“Sunny, please,” Dad says, sighing. He puts a finger in the book to hold his place and frowns up at me. “I know how you feel, but—”
“Pleeeeease.” I know it’s no use, but I try anyway. “I’ll do chores. I don’t care.”
“Sunny, be nice,” Dad says, his tone sharper now. “This isn’t a bargaining situation. If your mom wants to make a scrapbook, then I don’t think it’s too much to ask for you to help her. We need to be supportive of your Auntie Mina right now.”
“We meaning me, you mean.” I stomp out of the den, exasperated. I can hear Dad grumbling to himself, but I don’t care. I go to my room, shut the door, and study with my earbuds in until the doorbell rings, when Dad comes up and marches me down to the dining room for our afternoon of vanilla chai tea blend with Auntie Mina. I’m ashamed to admit that I’m dreading it almost as much as the scrapbooking. My guts twist.
Mom is sitting next to Auntie Mina at one end of the dining room table. She frowns at my outfit. I’m wearing a light-yellow tracksuit that Grandma and Grandpa gave me for my last birthday; it’s hideous, but it was the first thing I grabbed that was clean.
I walk in and try to put on a smile for my aunt, who is sitting at the dining room table looking small and lost. Her normally shiny dark-brown hair hangs limply down her back, more gray in it than before. She’s staring at her full teacup, still and silent.
I feel horrible. And I don’t know what to do.
When I approach the table, she looks up briefly with a wan smile. “Hi, Sunny. I’m glad you’re here.”
“Hi, Auntie,” I say uncertainly. She doesn’t look glad; rather, the moment I walked in, it was as if her face crumpled just a little more under the weight of memories. I want to hug her, like I usually do, but I’m afraid to.
Dad walks in behind me and sits on Auntie Mina’s other side, leaning over to give her a quick, awkward kiss on the cheek. I sit across from her, feeling queasy and awful. Her eyes are shadowed and hollow, her lips dry and cracked. I can’t imagine Uncle Randall and Number Two have been much comfort; Dad told me that Uncle Randall’s been working late every day. Number Two, as usual, is doing his plastic surgeon thing out in Palm Springs, in the Condo That Dad Bought.
“We’re all so happy to see you,” my mother says, a little too cheerfully, putting a gentle hand on Auntie Mina’s shoulder. I fidget in my chair and force another smile.
“Oh, pooh,” my aunt says, her voice slightly tremulous. “You make it sound like I’ve been in seclusion.”
“Really, Mina. We are,” Mom says. “It feels like it’s been weeks since we’ve really talked. I’m concerned that you’ve been too … alone with your feelings.”
Way to be subtle. Mom tries to draw Auntie Mina out of her shell, encouraging her to vent if she needs to and not hold any emotions inside where they’ll “fester.” Despite my mother’s well-meaning attempts, Auntie Mina stays quiet and listless, putting in a soft word now and then but nothing significant. Nothing that tells us how lost she must feel. Not that she needs to tell us.
At some point, after our tea has long gotten cold and Dad and I have reduced the zucchini bread to a pile of crumbs on the plate, the conversation turns to Shiri. It happens by accident. I’m finally telling my parents about how I’ve stopped going to swim practice, how I think I want to quit the team, and it just slips out of my mouth: how Shiri would have wheedled, badgered me, whatever it took to get me back on track because it would be a major plus on my college applications.
And after that, it’s like an invisible barrier has suddenly disappeared. Auntie Mina starts to talk. And then we’re all talking, remembering weird random things like how much Shiri hated mustard and how inordinately happy she got whenever she was able to find a cute pair of shoes in her tiny shoe size.
Dad says, “Remember that time the newspaper wrote about the Mock Trial case against Vista Hills?” Mom nods, a sad smile on her face.
“That’s right,” I said. “The reporter got her name wrong. He wrote ‘Sherry.’” I snort.
“Sherry,” Auntie Mina says with a shaky laugh. “I’d almost forgotten about that.” One minute she’s smiling; the next minute, tears begin to roll down her face. Abruptly, she dashes them away and apologizes, eyes downcast with—what? Embarrassment? I’m not sure. I pass the napkins. She dabs at her face with one and then crumples it into a ball. My mom fusses, putting an arm around Auntie Mina’s shoulders and pulling the cup of cold tea closer, telling her she has nothing to apologize for.
Auntie Mina lets out a shaky sigh. “But I am sorry, because you’ve been so nice to do all this,” she says, her voice thick. “I know I should be coping better, but I just—” She breaks off, looking down at the table, not meeting anyone’s eyes.
I exchange a look with Mom. Auntie Mina lost her only daughter, for crying out loud, and it’s like she’s afraid we’ll be angry at her. But I just feel bad. We all do.
I open my mouth to tell her that she has no reason to be sorry, that nobody has any right to tell her otherwise, when the doorbell rings. Auntie Mina springs to her feet and says, “I should really get going.”
“Mina,” my dad says, reaching a hand toward her. “Stay for dinner.”
She grabs her purse from the back of the chair. “You have company. Plus it’s roast chicken night, so we’ll have company, too, one of the other VPs in Randall’s department. I’ll just let myself out the side door. I loved the tea.” She gives Mom a kiss on the cheek and says, “I’ll call soon.” She hugs me and Dad, quickly, and hurries out the door before we can say more than goodbye. Dad scoots his chair back and rushes after her, looking as confused as I feel, and Mom is frowning, but the doorbell rings again and she hurries to answer it.
Poor Auntie Mina. I wonder what she’s thinking, what was going through her head. Why she decided to run off. And I wonder why I didn’t underhear anything.
I guess I didn’t try.
For the first time, it occurs to me that I could have. Could have tried to find out what she was feeling, deliberately. What she was thinking.
No matter what was going through her mind, I know she’s got to be hurting a million times more than I am.
I don’t have much time to think about it, because who follows my mother into the room but Antonia in the ample flesh, wearing a yellow tracksuit nearly identical to mine, only hers is adorned with a giant quartz crystal pendant and a silver dragon pin.
“Sorry I’m early,” she’s saying to my mom. “I really thought you said four o’clock. I—” Then she catches sight of me.
“Sunny!” she exclaims in a bright, chirpy voice. “Look at us! We’re twins.” Her shoulder-length, curly, carroty-orange hair has a white streak in the front where it’s starting to go gray, and it’s bouncy just like her personality. It makes me ill. And I’m angry, too, because if she hadn’t shown up so early, maybe Auntie Mina wouldn’t have felt like she had to jump up and leave.
Dad walks back through the side door at that moment. He doesn’t look happy, either, and he quickly retreats to his study with his stack of grading.
Antonia turns to my mother and plops a huge macramé bag onto the table.
“Oh, that’s really thoughtful of you, Antonia. I hope it wasn’t any trouble,” my mom says. Mom looks pleased, but for me, the rest of the evening is a nightmare. I try to bury myself in my pre-calculus homework when I’m not helping sort through photos. Every time I look at any of the pictures—the ones of Shiri as a kid at tennis camp, dressed up for eighth-grade graduation, or even the horrible one with the two of us as little kids, half-naked in an inflatable pool—I feel my teeth clench and my eyes sting. All those moments are worthless now.