Lucia is stunned, caught completely off guard, and then she knows. She looks at Bernadette, who meets her gaze without flinching. If Lucia asks her, Bernadette will tell the truth—I called him, I gave him the address—but Lucia doesn’t.
She looks back at her daughter in her husband’s arms. Richard is swaying as he holds her, and Maggie’s face is buried in his neck. No one speaks or moves. It’s as if time has stopped and held its breath. Then Lucia shrugs as if what she sees was inevitable.
She walks slowly but deliberately across the lawn to her husband and child and the three of them take the stairs to the garage apartment, Maggie still in her father’s arms.
Very soon, the Weiss family comes back down the stairs, Maggie walking now, her backpack on her shoulders, Raymond, the stuffed dachshund, in her arms. Richard carries the two duffel bags. Without a glance at the house, where Bernadette’s face can be seen in the kitchen window, they walk down the driveway to the street, get into Richard’s car, and drive back to Riverside.
AS THE SUN GOES DOWN, Bernadette sets the patio table with a batik tablecloth in shades of deep blue. She puts out two fat, red candles and lights them. She opens a bottle of wine and cuts shockingly pink and orange zinnias from the garden and installs them in a small white pitcher in the center of the table. She does not look up at the empty apartment, but she wrestles with her conscience.
Yes, she wanted her home back — the one she and Max were beginning to build together. The quiet, the privacy, their intimacy. She readily admits that to herself. But there was more — Lucia wasn’t capable of solving the dilemma she created for herself, so, ultimately, weren’t Bernadette’s actions an effort to save Maggie? Weren’t they? Right now she honestly doesn’t know. What she does know is that she can’t wait for Max to get home and she won’t let anything else, anything, get in the way of what they have.
YEARS LATER, WHEN SOMEONE brings up the summer Maggie spent in Ocean Park, she remembers it as the season of the bees when she fell a little bit in love with Max. Lucia remembers it as a time of shame. And Richard refuses to remember it at all.
Sweet Peas
THE DAY AFTER HER HUSBAND’S FUNERAL, Trudy gave away every piece of clothing he owned. She had heard stories of widows who visited the hanging shirts and stacks of sweaters for many months, even years, after their husbands’ deaths, unable to perform the simple task of grabbing and folding and packing away that was required.
That wasn’t her way. Brian was dead. She was under no illusion that there was any other reality. She understood her task was to find a way to live without him. The first thing to do was to get rid of the clothes.
She suspected her grown son was appalled. He was. He knew his mother so little that he attributed her behavior to hard-heartedness when it was really the exact opposite. She ached for Brian in a way that bowed her spine and hollowed her out, and she knew she would feel this way for as long into the future as she could see. The clothes were a reproach—Remember when you used to be happy? they said to her. Well, that’s over now.
So Trudy filled their bedroom with large cardboard boxes bought especially for the job. Never in the past thirty years had she needed packing boxes of any kind. She and Brian had bought this small house when they were newly married and had stayed put. The town of Sierra Villa in the Southern California foothills felt like home the first time they saw it: a tiny business center with all the shops grouped within easy walking distance, one elementary school, one high school, a town library, where Trudy worked. It reminded them both of their Midwestern roots.
Trudy and Brian were people who were not easily dislodged. Neither saw any reason to change what was good enough decades ago — this two-bedroom house with green shutters on Lima Street or their commitment to love, honor, and cherish each other. Until Brian died, nothing had changed.
Now the boxes stood waiting, freshly creased and open-mouthed. There was no way Trudy was going to throw Brian’s monochromatic sweaters, button-down shirts, and threadbare jeans into black garage bags as if they were junk to be picked up with the rest of the trash.
No. She folded and smoothed and lined up the creases in his suit pants, which he rarely wore, and rolled his black socks into tight balls, and evened out the shoelaces on his running shoes, which he laced up every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday rain or shine. And she packed each box tightly and secured the top with clear cellophane packing tape, also newly bought. She couldn’t deny the satisfaction of zipping the tape across the top of each box, a tiny piece of the work completed even though the task was one that bit into her heart.
“Mother …?” Her son, Carter, is standing in the doorway.
“What?!” she answers too sharply. He had startled her. With each garment her hands touch, another memory ambushes her, but she doesn’t explain this and her son doesn’t hide his sigh of exasperation.
He’s so short, Trudy thinks again as she does at least once on every visit. Why did he have to take after my mother’s side of the family? Trudy’s maternal grandfather was barely five feet tall. Her maternal grandmother was not much bigger. She remembers them from her childhood as gnome people. Holding hands in their wedding picture her mother kept on the mantel, they looked like the illustrations in her fairy-tale books.
Brian had been tall. Tall and lanky. Angular. The sort of person who never seemed to be able to fold his body comfortably into conventional chairs. Definitely not the sort of person to have a fatal heart attack. Too many people expressed that same opinion to Trudy after the fact. But there it was — an undetected defect in his aorta biding its time, bulging and pressing and finally rupturing.
Carter shows Trudy his packed duffel bag. “I’ve got to go.”
But Trudy doesn’t answer. He’s not sure she’s heard him, because she’s turned her back and is taking in the mounds of clothes, a lifetime of clothes, spread across the bedspread, the dresser, the chair where Brian sat every morning to lace up his shoes.
For his entire life, Carter has found talking to his mother difficult. He often wondered why his parents ever had a child. They seemed like such a self-contained unit, the two of them. Always, always he had felt like an interloper in someone else’s world. Oh, it’s not that they neglected him. Not at all. There were the requisite birthday parties when he was young, and carpooling to school and tennis practice, attendance at his matches when he was in high school, and visits to various potential colleges when the time was right.
It was just that when his parents were together, they were present with each other in a way that never worked itself into his relationship with either one of them.
It was hard to explain. With his first girlfriend, Sabrina, he had tried. “It’s like they’re going through the motions with me … but when they’re together it’s like the house and everything in it, including me, could go up in flame and they would just say, ‘Is it getting warm in here?’ ”
They were naked at the time, and she ran her hand up the inside of his thigh, teasingly. “Oh, Carter’s feeling neglected.”
He shook his head — that wasn’t it, but it was as close as he could come to explaining. No one was surprised when he chose a college as far from sunny California as he could get. It was in New Hampshire, with its brutal winters, that he began to feel less invisible.