ve never made a turkey, all right?” She slept until eleven, but she still sounds exhausted. “What’s the meat thermometer say?”
“It says it’s done, but I don’t know.” Donna glances back at the bird. “Don’t you think it looks a little … pale still?”
Alice shrugs. She leans against the counter and takes another sip of wine.
Donna closes the oven door. She figures another fifteen minutes can’t hurt. The last thing she needs is one of them ending up in the hospital with worms.
She says, “Alice?”
“Yes?”
“Should you really be … I mean, is it a good idea to be drinking on the…”
“The crazy-person pills I’m taking?”
Donna reaches back to untie the apron.
“You’re always so hard on yourself.”
Alice leans across the counter for an open bottle of pinot noir, and Donna watches as she drains what’s left of it into her glass.
“They only say that because alcohol is a depressant, and the fuck-ups who typically take pills like Klonopin are depressed.” She throws the empty bottle into the recycling bin below the sink. “Thankfully, while I may be your typical fuck-up, I am not, categorically, depressed.”
“All I’m saying is that maybe it would be a good idea to slow down. It’s hardly noon.”
“Mom. Donna.”
Donna winces. “Yes, dear?”
“I’m an adult.”
“I know that, sweetheart.”
“I can make adult decisions.”
“Of course you can.”
“So please stop—”
The angry thuds of Paul galloping down the stairs interrupt her. He slides into the kitchen wearing only his socks and a pair of pajama bottoms. He needs to eat more, Donna thinks, glancing at his ribs. He needs a haircut, and he needs to eat more.
“Mom?” he says.
“What can I get you, sweetheart?”
“What’d you do with Dad’s chair?”
“Which chair?”
“Don’t play dumb.”
Donna drapes her apron over the back of a chair. She notices a small puddle of water on the countertop next to the sink, and to avoid having to look at her son, she begins wiping it up.
“I’m sorry, honey, I don’t know what chair you’re talking about.”
“Then come here,” Paul says, and pushes open the door that leads out of the kitchen. Reluctantly, she follows him into the living room and finds him standing in the empty spot where Bill’s old leather armchair had sat for thirty years, its existence now reduced to a darkened square of carpet.
“Here,” Paul says, pointing at the ground. “Dad’s chair used to be here. I … I came down here because I wanted to sit in it while I read, but now it’s gone. So I’m asking you: What did you do with it?”
She looks at him squarely and says, “I got rid of it.”
“I was going to take that chair to New York with me, Mom.”
“I’ll get you another chair.”
“That’s not the point!” He grabs the back of his head and looks around the room. Donna stares at the ceiling. “Wait,” he says. “Wait. Where are all the pictures of Dad?” He rushes over to the bookcase, where Donna’s rearranged pictures of Paul, and Alice, and Eloise. “There were like ten pictures that had Dad in them in this room. What happened to them?”
What was she supposed to say to him? Without hearing some approximation of the truth—the very thing she’d so consciously kept from him—how would he ever understand her choice to rid the house of Bill and the conflicting memories she had of him? How could he empathize with that peculiar feeling she experienced six months ago, when the rawness of her grief gave way to logic and rationality?
All she says is “I got rid of them, too.”
February 10, 2012
Janice reaches forward from the second pew and hands Donna a balled-up Kleenex.
“You’ve got some mascara on your cheeks, hon,” she whispers.
“What? Oh, geez.”
Donna dabs at her eyes, even though she knows it’s useless; she’ll start sobbing again just as soon as the service begins, which will be any minute now. Next to her, Eloise wraps and unwraps her own tissue around her middle finger. Her cheeks are flushed and damp, though still, even under the weight of her grief, she maintains a dignified posture, her shoulders pulled back and her spine elongated. Donna watches her daughter as she stares at a spot on the stairs leading up to the altar, where a blown-up, framed picture of Bill stands between two vases stuffed with lilies. She had a hard time deciding on it. Initially, she wanted to find a photo of him right before he died—or, at least, right before the cancer hit. Something that caught how people most recently remembered him. It seemed crass to throw up some glamour shot of her husband from thirty years ago, she thought; some athletic portrait where he appeared farthest from what he lately was, which was broken and in the early stages of decay. But finding evidence of the most recent Bill proved to be harder than she expected; over the past few years, they’d had little occasion to take pictures. Their children were all grown, all living independent, separate existences in different states and foreign countries. And their own lives—Donna’s and Bill’s—hardly required documentation; their weekends were most often spent trying to conceive of ways of acknowledging each other’s company while staying in separate rooms. The pictures they did have were awkward or blurry—snapshots that were taken reluctantly, with the knowledge that this would be one more thing they’d have to find a place for, one more object they’d have to file away.
And so she’d gone against her initial intuition. She chose a picture of him from thirty-some-odd years ago, when he still had a full head of chestnut hair, and his face wasn’t bloated or creased. He must have been thirty-four, she figured. Maybe thirty-five? He was wearing waders and a canvas vest covered in fishhooks. A craggy, dust-colored peak loomed in the background. It was their honeymoon. A camping trip to somewhere in Yellowstone. It had been his idea. She hadn’t been camping since an ill-fated Girl Scout trip in junior high school, and privately she wasn’t too keen on giving the whole thing another go. Still, though, she’d agreed. She reasoned that Bill was a new start—not just for her, but for Eloise—and camping was just about the furthest thing away from Henrique.