One Italian Summer(2)

There was always food in the fridge, wine in the side door, and fresh-cut flowers on the table.

Eric and I have been trying to plant an herb garden for the past three years.

I smile at Eric. I try to arrange my mouth in a way I should remember but that feels entirely impossible now. I do not know who I am anymore. I have no idea how to do any of this without her.

“Katy, you’re grieving,” he said to me last night. “You’re in crisis; you can’t decide this now. People don’t get divorces in the middle of a war. Let’s give it some time.”

What he did not know is that I had. I had given it months. Ever since my mother got sick, I’d been thinking about the reality of being married to Eric. My decision to leave Eric had less to do with my mother’s death and more to do with the remembrance of death in general. Which is to say I began to ask myself if this was the marriage I wanted to die in, if this was the marriage I wanted to see me through this, my mother’s illness, and what would, impossibly, remain after.

We didn’t have kids yet—we were still kids ourselves, weren’t we?

Eric and I met when we were both twenty-two, seniors at UC Santa Barbara. He was an East Coast liberal, intent on going into politics or journalism. I was a Los Angeles native, deeply attached to my parents and the palm trees, and felt that two hours away was the farthest I could possibly go from home.

We had a class together—Cinema 101, a prereq we were both late in taking. He sat next to me on the first day of the spring semester—this tall, goofy kid. He smiled, we started talking, and by the end of class he’d stuck a pen through one of my ringlets. My hair was long and curly then; I hadn’t yet started straightening it into submission.

He pulled his pen back, and the curl went with it.

“Bouncy,” he said. He was blushing. He hadn’t done it because he was confident; he had done it because he didn’t know what else to do. And the uncomfortableness of this, the ridiculousness of his, a total stranger’s, pen through my hair, made me laugh.

He asked me to get a coffee. We walked to the commons and sat together for two hours. He told me about his family back home in Boston, his younger sister, his mother, who was a college professor at Tufts. I liked the way he saw them, the women in his family. I liked the way he spoke about them—like they mattered.

He didn’t kiss me until a week later, but once we started dating, that was it. No breaks, no torrid fights, no long-distance. None of the usual hallmarks of young love. After graduation, he got a job at the Chronicle in New York, and I moved with him. We set up shop in a tiny one-bedroom in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I worked as a freelance copywriter for anyone who would have me, mostly fashion blogs whose hosts were grateful for help with language. This was 2015, the city had rebounded from financial ruin, and Instagram had just become ubiquitous.

We spent two years in New York before moving back to Los Angeles. We got an apartment in Brentwood, down the street from my parents’ house. We got married, we bought a starter home, farther away in Culver City. We built a life that perhaps we were too young to live.

“I was already thirty when I met your father,” my mother told me when we first moved back. “You have so much time. Sometimes I wish you’d take it.” But I loved Eric—we all did. And I had always felt more comfortable in the presence of adults than young people, had felt since the time I was ten years old that I was one. And I wanted all of the trappings that would signal to others that I was one, too. It felt right to start young. And I couldn’t help the timeline. I couldn’t help it right up until last night, when I suddenly could.

“I brought over the mail,” Eric says. My mother is dead. What could any piece of paper possibly say that would be worth reading?

“You hungry?”

It takes me a moment to realize that my father has asked this of Eric, and another second to understand that the answer is yes, actually, Eric is nodding his head yes, and a third, still, to realize neither knows how to prepare a meal. My mother cooked for my father, for all of us—she was great at it. She’d make elaborate breakfasts: goat cheese frittatas with scooped-out bagels. Fruit salad and cappuccinos. When my father retired five years ago, they’d begun to eat outside, setting up on the veranda for hours. My mother loved the New York Times on a Sunday, and an iced coffee in the afternoon. My father loved what she did.

Chuck, my dad, worshipped Carol. He thought she hung the moon and painted the stars in the sky. But the deep secret, although it couldn’t have been one to him, is that I was her great love. She loved my father, certainly. I believe there wasn’t a man on earth she would have traded him for, but there was no relationship above ours. I was her one, just like she was mine.

I believe my love with my mother was truer, purer, than what she had with my father. If you’d have asked her Who do you belong to, the answer would have been Katy.

“You’re my everything,” she’d tell me. “You’re my whole world.”

“There are some leftovers in the fridge,” I hear myself saying.

I think about dishing lettuce onto plates, heating the chicken, crisping the rice the way I know my dad likes.

My father is gone, already in pursuit of the La Scala chopped salads that are no doubt soggy in their containers. I can’t remember who brought them over, or when, just that they’re there.

Eric is still standing in the doorway.