That was Colleen. No pressure, no extraction attempt, just the door held open.
I drove to the grocery store on the edge of the peninsula—the big one, the kind that had everything. I found a parking space and sat for a moment in the car with the engine off and thought about what I actually needed. Not what was on a list. What I actually needed, in the refrigerator of a studio I was going to be living in for the foreseeable future, for a woman who was figuring out what she liked to eat when she wasn't shopping for a household.
The question was smaller than it sounded. But it was also the kind of question I had rarely had occasion to ask.
I got out of the car.
It was the olive oil that did it.
I was in the specialty foods aisle reaching for a bottle of something I'd always wanted to try but never bought because it seemed extravagant, when I heard Colleen's laugh.
Not the careful version of Colleen's laugh. The real one—the low, unguarded one she kept for people she trusted completely, the one I had heard maybe a dozen times in my life and always recognized immediately, the way you recognized a rare bird by its specific call.
I went still with the olive oil in my hand.
She was two aisles over. I could see her through the gap in the shelving—not well, just fragments: the familiar angle of her shoulder, the dark of her hair. And next to her, someone else. A woman. Shorter than Colleen, red-haired, a laugh of her own running underneath Colleen's. And they were?—
I watched through the gap in the shelving and felt the pieces of something arrange themselves into a picture I realized I had been holding in fragments for years.
Colleen's hand was at the small of the other woman's back. Not a friend's hand. The hand of someone who knew the geography of another person and moved through it without thinking—easy, proprietary, tender. The red-haired woman said something I couldn't hear and tilted her face up toward my sister. Colleen smiled down at her in a way I had never seen Colleen smile at anyone.
I set the olive oil quietly in my basket.
I stood very still for a moment.
Then, I did the accounting I should have done years ago, probably, if I hadn't been so occupied with the performance of my own life that I'd missed the performance of hers.
Thirty-two years old and single, in a family that asked about it constantly. The careful deflection. The parental attention she received and endured. The thing in her face that lived beneath the surface of the events of yesterday—older, heavier, a struggle of her own. The way she'd looked at me in the bride's room, in the way that meant she was giving me something real:whatever you're thinking, you can tell me.
Whatever you're thinking, you can tell me.
Had she been talking to me? Or had she been talking to both of us?
I turned the corner of the aisle.
Colleen saw me before I'd taken three steps. The smile went—not to fear, exactly, but to something braced. Ready. The expression of a person who had spent years waiting for a moment and was now watching it arrive and couldn't quite tell yet if it was catastrophe or relief.
The red-haired woman looked from Colleen to me and went carefully neutral.
"Hi," I said.
"Hi," Colleen said. One word, all the weight of thirty-two years in it.
I looked at them both. At my sister's hand, which had gone still at her side. At the careful, watchful face of this woman who clearly loved her, who had the look of someone who had learned to wait in doorways and not require an introduction until one was offered.
"I'm Mary Catherine," I said, to the red-haired woman. "Colleen's sister."
Something in the woman's shoulders dropped a fraction. "I know," she said. "I'm Nora. Nora Bridges. I’ve—she's told me about you."
I looked at Colleen. "You have a whole life I haven't met."
It wasn't an accusation. I meant it exactly the way it came out—with wonder in it, and something like grief, and underneath both of those something that was just love, the uncomplicated kind that didn't require anything of its object except that it exist.
Colleen's jaw worked. “Cat?—”
"Don't," I said. "Don't apologize. Not to me." I took a step toward her and put my free arm around her and held on for a moment—the grocery basket dangling, the olive oil inside it, the specialty foods aisle of a Sunday grocery store, which was not where either of us would have scripted this. "I just—I'm glad she makes you laugh like that. I've been waiting to hear you laugh like that for years and didn't know what I was waiting for."
Colleen's arm came around me and held tight and she let out one breath that had been held a very long time.
