Rachelle felt resentment crawling up her neck. “She is, yes. She divorced my father about eight years ago. But it was a long time coming.”
“Do you still talk to your father?” Valeria asked.
“I hear from him on birthdays. I call him on his,” Rachelle said softly, although this hadn’t been true for a few years. The fact of her father’s abuse of her mother was something she’d confronted, sort of, in therapy. But she wasn’t sure she would ever fully get over it.
“There you have it. Divorce! It’s everywhere in America,” Valeria said. “Italians don’t believe in divorce. We’re Catholic, all of us. When your father wanted to have an affair, I said, go on! Do whatever you want to! Know that I will make your life miserable forever, because we can’t get divorced on this. I laughed! And he didn’t ever have that affair, did he, girls?”
Gia and Teresa laughed with their mother. Rachelle didn’t know what to say. She thought of her Great-Grandpa Chuck, of the divorce that had splintered the Coleman family. Was divorce really something that Americans were drawn to? She didn’t buy it. It felt like a story that Valeria wanted to tell herself to feel superior.
But that night in the car going home—after a painful final hour during which Valeria peppered Rachelle with more details about the wedding—Rachelle asked Riccardo what he thought of divorce.
“I think it’s a sin,” he said simply.
“But people sometimes need to get out of bad situations,” Rachelle said, surprised at his answer. “People need to regroup, to step away legally.”
“Oh! I didn’t know this would affect you so much.” Riccardo threw his arm around her and kissed her on the cheek. “You’re so sensitive!”
“I’m not!” But Rachelle had begun to cry. She couldn’t understand it. Where had all these emotions come from? Oh, but she missed her mother. And she was suddenly frightened. What if, one day, she wanted to divorce Riccardo? And what if he didn’t let her?
8
Impossibly, it was Darcy in the driver’s seat en route to Estelle’s book launch in Manhattan. In the passenger seat was Estelle, jittery and smiley, her face glowing with the late June sunlight that came in through the windshield. Behind them was Darcy’s mother, Sam, who was in charge of the music, switching from nineties’ pop to eighties’ pop and dancing around. It was Estelle’s first time off the island since Grandpa Roland’s death, Estelle’s first batch of freedom after the event that had changed the course of her life forever. Darcy was thrilled that she’d been invited along.
When Darcy had watched the rapid decline of Grandpa Roland, she’d had two very young children and a marriage under five years old. She’d felt at the dawn of her life, watching what happened when “till death do us part” really happened. She’d been unable to sleep, watching Steven sleep in the dark, terrified that he’d die right in front of her. She’d realized that nothing kept you safe from the awfulness of life, that love was the bravest thing you could do, if only because it could so easily be taken away.
When the Manhattan skyline came into view, Estelle and Sam clapped their hands.
“We made it!” Sam cried. “Let’s launch your book!”
Darcy had driven in the city very infrequently. The bumper-to-bumper traffic meant the impatient drivers were honking. When their hotel came into view, she breathed a sigh of relief and pulled into the half-moon drive. After she handed the keys to the valet, she got out and stretched her arms. Grandma Estelle hugged her and said, “Thank you for driving, my dear! I’m so thrilled to welcome my book into the world with both of you by my side!”
Upstairs, Darcy settled into her bedroom. Each of them had their own in the three-bedroom suite, which offered a living area and kitchen in between. Darcy unfurled her dress for the night on the bed, marveling at the fact that she hadn’t worn anything half as nice since, maybe, her grandfather’s funeral. She itched to call Rachelle and tell her where she was. It was crazy that she still had that inclination despite not having talked to Rachelle for so long.
At six that evening, Darcy, Sam, and Estelle entered the bookstore hosting the launch. Grandma Estelle looked incredibly chic in a black silk one-piece and long, jangling earrings. Darcy’s mother wore a dark green dress, and Darcy herself wore a high-necked brown two-piece with wide-legged pants. Before everyone arrived, Estelle’s agent, Anne, took a photograph of the three of them, hovering over stacks ofThe Morning We Knew, the book Estelle had written before Roland died.
Darcy watched as her grandmother picked up a copy of her book, shifting it around to read the back. She looked at it with a sense of wonder, as though she hardly recognized it.
“I wrote it before everything happened,” she said when it was just the three of them again. “It feels like a very different woman wrote it.”
Sam rubbed her mother’s shoulder. Darcy had a flashing image of herself supporting Sam if and when her husband, Derek, passed away. She hoped she could be there for her; she hoped that she could provide the emotional backbone her mother needed.
She imagined her own daughter doing the same for her down the line, and then, she had to excuse herself to the bathroom to clean up her tears. “Pull yourself together, Darcy,” she told herself.
Estelle’s fans began to arrive around six forty-five. Each chair was filled by seven, and the entire bookstore was packed by seven thirty. Darcy and her mother stood off toward the side, arms crossed, watching as Grandma Estelle arranged herself in front of the long table and raised the microphone. She looked every bit the celebrity she was.
“This is quite a turnout,” Estelle said, laughing softly. “I can’t thank you enough for coming out tonight. I can’t thank you enough for showing me how much these books matter to you. They’ve been my life’s work. They’ve saved me on numerous occasions. And now? Well.” She ticked her nails against the table in front of her. “Things have certainly changed in my life. I haven’t been public about this. But I lost my husband a little more than a year ago. He was everything I knew of romance, everything I knew of love. And without him in the world, my light has dimmed.” She hesitated.
Darcy couldn’t believe how open her grandmother was about her heartbreak. She wondered if she’d ever be half as brave.
“Anyway,” Estelle continued, “I’d like to read from a chapter I remember writing when my husband and I were in the Bahamas together. I can still remember what it was like toburrow into this chapter, only for Roland to come find me and tell me it was time for our walk, and maybe an afternoon wine.”
There was light chuckling. Estelle cleared her throat and read clearly, evenly. Darcy was swept away in the story. She’d never been particularly good with words, not like her grandmother, but she adored a story. She adored the way her grandmother built her characters, set scenes, and described the beautiful world around her. By the end of the reading, there wasn’t a dry eye in the bookstore. Estelle closed her book and thanked the audience. She was crying, too.
The question-and-answer segment brought nearly twenty hands into the air. Estelle laughed, overwhelmed. “Goodness. Where should we begin?”
She called on a woman in the second row. She stood, reaching for the mic that Estelle’s agent handed over. She was maybe in her fifties or sixties, with dark hair and tired eyes. “Thank you for that remarkable reading,” she said, her voice wavering. “Estelle, I’ve been reading your books for thirty years. I feel that I’ve entered into so many different stages of my life with you at my side. I can’t thank you enough for that.
“Like you, I recently became a widow,” the woman said. “It’s been a difficult year, to put it mildly. So my question to you is: how do you think about the rest of your life, without your husband in it? How do you find context for yourself, without him around?”
