“He came to my room almost every night that summer. I was thirteen years old.” Her face is impassive, bland. She could be talking about cats. “My brother was a monster. Every night I prayed to God he would die. And finally God answered my prayers.” She pauses. “Part of me has always wondered if it wasn’t God who answered my prayers, but you.”
Rosemary reaches over to the coffeepot and pours herself another inch of decaf, carefully adds two sugar cubes with a little pronged tong. “Edmund wanted children, but I could never see the point. More coffee?”
I am too numb to respond.
The front doorbell rings. “Oh good,” Rosemary says, standing up. “That’ll be the dry cleaning.”
* * *
—
Outside Rosemary’s house, the sun is still shining, the air dripping with heat and the exhaustion of being. A boy bicycles past, ringing his tinny bell. Weeds grow up from a crack in the sidewalk. I come to a crosswalk. The smell of banana peel, a vacant brown lot strewn with plastic bags that float and settle like a broken laundry line of wife-beaters. I need to call Jonas.
31
Yesterday. July 31, the Back Woods.
“What time are people coming?”
“I said sevenish.” My mother has her head deep in the refrigerator, hunting for a lost tube of tomato paste.
I grab a white linen tablecloth from a drawer and throw it over the porch table. “Are we eight or ten?”
“Nine, including Jonas’s insufferable mother. I don’t know why we had to include her. I hate odd numbers.”
I take a stack of pasta bowls from the shelf, carry them carefully to the table, and set them around. “What about Dixon and Andrea?”
Mum hands me a pile of cloth napkins. “Dixon, yes. Andrea, no. Use these. And the brass candlesticks.”
“Why not?”
“That dreadful son of hers is visiting from Boulder for the weekend. She asked if she could bring him, and I said no.”
“You truly are the absolute worst.”
She hands me a breadboard. “Why on earth would I include him? He didn’t know Anna.”
I bring wineglasses to the table, two by two. Forks and knives. Salt. Pepper. I concentrate on each small task as if it is a lifeline, anchoring me to the present, to my life right now. I cannot get Rosemary’s words out of my head, her mundane, unvarnished voice as she handed me absolution, a pardon for my crime.
“What else needs doing?” I say.
“You can open a few bottles of claret to let them breathe. And grate the cheese. There’s a hunk of Parmesan on the door of the refrigerator.” She places a white ironstone compote filled with limes and bright green pears in the center of the table.
“That looks nice,” I say.
“You must be exhausted.”
“I am.”
“I still don’t understand why on earth you wanted to go to Memphis with Peter.”
“He asked me. He never asks.” I wander into the pantry. “I’m glad I went. Do you have any idea where the corkscrew has gone? It’s not here.”
“Last time I looked it was right there on its hook. It may have fallen down. Grab me a head of garlic while you’re in there.”
“Got it. I saw Rosemary,” I say, bringing it to her. “I went to her house.”
“Rosemary,” she says. “I’d practically forgotten she existed.”
“It was Peter’s idea.”
“She was such a strange little girl. The way she clung to her father. Those hollow eyes. I remember there was something about her that drove Anna running out of the house every time Rosemary came to visit.”
“She hated the way Rosemary smelled.”
“That’s right,” Mum says. “Anna said she smelled of formaldehyde. Sickly sweet.” She crushes five fat cloves of garlic with the wide flat of her knife and throws them into a cast-iron pan. Finely minced carrots, celery, and onions are already caramelizing in olive oil and browned butter. She opens a package of ground meat wrapped in butcher paper—veal and pork—and adds it into the pan bit by bit, then milk, to make the meat tender. An open bottle of warm white wine sits on the counter for deglazing.
“Hand me that, would you?” She points to a slotted spoon. “What’s she like now?”
“Still an oddity. Direct. She’s a musicologist. Lives in a ranch house. Short feathered hair. Slacks. That sort of thing.”
“Married?”
I nod.
“And her mother?”
“Died a few years ago.”