“Launched them into the ceiling fan. I didn’t even know napkins could get tangled in fan blades, but Jill finds a way.”
By the time Lori arrived with her tea thermos and Jill arrived with a twelve-pack of paper napkins and an apology she’d clearly rehearsed in the car, Tammy had heated the tetrazzini andpoured four glasses of wine with the efficiency of someone who could set up a dinner party in a hurricane.
We ate at the kitchen table with the boxes visible through the doorway, all of us pretending we weren’t looking at them.
“So,” Tammy said, setting down her fork. “We doing this or what?”
Jill insisted on being the one to open the first box. “I need the practice,” she said, standing over it with her hand extended, fingers splayed. “Fine motor control. Lori says I need to work on finesse instead of just?—”
“Launching things,” Lori supplied.
“Directing energy enthusiastically.”
She closed her eyes. Did the breathing. The cardboard flaps trembled. One lifted, then another, folding back with the careful slowness of someone defusing a bomb. The third flap opened. Jill smiled—actually beamed—and then the fourth flap ripped clean off and a shower of Christmas ornaments erupted from the box like a seasonal volcano.
Glass balls arced across the living room. A felt reindeer Nick had made in second grade hit the lamp. A star made of popsicle sticks pinwheeled toward the ceiling. Three painted wooden angels launched in different directions, and Jill’s hands flew up, trying to catch them telekinetically, which only redirected half of them toward the kitchen.
Lori, without looking up from her tea, reached out and caught a glass ball six inches before it hit the floor. Just plucked it from the air like she was picking an apple.
Tammy was already on her feet gathering ornaments off the couch, the bookshelf, the top of the refrigerator. “Well. Now it’s a party.”
“I’m sorry, I’m so—the flap compromised the structural integrity of the—I mean, the box was overpacked, and the velocity of the?—”
“Jill.” Lori held up the glass ball. It caught the lamplight, red and gold, one of the nice ones Sal’s mother had given us the first Christmas after we were married. “Not broken.”
Jill sat down on the floor with her back against the wall and pressed her palms to her eyes. “I was a senior litigator. I managed depositions for Fortune 500 companies. And now I can’t open a box of Christmas ornaments without redecorating the house.”
“You’ll get there,” Lori said. “It took me eight months before I could shake someone’s hand without diagnosing their blood pressure.”
“That sounds useful, honestly.”
“Not at cocktail parties. Believe me.”
We opened the rest of the boxes by hand.
Thirty years of marriage fits in surprisingly few boxes when someone else decides what you get to keep.
Box two was the recipe tin—my grandmother’s, dented brass with a latch that stuck. Inside, handwritten cards in her cramped Italian cursive, splattered with olive oil and tomato sauce and forty years of Sunday dinners. Tammy pulled one out and held it up.Nonna Rosa’s braciole.
“We’re making this,” she said. It was not a question.
Box three was photo albums. The pre-digital ones, from before everyone’s lives moved onto phones. I set them on the coffee table and Tammy opened the first one while Jill gathered ornaments from behind the couch cushions.
“Oh, honey.” Tammy was looking at a page near the front. “Is this you?”
I leaned over. The photo was from my wedding day. June 1992. I was twenty-two, standing outside the church in my mother’s altered dress, squinting into the sun with a bouquet of white roses and a smile so wide it looked like it might split my face open. Young. Certain. Not yet aware that certainty was something you could lose.
I stared at her. At me. At whoever that woman was.
“I don’t remember looking like that,” I said.
Nobody responded right away. Tammy’s hand found my shoulder. She didn’t squeeze, didn’t say anything wise or comforting. Just rested it there. Warm.
Lori had picked up a second album and stopped on a page near the middle. Josie’s first birthday. Nick in his high chair with frosting in his hair. Carmen not yet born. Me in the background of every shot, holding things, carrying things, serving cake, pouring drinks. Always in motion. Never the one in front of the camera.
“You know what I see?” Lori said, studying the page over her glasses. “A woman who held that whole family together. Every picture. You’re the one making sure everyone else is having a good time.”
“That was the job.”
