The Clairvoyants(37)

After days in our cold apartment, the warmth of the place struck me immediately. We’d stepped into a room with low, beamed ceilings and white-painted walls. There were shelves of old books, a fire in the hearth, and two long green velvet couches in an L. On one wall were what I took to be Anne’s work—portraits of nude women done in an impressionist style in oil. The colors were subdued, the texture of the paint heavy. Along the main wall, high above the door frame, mounted heads of stag and elk peered down at us from the shadows.

“Her trophies.” William laughed.

Down a narrow hallway was the kitchen—I could hear everyone talking all at once, not garrulous or cheery, but subdued—still tinged with the tragedy of Mary Rae.

I slipped off my coat, and William took it. Geoff went down the hall calling, “Hello!” and then, “Well, surprise, surprise.”

Del slipped past him and appeared in the doorway wearing an apron with I PUT THE FUN IN DYSFUNCTIONAL printed on the front. I felt angry, almost left out.

“What are you doing here?”

“Cooking dinner,” she said. Her hair was twisted up on the top of her head. A few stray pieces had fallen loose.

“Since when do you know how to cook?” I said.

“I needed something to do with my time,” Del said. She tugged on the apron. “Isn’t this funny? We should get one for Mother.”

“When would she wear it?” I said, and Del laughed, though it was hesitant. She didn’t know our mother had nearly quit cooking altogether.

What was Del’s life like at the manor—had she had a job there? If she knew little about my mother’s and my life, I knew just as little about the last three years of hers. I’d allowed her to become part of mine again, and then I’d met William and practically abandoned her. William moved behind me in the hallway and grabbed my shoulders.

“God, it smells fantastic!” he said.

He’d never seemed to care about food, and I felt like a bad housewife in a sitcom, the one who’d burned every dish. I began to protest, to ask him why he never wanted me to cook, but he maneuvered me out of the way and stepped around me. Del and I were left to file behind him, down the narrow hallway into the kitchen.





15




School had let out a few days before Thanksgiving, and students had flocked to the public transit system for home. Our mother had said she was going to Leanne’s for the traditional feast. She’d called yesterday, and there’d been a moment on the phone when I thought she might insist Del and I join her, but she did not. Instead, I heard her open a kitchen cabinet, listened to her sort through the glass casserole dishes on the shelf.

“Leanne didn’t invite us,” I said.

In the old house’s kitchen, my mother ran the electric can opener. She would be assembling her traditional canned green beans almondine.

“You said you weren’t coming last time we talked,” she said.

I stood in front of the window and fogged the glass with my breath. Below me, Mary Rae tipped her face to meet my gaze.

“You told me you weren’t having Thanksgiving,” I said.

My mother clanked the side of the can of green beans against the glass dish. “I said I wasn’t hosting.”

Del hadn’t attended family gatherings for three years. The first year she’d been in the Institute, and the doctors had recommended she skip the holidays at my mother’s. The following Thanksgiving, all of us girls went to our father’s house. He claimed he’d invited Del, but when I arrived—to find Leanne with her new husband, Sarah with her fiancé, and my father and his wife, all of them at the bar in the family room, mixing gimlets—my father told me Del had other plans.

“With whom?” I said. I stood in the foyer in my coat and considered heading home. My mother would spend that holiday with my grandmother, and at least we would be three women alone.

My father came around the bar with a frosty glass and handed it to me.

“Oh, let her take off her coat first,” his wife said. Her name was Jill, a name for a character in a children’s beginner reader, Del would have said.

That year, Jill tried too hard and served what to Leanne and Sarah and me seemed exotic dishes: individual acorn squash halves stuffed with mushrooms and rice, bleu cheese mashed potatoes.

“I miss plain corn,” Sarah said. The three of us had offered to wash the dishes, and we were alone in the kitchen.

Leanne finished a glass of wine and re-poured. “Wasn’t maize a Pilgrim staple?”

For once, we had been united, though it was in our dislike of the food and at Jill’s expense. If not for Del’s absence, one I felt obligated to fill with her scornful comments, we might have continued to get along.

I ran a dish towel over the china plate Sarah had set in the drainer. “I’m pretty sure Squanto wouldn’t have enjoyed green beans almondine,” I said.

Sarah washed another plate and handed it to me, her pink nails shiny with suds. “Why don’t you let Leanne dry now?” she said.

Last Thanksgiving, we’d all gathered at the old house. Leanne and her husband had picked up my grandmother at Essex Meadows on the way over, and my mother had gone to the manor to get Del. Sitting in a rocker on the cold front porch, I waited for them to return. My mother and I had potted mums the month before, and their colors were bright against the painted gray boards and against the dried grass of the lawn. Inside the house, my grandmother oversaw preparations, and Leanne and Sarah’s husbands watched football in the den. When the Cadillac turned down the pebbled drive, I stood and went to the car. Del hadn’t come.