Don't You Cry(51)

“You’ll remember to turn the heater off before you leave?” I remind her as her hand slides from my necklace, and she says she will. I nod my head and I say that I have to go, peering back over my shoulder for one last look before I’m gone.





Quinn

There’s a dish Esther serves. It’s a vegetarian recipe, a stir-fry with beans and broccoli and baby corn. And tofu. It should be disgusting but it’s not. It’s absolutely delicious. It also has a sauce complete with soy sauce and rice vinegar.

And a quarter cup of peanut flour.

Which doesn’t matter in the least bit to me, but it does matter to Kelsey Bellamy.

She was four years old when she was first diagnosed with a peanut allergy. That’s what her fiancé, Nicholas Keller, tells me as I sit across from him at his own kitchen table in a recently renovated flat in Hyde Park. It’s a small glass-top table that generally just sits one.

Him.

His eyes are disconsolate, brown eyes that dampen when I mention her name. Kelsey.

“She’d eaten peanuts before with no adverse effect,” he tells me, “but over time, things change. Especially when it comes to allergies. She was four years old, and her mother served her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for the first time, and right away—or so the story goes—Kelsey could hardly breathe. Her throat swelled up, she broke out in hives. Anaphylaxis. From that day on, she carried with her an EpiPen. Benadryl. She was always ready.

“She was always so careful about eating peanuts. We hardly ever ate out—too risky. She read the label on everything. Absolutely everything,” he says. “She wouldn’t eat products that were manufactured on shared lines for fear of cross-contamination. No processed cereal, no granola bars, no crackers.”

“So what happened?” I ask, and he shakes his head and says it was an accident, a horrible accident.

Nicholas Keller wasn’t hard to find. There were only twenty of them in the entire United States, and only two in Illinois. He was the first I called. Lucky guess. The commute from Andersonville to Hyde Park took a good eighty minutes: one “L” ride, two buses and a half-mile walk on foot.

I waited until evening when I knew he would be home from work. According to LinkedIn, Nicholas Keller is a financial adviser, a fact he later confirms in the foyer of his home, small talk before I dive into the reason for my visit. He seems to be a pretty straitlaced guy, not quite what I would have imagined for Kelsey Bellamy. And yet, as the saying goes, opposites attract.

“I went to grammar school with Kelsey,” I lie, “in Winchester.”

“You’re from Winchester?” he asks.

I say that I am. Winchester, Massachusetts. I add in, “Go Red Sox,” because I don’t know a thing about Boston other than they have a decent baseball team. And they drink tea, supposedly.

“You don’t have that whole Boston accent like Kelsey did,” he says, and I tell him how I’m an army brat, how our stay in Massachusetts only lasted a short time.

“Fort Devens?” he asks, and I nod my head and say, “Yeah,” even though I’m not quite sure what I’m saying yes to. I tell him I went to fourth grade with Kelsey. “Fourth or...” I pause, feign thinking, “Fifth, maybe? I can’t remember for sure.”

My eyes take in the flat, a home that is all man. A bachelor pad. He tells me that they planned to move in here together after the wedding, he and Kelsey. They had purchased the unit, but were living apart in their separate sides of the city while it underwent renovation—she sharing an apartment with a roommate in Andersonville, he in a midrise in Bridgeport. The building was quite downtrodden the first time they laid eyes on it, a warehouse converted to loft apartments. But still, it had all the elements they were looking for in a new home: the expansive rooms, exposed pipes and ductwork, brick walls, wood cladding. And Kelsey had a vision, though she died before having a chance to see it through. Instead, what remained was a poorly furnished space with dirty dishes in the sink and laundry on the floor. And an inconsolable fiancé.

They were to be married within a year from her death. She’d purchased a dress already, and he showed it to me, a simple taffeta thing that hung in a spare closet all alone, light blue because, as Nicholas said, “She was too much of a nonconformist for white,” saying these words not in any sort of carping way, but in a romantic way, as if Kelsey’s nonconformity was one of the reasons he loved her. Talk about sad. They had booked a hall for the three-hundred-plus guests they hoped would attend. They were still undecided on where to go for their honeymoon, a toss-up between Romania and Botswana. “Kelsey had no need to lie on a beach in a bikini,” Nicholas says. “That wasn’t her thing,” he tells me, and I say that I know.

I don’t know. But I’ve seen the gothic photo, the head-to-toe black, the albino skin, and so I can assume.

“It’s been a long time, I know,” I tell him, “but I just heard about Kelsey. I’m so sorry. We’ve been out of touch for years. I knew I probably shouldn’t, but I had to stop by and express my condolences,” I say, and then he leads me to his glass-top kitchen table and tells me about her peanut allergy.

“How’d you find me?” he asks. It isn’t censorious in the least bit. He’s curious.

“A friend of a friend,” I say, knowing how vapid it sounds.