“Um, sure.”
Sicily set off toward the back of the house and I followed, again.
“I think we have some juice,” she said.
“Juice, sure.” I had a headache and a fluttering somewhere between my heart and gut as I went along the hall, like I was getting closer to some secret.
We passed doors to each side, pulled closed or nearly closed, and I realized I was scraping the landscape for details when we entered the kitchen and I spotted a whiteboard where someone had written the week’s menu plan.
Sicily pressed a juice box into my hand. “What’s wrong?”
“Is that…?” A strange lump had formed in my throat. “Is that her handwriting?”
“You don’t know what Mom’s handwriting looks like?”
“She wasn’t writing so many checks back in the day,” I said.
“Huh?”
I mean, I had never balanced a checkbook either, but this kid had probably never even heard of paper checks. But I’d given myself an idea. “Where would she sit to pay bills or whatever?”
“At the counter,” Sicily said, gesturing to the peninsula between the kitchen and dining room.
“But is there a computer somewhere?”
“My… We already tried that,” Sicily said. She hesitated, like she wanted to say something more. But then she went to the counter and pulled a laptop out from under some newspapers and put it in front of me. “We don’t know the password.”
“When’s your birthday?”
“She wouldn’t—”
She had.
The laptop had only a sliver of battery. Sicily went to fetch an adaptor while I sat at the counter to start shopping through the applications Marisa had left running. Maybe snooping through her computer wouldn’t lead anywhere, but at least I could get a sense of where her head was the last time she’d used the thing.
The laptop had opened up to a spreadsheet, names and addresses. I scanned it, looking for significance. Family holiday card list?
“Cutting it close, Marisa,” I said to the screen.
Below the spreadsheet layer was a web browser frame with many, many tabs open. I sipped my juice box and settled in.
Email, first. I didn’t see anything meaty in the inbox, mostly promotional crap she’d signed up for. I discovered a few messages from actual people and sorted through them, listening to footsteps overhead as Sicily searched out the charger. There were emails from people who were checking in with Marisa, hadn’t heard from her in a while, wondering about getting coffee sometime or dinner when all the girls were back in town or just touching base on that thing she’d said she’d do for this group or that one.
Maybe shedidneed a break. To me, it all felt so heavy, your presence being demanded by so many.
I switched to the next tab, which was a recipe for a breakfast casserole, then the next, which was a grocery delivery order full of wine, precut veggies, frozen mini-quiches, and the ingredients for thatcasserole. The next was another recipe—no, ideas for cookie decorating. Something for thewholefamily.
In other windows, Marisa seemed to be browsing for gifts. Someone was getting a fancy watch—the husband, probably. Or herself? The watch looked more like a woman’s. Or maybe everyone would get a pricey sweater from this alpaca-to-apparel site?
Decisions, decisions.
There was a page open for Northwest Illinois University—ooh, maybe the alumni association, right, Marisa? Youliar.
But no, the page was about requesting student information. I read a bit of it without understanding what I was reading, before nearly falling asleep and moving on.
The next tab was for an electronics store with some sweet noise-canceling Bluetooth headphones front and center. High-end cans that cost— Wow. I salivated over them for a minute, then clicked over to the next tab, a clothing store that sold, it seemed, bougie workout clothes that looked more like scuba gear.
The last open tab was for a different clothing store website, featuring a lush cashmere wrap in the softest inner-seashell pink.
