She scrunched her face into a scowl. “No! Because then we might miss her!”
I chuckled. “I don’t think that’s very likely, little mouse.”
“I want to see her as soon as she gets here,” Olivia said in her most stubborn voice. She was a kid who didn’t let go of a thing once she’d set her mind to it. “I want to see her before she sees me.”
“Why?” I asked.
“So I can decide if I like her or not,” Olivia said.
I smiled, stroked her smooth, pinned-back hair. “Of course you’ll like her. She’s your grandmother.” My jaw tightened as I said the words.
Olivia kept her face pressed against the glass. Her breath was fogging it. “But I barely know her at all.”
I tensed. That was my fault.
I tried to put on a smile. “Well, now you’re going to have a chance to get to know her. And I know she can’t wait to get to know you.”
She ran a finger through the fogged patch on the glass, drawing a heart, then piercing it with an arrow.
The dining room opened up into the living room on the right, where the tree was lit up, its decorations hung. There was a new glass angel watching us from the corner, even gaudier than the first: decked out in a painted pink dress with metallic gold accents, gold wings, and an oversized gold trumpet. I couldn’t help but imagine another accident resulting in her demise.
There’s no doubt about it: I’m a terrible person.
Olivia drew a second heart next to the first. “What’s her name? My grandma?”
“Mavis.” The name felt sharp on my tongue.
“I know that, Mom,” Olivia said in herwell, duhvoice. “Maviswhat?”
“Mavis Eldeen Holland.”
Olivia turned and looked up at me, confused. “But that’s not your last name before you married Daddy. What’s that called?”
“My maiden name. And you’re right, it’s not. My maiden name is Russo.”
“So if she’s your real mom, why don’t you have her last name?”
I was caught off guard by her words:your real mom. As if I had another secret mother somewhere. A different mother. A better mother.
“She is my real mother.” I smiled at Olivia. “My last name was my father’s last name. His name was David Russo.”
Saying his name actually hurt, left my chest aching, even after all these years. I was only seven when he died, but his death had broken me, broken us all, in a way we’d never recover from, especially Ben. It was Ben who’d found him that day out in our father’s studio in the old carriage house. Ben had come running back across the front lawn and into the house, screaming the whole way, so hysterical he couldn’t get the words out when Mother and I met him in the front hall. His screams and howls filled the house, made me cover my ears. At last Mother slapped him, and he managed to get the words out: “He’s dead.”
They wouldn’t let me out to my father’s studio to see what it was Ben had found. I’d spent countless hours watching my father work in the old carriage house, painting abstract colorful designs on canvases so large he needed a stepladder to reach the top. I loved watching him work, listening to the titles he gave his paintings—Three Horses and One Rider, The Tiger’s Escape—and desperately searched the paintings for some sign of the things he said were in there, things I could never seem to find hidden in the bright splashes of color.
Mom had gone into the studio while Ben howled and moaned, and she’d come back out ashen-faced and called the police.
“It’s your fault!” Ben had screamed at her that night, after the police and the ambulance had come and gone, after they’d taken our father’s body away. Ben then went back into the studio and began knocking things over, toppling canvases, throwing tubes of paint onto the floor. “You killed him!” he screamed.
My mother just stood in the corner watching, not stopping him, not speaking a word. It seemed to me that she got smaller and smaller the more he screamed, and I worried that by the time he was done, she’d be doll-sized, maybe even disappear.
I blinked the memory away before it could sink its claws in.
“What did your dad do?” Olivia asked.
“He was a painter, like my mother.”
“Was he famous?”
