That idea was running through her mind when the phone buzzed at nearly midnight as she drove home from work.
“Hey, Faye. You need to get over here.”
“Hey, sis. It’s late. Is everything okay? You’re usually long asleep by this hour.”
“Yeah, I’m okay. It’s okay, but I found something while I was cleaning out Dad’s place. I think you need to come look.”
“Now? Tonight?”
“No, it’s not an emergency or anything. It's not life or death, but it’s odd. Crazy even. And there are pictures I think we need to look at together.”
“Odd like, Precious imprisoned in a secret hole in the basement, odd? Or odd, like dad has a secret collection of vintage dental floss?”
“Yeah, no, he’s not a serial killer, and the only thing he collected was coffee cans of nails. Like, why? So many coffee cans of nails. But anyway, yeah, I want to run some paperwork I found by you. And brace yourself for this one: he’s got a box of some of Mom’s stuff he never showed us!”
That last part felt like a bombshell. Ali was underplaying it—but Mom’s stuff!
“Oh wow. No way. Okay, I can do that; how about I bring a couple of bagels from Barry’s for an early lunch? We can eat before I head to work.”
“Perfect.”
They ended the call.Mom’s stuff?They just had that one picture. Faye had so little in her memory to hold onto when it came to their mom.
And this late call didn’t do anything to alleviate Faye’s worries about Ali. Usually, it was the other way around. Ali worried about Faye. Ali worried about Dad. Ali worried aboutBlair. But right now, Ali was making moves that were so out of character.
Was it Dad’s death that had unmoored the order in Ali’s life? Was it catching Ted in the act?
Ali had worked for years with very little praise and credit from their dad, and she’d replicated that with her husband and her boss. In Faye’s eyes, Ali was the sun, and the people around her all paled in wattage. Ali didn’t see it that way.
But now, her big sister, the responsible bedrock for all the Kelly Sisters, was making very drastic, un-Ali-like moves.
Faye pulled her car into the garage.
She was curious about the paperwork and what Ali found, but she was also tired. The death of their father was long, even though the funeral and services were short.
Maybe that was it. All the Kelly Sisters, from Ali to Blair and Faye in the middle, just needed a reset after a difficult year.
Faye got ready for bed and opened the book on container gardening she was reading.
She wanted to learn how to build a raised bed in her backyard before this spring. She was running out of space and needed to get creative.
Eight
Ali
Faye and Ali didn’t eat the bagels Faye had procured. They were both too distracted, keyed up, and mesmerized by the box of stuff Ali had found.
Ali had gone up in the morning and found two more boxes. These were filled with expensive dresses, shoes, and bags.
“How in the heck did Mom afford this stuff?” Faye mused as they looked at the labels that readMiss Dior, Pucci, Geoffrey Beene, Halston, Von Furstenberg,andEvan Picone.
“No idea. I thought garage sale at first, but now? Well, they’re all size two or four, so it would be really, really lucky for her to be able to thrift all in her size.”
“And I mean, you’ve been to garage sales in Toledo. It’s usually lawn equipment and creepy dolls. Do you remember her wearing fancy stuff?” Faye asked.
“No, I remember her being pretty, smelling pretty, but not wearing anything that stood out in the neighborhood. Right? She was just my mom.”
After going through the dresses, Ali asked Faye if she wanted to look at the album.
