“I’m fine,” I say.
Mom doesn’t push—she never does.
She points at the beach towel over my shoulder. “Heading over to the Big House?”
“Yep.” Mimi has given me an open invitation to use the pool. I booked a stretch of vacation days in the lead-up to the honeymoon, and I plan to spend them working on my tan. “I made Mimi a batch of kimchi fried rice,” I say, taking the Tupperware out of the fridge. She’s a sucker for fried rice.
“Let me pack up some muffins,” my mom says.
Containers in hand, I cut across the property to the gap in the cedar hedge, where a wooden birdhouse rests in the tangle of branches. It’s shaped like a log cabin, with a peaked roof that lifts open. George put it there the year after my mom came back. We’d been learning about volcanoes at school, and that’s exactlyhow I felt. My feelings were hot, bubbling lava that would burst from me wildly, and I didn’t always understand why. I felt angry all the time.
“It’ll be like the mailbox Laurie gives the March sisters inLittle Women,” George said, knowing how to talk me into anything, even then. We’d recently seen the movie for the first time. “I’ll write to you today, and you can check for the letter tomorrow morning.”
Like magic, his note was waiting for me beneath a shiny red apple. I still have it.
Dear Frankie,
This is the first official letter in our new mailbox!
(It’s actually a birdhouse, but I found it in the basement, and I think it will work.)
Remember the other day when you said you sometimes have a hard time explaining how you feel? I wondered if it would be easier to write it down. That’s what I do when I need to figure stuff out.
We can say whatever we want, and nobody but us will read it.
From,
George
While writing didn’t come naturally to me the way it did for George, putting my feelings on paper and letting the mailbox carry them away is how I coped with my most complicatedemotions for years. But I was just as likely to leave treasures as letters—a blue jay feather or a bowl of wild raspberries, and later, clippings of places I wanted to visit or recipes I wanted George to taste test for me.
I’ve been home for six weeks now, and I’ve never needed my best friend more. I see him everywhere I look. The sweet eight-year-old I defended fiercely. The high school heartthrob I’d tease when girls fawned over him. The boy who climbed through my window when I’d had a fight with my mom. The man who yelled at me in the field at Christmas.
I open the lid to the mailbox and leave him the letter I wrote last night. I don’t know when he’ll get it, but it’ll be here. Same as me.
Chapter Eight
I let myself in through the side door so Mimi doesn’t have to get to her feet.
“Good morning,” I call.
“I’m here,” Mimi says. “Not dead yet.”
My parents’ place is a good size, but the Big House makes it look like a hovel. The original structure is a lovely two-story stone farmhouse, but Mimi and her late husband, the great Edward Saint James, added three wings. There are six fireplaces, a library, and a ballroom with French doors that open onto the back terrace.
Mimi’s listening to something dramatic and classical—from a ballet, no doubt. I put the fried rice in the fridge and follow the orchestra to the bright sitting room at the back of the house.
She’s smoking a skinny cigarette and flipping throughVogue, dressed in a black caftan and one of her wigs. This one has short,raven curls that are stark against her paper-thin skin. Before she met George’s grandfather, Mimi was a principal dancer in Montreal’s Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. I imagine she was considered a strange creature out here in North Kawartha long before my brothers and I thought she was a witch.
“You’re supposed to be quitting,” I say, kissing the cheek she offers me.
“You’re supposed to be married.”
“For two months,” I respond, sitting across from her and placing Mom’s tin of muffins on the coffee table.
“Rebecca’s chocolate-chip cookies?” she asks. Her voice is as dry as parchment.
“Blueberry muffins.”
