Peach sets the timer. “Everything will be ready in about ten minutes.”
She looks so comfortable in our kitchen. It makes my stomach churn. I mumble a quick, “I’m not hungry,” and race upstairs, almost bumping into Nonnie as I round the corner in the hallway.
She’s wearing a blouse patterned with bright green giraffes and her signature turquoise glasses. Her hands adjust the frame of one of our family pictures. Wallis sits next to her, thumping his tail in excitement when he spots me.
“Stay, Wallis,” Nonnie says. Miraculously, he does. “Ha! Wish I’d realized he knew that command this morning.”
I stare at the pictures. “What are you doing?”
“Oh, Wallis knocked into the wall as he was running toward the guest room.” Nonnie waves her hand over the collection of pictures. “I noticed a few were crooked, so I’m realigning them.”
I look at the dozens of frames hung along the wall. It’s funny. They’ve been there for so long that I sometimes forget they exist. Most are of me growing up—toothless kindergarten pictures followed by awkward elementary school photos and overly enthusiastic middle school snapshots.
There are a ton of us as a family. One is from our camping trip in Blanco State Park. Another is from a ski trip my dad and I took a few years back. But so many of Grams. She poses with me after my first ballet recital, where she’d learned how to work a video camera just for that evening. In another, we’re lying side by side in a field of blue bonnets on our road trip to Austin. There’s another of us wearing red, white, and blue at Cedarville’s annual Fourth of July parade.
All my friends had moms who were dependable, but I thought I’d always have Grams. These pictures are another reminder of one more thing I’ve lost.
“Take them down,” I tell Nonnie. Then I say it louder. “The ones of her. Take them down.”
Nonnie follows my stare to the pictures of Grams. Understanding washes over her features. I move past her and Wallis and walk into my room, but she follows me before I have a chance to shut my door.
“Kira?” Her voice is gentle at the edge of my bedroom. “May I?”
I set my book bag down on the ground. I’m too tired to fight her on this, so I shrug and sink down on my bed.
Nonnie walks all the way inside. Wallis takes a tentative step behind her.
“I know it doesn’t help,” she says, “but I’m sorry.”
A tightness squeezes hard in my throat. Slowly, she comes and sits down next to me on the bed. I notice she smells strongly of patchouli and rose petals and hairspray.
“Sometimes life throws us balls and forgets to hand us a bat.” She’s quiet for a moment. “You miss her. That’s completely natural, you know.”
I don’t say anything, afraid of the emotions that might come flooding out. I remember my list and how I’d committed to learn how to be a family with her gone, but it’s difficult to do when the memories of her hang in every corner of the house.
“It’s hard. Experiencing loss in one form or another.” Nonnie runs her hands over her slacks. I stare at her chunky collection of turquoise rings—one on every finger. “But it’s the way you handle it that reveals the type of person you are.”
I shrug, unsure of what type of person that makes me.
After a pause she asks, “Do you know why I left New York?”
I assume she thinks my dad has told me, but he hasn’t. I shake my head.
“My husband left me for another woman. Nearly twenty-five years ago. Rayanne Summers—even her name was prettier than mine.”
I pick at my thumbnail. I thought losing Jay to Whitney was hard, but I can’t imagine how it would feel to have a marriage end because your husband wanted to be with someone else.
“I’m sorry.”
Nonnie’s eyes brighten. “I’m not.”
I’m confused. “You’re not?”
“Having Charles leave me was the best thing that happened to me,” she says. “Oh, it was hard. And it hurt. It hurt because I still loved him, and those feelings were terrible to try and process.”
I nod, picking at my pinky nail.
“But one night, when I was trying to get back to Brooklyn, Freddie Mercury stepped right into my subway car.”
