“No,” I say. “It’s fine.”
He calls my parents by their first names. He takes his shoes off at the door and puts his feet, in socks, up on the coffee table. He helps himself to the refrigerator and puts more soap in the dispenser when it’s empty. This is his home, too.
“I’m going to go lie down,” I say.
I turn to leave, and Eric reaches out and takes my free hand. I feel his fingertips, cold, press into my palm. They seem to be Morse coding the one word Please.
“Later,” I say. “Okay?”
He lets me go.
I walk up the stairs. I travel down the wood-paneled hallway, past the room that used to be mine, the one that my mother and I redecorated during my second year of college, and then again when I was twenty-seven. It has striped wallpaper and white bedding and a closet full of sweatshirts and sundresses. All of my skin-care products sit, expired, in the medicine cabinet.
“You’re fully stocked here,” my mother would say. She loved that I could sleep over if it got late, and I didn’t even have to pack a toothbrush.
I stop at the entrance to her room.
How long does it take for someone’s smell to fade? When she was here, at the end. When the hospice nurses came and went like apparitions, the room smelled like illness, like a hospital, like plastic and vegetable broth and soured dairy. But now, all trace of sickness gone, her scent has come back, like a spring bloom. It lingers in the blankets, the carpet, the curtains. When I open the doors to her closet, it’s almost as if she were crouched inside.
I flick the light switch on and sit down among her dresses and blazers, jeans ironed, folded, and hung. I breathe her in. And then I turn my attention back to the envelopes in my hand. I let them slip down to the floor until I’m just holding the one on top. I slide my pinkie in the seam and wiggle it open. It gives easily.
Inside, as I expect, are two plane tickets. Carol Almea Silver was not a woman who handed her phone to the gate agent to scan. She was a woman who demanded a proper ticket for a proper trip.
Positano. June 5. Six days from now. The mother-daughter trip we had talked about for years, made manifest.
Italy had always been special to my mother. She went to the Amalfi Coast the summer before she met my father. She loved to describe Positano, a tiny seaside town, as “pure heaven.” God’s country. She loved the clothes and the food and the light. “And the gelato is a meal itself,” she said.
Eric and I considered going for our honeymoon—taking the train down from Rome and hitting Capri—but we were young and saving for a house, and the whole thing felt too extravagant. We ended up finding a cheap flight to Hawaii and spending three nights at the Grand Wailea Maui.
I look at the tickets.
My mother had always talked about going back to Positano. First with my father, but then as time went on she began to suggest the two of us go together. She was adamant about it—she wanted to show me this place that had always lingered in her memory. This special mecca that she played in right before she became a woman and a wife and then a mother.
“It’s the most spectacular place in the world,” she’d tell me. “When I was there, we’d sleep until noon and then take the boat out onto the water. There was this great little restaurant, Chez Black, in the marina. We’d eat pasta and clams in the sand. I remember like it was yesterday.”
So we decided to go. First as a fantasy, then as a loose, down-the-road plan, and then, when she got sick, as a light at the end of the tunnel. “When I’m better” became “when we go to Positano.”
We booked the tickets. She ordered summer sweaters in creams and whites. Sun hats with big, wide brims. We planned and pretended right up until the end. Up until the week before she died we were still talking about the Italian sun. And now the trip is here, and she is not.
I edge my back so it’s flat against the side of her closet. A coat rubs up against my shoulder. I think about my husband and father downstairs. My mother was always better with them. She encouraged Eric to take the job at Disney, to ask for a raise, to buy the car he really wanted, to invest in the good suit. “The money will come,” she’d always say. “You’ll never regret the experience.”
My mother supported my father through the opening of his first clothing store. She believed that he could create his own label, and believed they could manufacture the product themselves. She was quality control. She could tell how good a spool of thread was just by looking at it, and she made sure every garment my dad had was up to her standards. She also worked as his desk girl, answering the phones and taking the orders. She hired and trained everyone who ever worked in their business, teaching them about an invisible stich, the difference between pleating and ruching. She planned the birthday parties and the baptisms of their employees and their children. She always baked on Fridays.