Nora, with the tact of a person who'd navigated careful spaces before, developed a sudden interest in a display of imported crackers nearby.
I pulled back. Colleen's eyes were bright. Mine probably were, too.
"How long?" I said.
"Two years." A pause. "Together. Longer that I—" She stopped. "It's not—I haven't hidden her on purpose, exactly. I've been?—"
"Waiting to see how the land lay," I said.
"Something like that."
I thought about our mother with her handkerchief and her architecture of love, the one that meant settled and safe and recognizable. I thought about Sunday Mass and the nine o'clock pew and all the conversations that would need to happen in kitchens over time. I thought about the Donovan family and the weight it put on its daughters, the texture of its expectations, the love inside them that was real and also sometimes a cage.
I thought about my painting studio and a man I had known for one day who had asked me what I wanted like it was the only question that mattered.
"She's going to struggle with it," I said. "Mama."
"I know."
"And Daddy will go quiet for longer than three days."
"I know that, too."
"But they love you," I said. "That part isn't conditional. I really don't think it is." I held her gaze. "And I'm on your side. Whatever you need. However this goes."
Colleen looked at me the way she'd looked at me in the bride's room and something in her face went young and relieved in a way it hadn't been in years.
"You sound different," she said.
"I feel different."
"Since yesterday."
"Since yesterday," I agreed.
She was dressed for Mass—I could tell by the dress, the one she wore for nine o'clock, dark blue, the small gold cross at her throat. Still had some time before it started. She confirmed it when I asked.
"Nora's going to take the groceries home," she said. "I'll head over from here."
I looked at her. "How bad do you think it'll be?"
She considered this with the honesty of someone who'd been managing our parents longer than I had. "Mama will have the posture. You know the one—plumb line, chin up, nobody sees her crack in public. That'll hold through Mass and coffee hour." A pause. "Mrs. Hannigan will say something she thinks is sympathetic and isn't. Father Doyle will be kind and careful because he always is. Daddy will shake hands with people and not say much." She adjusted the strap of her bag. "They'll get through it. This city has been absorbing Saturday scandals since before the Revolution. Give it two weeks and it becomes the story people tell with a glass of wine."
"And after that? When they're home?"
Colleen's expression went quieter. "That's the harder part. That's when it's just them and the kitchen and no audience." She met my eyes. "I'll check on them."
"Thank you," I said.
She glanced at my basket, the careful provisions of a woman setting up a life. "Are you—are you really okay? Truly?"
"Truly," I said. "I have a meeting with a gallery owner in a few days. I have a studio and a car and I know what I want for the first time in my life."
Colleen blinked. "The gallery owner."
"I called her back."
She stared at me. Then she turned and looked at Nora, who had turned back from the crackers with an expression of polite attention. "She called the gallery owner back," Colleen said, like she was reporting something significant to a person she debriefed after important events.
