“That was the job you were told was the job. Not the same thing.”
Box four was books—my books, the ones Sal had relegated to the guest room and then to the garage. A mix of novels and self-help titles with cracked spines.Women Who Run with the Wolves. The Awakeningby Kate Chopin, which I’d read three times in my thirties and underlined so aggressively the pages were soft. Jill picked it up and fanned through it.
“I had this in my office,” she said quietly. “On the shelf behind my desk. Fourteen years. Nobody ever asked me about itand I never brought it up because I was afraid they’d think I was—” She stopped. “I don’t know. Something.”
“Awake?” Tammy offered.
“Yeah. That.”
Box five was the junk drawer of a marriage. A tangle of old phone chargers that fit nothing we currently owned. A stack of Carmen’s drawings from kindergarten. A dried corsage from a benefit Sal and I had attended a decade ago, pressed flat between two pieces of cardboard. I couldn’t remember the event. I couldn’t remember if I’d had a good time.
Tammy picked up the wedding album again. Her eyes had gone slightly unfocused, the way they did when she was reading something the rest of us couldn’t see.
“Your aura in this photo,” she said. “I know it’s old and I’m reading a picture, so take this with a grain of salt. But you were bright, Gina. Really bright. Gold and pink and wide open.” She looked at me. “You’re getting that back, you know. It’s coming in different now—deeper, more red than pink, some orange in there that I’d bet is the fire thing. But it’s coming back.”
“Can I tell you all something terrible?” I said.
“Always,” Tammy said.
“I don’t miss him. I keep waiting to miss him and I don’t. I miss the relationship I had with my kids before he made me out to be the bad guy in the divorce. I miss who I thought I was going to be. But Sal?” I set the mug on the table. “I can’t remember the last time I missed him. I think I stopped years ago and didn’t even notice.”
“That’s not terrible,” Lori said. “That’s honest.”
“My first husband,” Tammy said, leaning back and cradling her wine, “was a man named Derek who believed that mercury was in retrograde every single day of our marriage, which would explain why nothing ever worked.” She took a sip. “His aura was the color of expired mustard. I should have known.”
Jill snorted. “My ex-boyfriend told me I was ‘too much’ for having opinions about restaurant menus. Restaurant menus, Tammy. I have opinions abouteverything. He hadno ideahow much I was holding back.”
“My second husband was wonderful,” Lori said, and the room gentled. “Frank. He didn’t understand the healing thing—not really, not the way Amelia did. But he’d hold my hand after a bad session and bring me tea and never once made me feel like I was broken for being different.” She adjusted her glasses. “I miss him every day. But I wouldn’t trade what I have now for what I had then. That’s not disloyal. That’s just living.”
Jill was holding the popsicle-stick star she’d fished from behind the bookshelf. She turned it over, reading the back. “This says ‘To Mom, love Nick, age 7.’” She looked up. “Do you still have his handwriting? On your phone or anything? I bet it looks nothing like this.”
“It doesn’t. He writes like a doctor now. Illegible.”
“Dentist,” Jill corrected.
“Same handwriting.”
Jill set the star on the mantle, propped against the wall where it could catch the light. She did it carefully, with her actual hands, and nothing broke.
From the hallway mirror, Rosaria had been watching the entire operation with the compressed silence of a woman cataloging complaints for later deployment.
“That is not how you fold tissue paper,” she said, as Tammy wrapped the glass ornaments for storage. “You are going to crack every one of those by spring. The tissue must be doubled.Doubled,Gina.”
I ignored her. Which, given that I was the only person in the room who could hear her, was the only sane option.
“And that recipe tin needs polishing. Your grandmother would be appalled. She polished that tin every Sunday after mass without fail.”
I continued ignoring her. Tammy glanced at the hallway mirror and raised an eyebrow at me.
“She’s doing the thing?”
“She’s doing the thing.”
“Tell her the tissue paper technique is fine and I’ve been wrapping ornaments since before she was haunting bathrooms.”
“She cannot hear me and she is wrapping themwrong,” Rosaria said, her voice climbing. “This is why I never let anyone touch my Christmas decorations. This is exactly why.”
I turned to the hallway mirror. “Rosaria. We’ve got it.”
