“So, he’s not smarter than you.” Rose lifted the sombrero up and pushed her hand through her hair—wavy like her daughters’ but laced with gray. She wasn’t nearly as old as she looked, but starting years earlier Rose had forbidden any celebration of her birthday, a personal declaration of war against the passage of time. Julia’s mother trained her eyes on the dirt rows of her garden. Potatoes and onions were all that remained to be harvested; most of Rose’s work now was devoted to preparing the garden for winter. The only sections of non-growing soil were reserved for a narrow path between the plants and a white sculpture of the Virgin Mary, which leaned against the back-left corner of the fence. Rose sighed. “It’s just as well, I suppose. I’m smarter than your father by a million miles.”
Julia could see how “smart” was a tricky term—how did you quantify it, especially when neither of her parents had gone to college?—but her mother was correct. Julia had seen photos of Rose, pretty and tidy and smiling in this same garden, with Charlie at the beginning of their marriage, but her mother had eventually accepted and donned marital disappointment the same way she strapped on her ridiculous gardening outfit. All of her considerable efforts to propel her husband toward some kind of financial stability and success had died in their tracks. Now the house was Charlie’s space, and Rose’s refuge was the garden.
The sky was dimming, and the air growing colder. When freezing temperatures arrived to stay, this neighborhood would quiet, but tonight it chattered as if trying to get in its final words: Distant kids shouted laughter; the older Mrs. Ceccione warbled in her garden; a motorcycle coughed three times before starting up. “I suppose it’s time to go inside,” Rose said. “Are you embarrassed by your old lady looking like this?”
“No,” Julia said. She knew William’s attention would be on her. She loved the hopeful look William directed at her, as if he were a ship eyeing the ideal harbor. William had grown up in a nice home, with a professional father, a big lawn, and his own bedroom. He clearly knew what success and security looked like, and the fact that he saw those possibilities in Julia pleased her immensely.
Rose had tried to build a solid life, but Charlie had wandered away with, or kicked over, every stone she laid down. Julia had decided, halfway through her first conversation with William, that he was the man for her. He had everything she was looking for, and as she’d told her mother, she just really liked him. The sight of him made her smile, and she loved fitting her small hand inside his large one. They made an excellent team: William had experienced the kind of life Julia wanted, so he could direct her endless energy while they built their future together. Once she and William were married and established in their own home, she would help her family. Her solid foundation would extend to become theirs.
She almost laughed out loud at the relief on her boyfriend’s face when she entered the living room. William was seated next to her father on the squeaky couch, and Charlie had his hand on the young man’s shoulder. Cecelia was lying across the old red armchair, and Emeline was staring in the mirror hung beside the front door, adjusting her hair.
Cecelia was saying, in a serious voice, “You have an excellent nose, William.”
“Oh,” William said, clearly surprised. “Thank you?”
Julia grinned. “Don’t mind Cecelia. She talks that way because she’s an artist.” Cecelia had special access to the art room at the high school, and she considered everything in her sightline to be source material for future paintings. The last time Julia—intrigued by the focused expression on Cecelia’s face—asked her sister what she was thinking about, Cecelia had said, “Purple.”
“You do have a nice nose,” Emeline said politely, because she’d noticed William blush and wanted to make him feel better. Emeline read the emotional tenor of every room and wanted everyone to feel comfortable and content at all times.
“He doesn’t know a word of Whitman,” Charlie said to Julia. “Can you imagine? William didn’t get here a moment too soon. I gave him a few lines to tide him over.”
“No one knows Whitman except for you, Daddy,” Cecelia said.
The fact that William didn’t know any of Walt Whitman’s poems was additional validation for Julia that her boyfriend was different from her father. She could tell from Charlie’s voice that he’d been drinking but wasn’t yet drunk. He had a glass in his hand, half filled with melting ice cubes.
“I can reserve Leaves of Grass for you at the library, if you’d like,” Sylvie said to William. “It’s worth reading.”
Julia hadn’t noticed Sylvie, who stood in the doorway of the kitchen. She must have just gotten home from her shift at the library, and her lips were the kind of deep red that meant she’d been kissing one of her boys in the stacks. Sylvie was a senior in high school and spent her free hours working as many shifts as possible to save money for community college. She wouldn’t earn an academic scholarship like Julia had, because she hadn’t matched her older sister’s determination to get one. Sylvie aced the classes she was interested in but got C’s or D’s in everything else. Julia had operated her determination like a lawn mower and mowed through high school with the next step in her sights.
“Thank you,” William said. “I’m afraid I haven’t read much poetry at all.”
Julia was sure William hadn’t noticed her sister’s lips, and even if he had, he wouldn’t know what they meant. Sylvie was the sister Julia was closest to, and she was also the only person who stymied Julia, who left her at a loss for words. Her sister had read hundreds of novels—it had been Sylvie’s only interest, and hobby, for their entire lives—and out of those books she’d plucked a life goal: to have a great, once-in-a-century love affair. It was a child’s dream, but Sylvie was still holding on to it with both hands. She was looking for him—her soulmate—every day of her life. And she made out with boys during her shifts in the library to practice for when she met him.
“It’s not right to practice like that,” Julia would tell Sylvie, when they were lying side by side in their dark bedroom at night. “And the kind of love you’re looking for is made up, anyway. The idea of love in those books—Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina—is that it’s a force that obliterates you. They’re all tragedies, Sylvie. Think about it; those novels all end with despair, or death.”
Sylvie had sighed. “The tragedy isn’t the point,” she said. “We read those books today because the romance is so enormous and true that we can’t look away. It’s not obliteration; it’s a kind of expanding, I think. If I’m lucky enough to know love like that…” She went quiet, unable to put into words how meaningful this would be.
Julia shook her head at the sight of her sister’s red lips, because this dream was bound to backfire. Sylvie cared too much and lived too much in her head. She would be branded a slut and eventually marry a good-looking loser because he stared at Sylvie in a way that reminded her of Heathcliff.
Emeline was talking about her homeroom teacher, who was on probation for smoking marijuana. “He’s so honest,” she said. “He told us how he got caught and everything. I’m worried he’s going to get in more trouble for telling us about it. He doesn’t seem to understand the grown-up rules for what to say and what to keep to himself. I kept wanting to tell him to shush.”