Tina placed the platter on the counter and stared at it. “I guess I need napkins,” she said, and then she burst into tears.
I was staring at her, stunned, when another woman entered the kitchen. She was older than we were, midthirties, striking but not beautiful, and wearing pounds of silver jewelry. She jangled and glinted as she put her arms around Tina, who was sobbing by then.
I had no idea what to do. I stood there, still as a statue, as Tina wept into the crook of the woman’s neck. “Why don’t you go upstairs and pull yourself together before your guests arrive?” the woman suggested to Tina. “I can set up for you.”
“Okay,” Tina agreed in a wobbly voice. “Oh”—she gestured at me as if I were a feature of the house a new homeowner needed to know about—“that’s Ruth, by the way. She came early.”
I was tongue-tied a moment. “Sorry,” I ended up saying.
Tina shrugged miserably as she started for the stairs in the kitchen. The house had two sets of stairs.
The woman picked up the platter. “I’m Janelle. Grab those plates. The den is on the left at the end of the hallway.”
The den was dim and warm, a fire dwindling in the hearth. Janelle picked up the poker and nudged one of the logs; it hissed at her, serpent-like, and reared back up again. I stationed myself in front of a sideboard cluttered with pictures of Tina from over the years. I wondered if this was how she’d felt when she discovered the photograph from my brother’s wedding in my dining room. Tell me what I don’t already know about you.
There was no nice way to say it—Tina had looked wrong as a child. Standing between her parents, she was a runty girl scowling in a dress, a proper towhead with jet-black eyebrows, her extremes even more pronounced back then than they were today.
On her wedding day, Tina was beautiful and stoic next to her happy groom. Some women might have said that at his age, he was still a handsome man, but those women would have been much older than we were. All I could think about, looking at the two of them together on their wedding day, was the two of them on their wedding night. My stomach made a sickly sound in protest.
Then there was Tina at her college graduation, holding her cap to her head and laughing against the breeze that threatened to blow it away. It was the only picture without men and the only one where Tina was smiling. I’m not saying the two are related.
I looked closer at the other women in the picture and gasped, realizing one was Frances. I didn’t recognize the woman on Tina’s other side; she was nearly six feet tall, with waist-length silver hair.
“Who is the other woman in this picture?” I asked Janelle.
Janelle tilted her head to see around the glare set off by the fire. “Oh. That’s Irene.”
Irene. Tina had mentioned an Irene that day in her car. When I’d asked who she was, I could tell Tina had withheld something from me.
Janelle leaned the poker against the wall, saying, “Can you let Tina know I’m going? I know everyone is arriving soon, and I don’t want to get blocked in.”
“Do you think I should check on her?” I asked, realizing how much I wished she would give me her blessing to go upstairs.
“Frances will be here soon,” Janelle said, tucking her shiny hair into the collar of her raincoat. “Nice meeting you. Good luck.”
I wondered if she meant with Tina or with the complex grieving.
* * *
Tina still hadn’t come downstairs by the time the other women started to arrive. They all seemed excited to see me answer the door. With me, they could widen their eyes as if to ask, Can you believe it? Their families had talked about this house around the dinner table too. When Frances walked in—like it wasn’t a Hollywood estate, like she’d been here before—I told her that Tina was upstairs and that she was upset. I don’t know what came over me, but when Frances started for the stairs, I barged past her, saying, “I don’t mind!”
At the top of the stairs, the hallway went left and right. But there was only one door that was expressly closed.
“Tina?” I knocked gently. “Everyone’s here.”
“You can come in,” I heard her mumble on the other side. Or maybe it was You can’t come in? I was already opening the door.
Tina was curled up on one of those fainting sofas under a trio of bay windows. The room was big; too big. It was clover-shaped, the canopy bed in the center surrounded by nooks for office, dressing, and living areas. In just this one bedroom, there was more furniture than we had on the first floor of my house. I don’t have a problem pitying rich people. There are a lot of sad things in this world, and getting everything you want only to realize you are still empty inside is certainly one of them.