“Yes?”
“Your situation. This whole terrible thing. Your mother dying the way she did. Leaving you with this mess, this debt. Everything you told me yesterday when you came into our little shop. Just devastated.” Yesterday. It seems like a year ago. I picture myself on my knees in the stockroom before the old mannequins.
“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. And I’ve decided I want to help you.”
“You do?”
She sighs. “I think you’re in a real bind here. I don’t just think it, I know it. You need to go back to Montreal, don’t you? And this place is really just a burden. I mean, I know you’ll do what you can to get her things in order but…” She looks at the basement box sitting open in the middle of the floor. Anjelica the cat slinks by, batting around one of the red jars. “It’s a big job. Bottom line. I think you need help.” Sylvia turns to look at me meaningfully. “How about I take it off your hands?”
“Off my hands?”
“The apartment. You’d be selling it to a friend. You could come back and visit whenever you like. I’ll help you pack and sort through everything this week. I could get some girls from the shop to help. Between us, we’ll get it done lickety-split. And you could go home when you planned. In—what is it again? Two days?”
Did I tell her my flight plans?
“Go back to work. Go back to your life. Begin to put all of this…” She shakes her head at the roses. “Horribleness,” she spits. And then her lip jerks to one side.
I stare at her.
“Such horribleness,” she insists, tears filling her eyes. “Put it behind you.”
Put it behind me. Isn’t that what Mother used to always say to me about the past?
“That’s very generous of you, Sylvia.”
She smiles greasily through her tears. Yes. It is.
“Well”—she wipes her eyes—“you know your mother and I were friends, of course.”
I think of visits with Mother over the last years. Always awkward whenever it was just the two of us. Always the radio way up in the car, even if it was a song she hated. Always a movie on full volume in the house. Always a restaurant where she knew a waiter and could banter with them instead of me. Usually she’d recruit Sylvia to join us for at least one lunch or early dinner. Mother would silently sip champagne from under the vast brim of a black hat that shadowed her pale face. Sylvia, hatless, melasmic, beaming with toadyism, would have a salad and sparkling water. Fill the silence with light, boring chatter. Inane comments about her book club. What she’d heard on NPR the other day that was so true. What she’d read in O magazine that she was internalizing—that Oprah just gets it, doesn’t she? And this restaurant—such a cute place. Just look at those cocktails going by! Of course she much prefers to eat her calories, hahaha. Mother would just nod absently. As if she’d left her body just as I’d left mine. And our souls were both floating elsewhere, this silly woman’s voice the only thing holding us down.
“I want to help where I can,” Sylvia says softly. “I really do.”
We both watch Anjelica bat at the red jar with her white fluffy paws. Sylvia, was my mother crazy? Did she ever bring you to a spa on the other end of the cove? An opulent glass house, right on the cliff’s edge? Did she ever introduce you to two beautiful twins clad in the most elegant jet? Who could be thirty, who could be teenagers? How about to a lady in red?
I look at Sylvia in her tan capris and Breton top—a marinière, Mother would have called it. She would’ve approved of this outfit, I know—a classic—but to my eye, Sylvia just looks like she’s going sailing on a very dull boat. Diamonds like little pinpricks of rich in either ear.
“You know,” she says, “I was thinking about what you asked me the other day. About your mother getting a little…”
“French?” I offer.
Sylvia nods. “Toward the end of her… toward the end. And there was something else.”
“What?”
“Well”—Sylvia laughs—“it’s a little embarrassing. But she kept coming into our little shop. After she sold it to me. It was like she’d forgotten she’d sold it or something. I’d catch her behind the counter or with the customers. Being her usual self. Maybe more than her usual self.” She laughs again. “I’d catch her staring at herself in the mirror. You know your mother and her mirrors. Forget about her five million boyfriends,” she says loudly, no doubt for the benefit of Tad in the bedroom. “That mirror was the affair of a lifetime.” She smiles at Mother’s wall of cracked glass. “Anyway. We sorted it all out in the end.”