“I’m making chicken soup,” Janice had said, a sunflower-patterned apron tied around her waist. “I can never remember—feed a cold and starve a fever? Or is it the other way around? Anyway, your dad said you were sick and chicken soup is good for everything. Want to come have lunch with me?”
My face was already flushed, but I turned a deeper red, wondering if Janice had seen my silhouette in the window. “Oh, no, I’m fine,” I’d said.
“Are you sure? There’s plenty. Besides, I’m going to start putting photos into albums—you know how I’ve got them all stacked up on that shelf and they look so messy—and I’d love some company for a bit.”
Somehow I was tying my sneakers and putting on a sweater and heading around the block with Janice. I’d eaten a big bowl of her garlicky soup, and then the Motrin had kicked in, bringing with it a wave of exhaustion. My head dropped down to my chin.
“Why don’t you lie down?” Janet had said. “No, just leave your bowl right there. I’ll take care of it.” Thank you for taking care of me, too, I’d thought, feeling inexplicably like crying. She’d led me to the couch and I fell asleep almost instantly. When I woke up three hours later, my fever had broken and a yellow knitted blanket was tucked around me.
“You had such a good sleep,” Janice had said softly, looking up from her book in the armchair opposite the couch. “Ready for some tea and toast?” I’d nodded eagerly, worried I was taking too much from her, but unable to stop. Janice had walked over to stroke my forehead, then looked down at the blanket. “It’s a family heirloom,” she’d said. “My grandma made it when she was a young woman, and my mother gave it to me when I went away to college. I always feel better when I curl up with it and think of all the love stored in it. It’s the most special thing I own.”
“Thank you,” I’d said, reaching out with a finger to touch the satin-trimmed edge of the blanket.
“Two peppermint teas, coming up,” Janice had said, and I’d hopped out of bed to help her.
It was why I’d spent three weekends searching through San Francisco shops for the prettiest teapot and the finest peppermint tea I could find for Janice’s Christmas present. I wanted her to know I would never forget that day.
* * *
The Windham Assisted Living Facility looked like a gracious Victorian mansion, except instead of being surrounded by sprawling green lawns, it was situated next to a strip mall featuring a pizza place, a bank, a pharmacy, a grocery store, and a beauty shop. All of life’s essentials, lined up neatly in a row. Ninety minutes after I’d left my dad’s house, I pulled into the visitors’ parking lot and unsnapped my seat belt, stretching out my arms and rolling my neck in circles.
Nana had moved here from Florida seven years ago, after Grandpa died of Alzheimer’s disease. Usually people live eight or ten years after that diagnosis; Grandpa had held on for seventeen. My father had invited Nana to move in with him, but she’d refused, not wanting to burden him. Dad had borne so much tragedy, I thought. His father and wife were diagnosed with horrible diseases within a year of each other, and he was an only child, so there was no one to share the grief. I felt a surge of gratitude that he was in Jakarta, gearing up to travel to the beaches of Thailand. He deserved happiness.
I stepped out of the Volvo and popped the trunk, reaching inside for the bags of gifts. I felt guilty that I couldn’t visit Nana as often as I used to, and I knew I was trying to compensate by lavishing her with a electronic reader stocked with a dozen downloaded books, lavender bath oils, Godiva chocolates, and a plush velour robe and matching slippers in a leopard-skin print—Nana definitely wasn’t a cabbage-rose pattern kind of woman.
Partly because of Nana, I’d been toying with the idea of moving back home, even though I’d loved everything about San Francisco from the moment I’d stepped into the city, loved the coffee shops and wine-tasting bars, loved the tang of the ocean that swirled around my little apartment on days when it was warm enough to throw open my windows and work on my computer with my new rescue cat, Oreo, lazily winding her way around my ankles.
But now I knew I couldn’t move back to Chicago, at least not anytime soon.
I found Nana in her room, reading a large-print edition of Gone With the Wind in an armchair by the window.
“Hey, hot stuff,” I called from the doorway.
“Go away. David Beckham’s on his way here and he’s got a big jealous streak,” she said without looking up from the page.
I burst into laughter and ran toward her as she stood up—less steadily than she had the last time I’d seen her. I folded her in my arms and breathed in the sweet smell of Chanel No. 5.
“Beanpole, don’t tell me you’ve gotten even taller?” Nana exclaimed, pulling back to look up at me.
“Hey! I think you must’ve shrunk,” I protested. “Old people do, you know.”
She swatted my rear and hugged me again.
“I was worried you’d miss dinner,” she said. “They have festive red and green Jell-O cubes, you know. You don’t see that every day.”
“Sorry, the roads were slick. It took an extra half hour to get here.”
“As long as you’re safe.” She finally let go and smiled up at me, her eyes almost disappearing into crinkles. “I missed you, sweetheart.”
It seemed like I’d done nothing these past two days but tear up. I turned away and wiped my eyes with my index fingers before Nana could see. “Are we late for dinner?” I asked. “I want to meet your friends.”
“Nah, it’s not for another hour. Plus I like to make an entrance,” she said.
When she’d first arrived here, Nana was depressed—plain worn out from caring for her husband and saddened by the arthritis that left her once-nimble fingers bent and gnarled. Then she began to make friends. Now she had a group of women—the Seven Widows of Windham, they called themselves -- and not one of them had the slightest bit of interest in water aerobics or taking macramé classes.
“So you’re in a gang?” I’d asked when she told me.
“Yup. Those Crups better look out,” she’d said. “We like to play poker and drink bourbon. We’re thinking about taking up playing pool so we can hustle people.”
“Crups?” I’d asked. “Do you mean Crips?”
“We could take ’em both,” she’d said, and I’d smiled. It was as though Nana’s spirit, buried beneath the pain of losing her husband long before his actual death, was finally fighting its way to the surface again.
I was grateful to the widows for that, but it wasn’t the only reason why I wanted to see them tonight. Usually we brought Nana to our house for visits or took her out to dinner, so although I’d waved to one or two of them in passing, I hadn’t spent any real time with them. I wanted to make sure Nana was taken care of, now that I was gone so much.
After I flopped on Nana’s bed and we chatted for a while, we freshened up for dinner and headed for the elevator. I was doing okay, I thought as I watched the numbers on the elevator panel drop from four to one. I could get through tonight with Nana to buoy me, and tomorrow I’d leave for the airport early. When I was back in my new apartment, with no reminders of Grif or his family, it would be easier.
Then, as we approached a circular table in the dining room where Nana’s friends awaited, she uttered two simple, impossibly complicated words: “How’s Griffin?”
I burst into tears. Not the discreet, slowly-rolling-down-the-cheeks kind either.
“Whoa Nellie!” shouted a voice to my left. “Better get her into a chair.”
I felt gentle arms around me, easing me into a seat; hands patted my cheeks with napkins.
“Usually they don’t cry until after they see the food,” someone cracked.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I grabbed a napkin and blew my nose. “I just. . .”
“Say you were cutting onions,” a widow with pure white hair suggested. “Or thinking about Sylvester Stallone’s acting.”
I gave a snort-laugh.
“Ah, now she�
��s coming around. Get her some water,” another widow suggested.
“Water? That’s ridiculous. Get her a gin and tonic.”
“Who’s got the gin?”
A purse appeared, a liver-spotted hand ducked inside it, and a moment later a silver flask emerged and was pressed upon me. “You’ll have to make do without the tonic.”
I took a sip. It burned going down, in a good way.
“You know what?” I said, looking around the table. “That was exactly what I needed. Thank you. Can we start over?”
“Elise, meet the Seven Widows of Windham,” Nana said.
“Six, unless you’re introducing yourself to your own granddaughter,” pointed out one of the women, who was wearing a homemade pin that said, “I’m a Jew. Don’t serve me that blasted Jell-O.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said. I took in a shuddering breath and tried to smile. “I was just feeling sort of emotional. My old boyfriend got engaged last night.”
“Oooooooh,” one of the women said. “Say no more. Actually, please do say more.”
“My daughter’s over there with her husband,” another women whispered. “I have to go sit with them in a minute, and they’re as dull as paste. I’d so much rather be here, in the middle of the action.”
A woman in a blue wrap dress nodded. “My kids are in Cleveland. Said it was too hard to get here for the holiday.”
“My son’s coming in January,” said another. “He invited me to visit him, but his kids have the flu again. ”
“Again? Those kids get the flu every month. Of course, with six of them, they’ve probably just been passing around the same disease all these years.”
“Can all you biddies stop jabbering and let Elise talk?” the tallest woman of the group spoke up. “So . . .” she prompted me. “Your boyfriend broke your heart?”
I shook my head. “I broke his. He wanted to marry me.”
“Were you in love with someone else?” Seven pairs of bright eyes were fixed on me; it was hard to tell who had asked the question.
“There isn’t anything you can say that would shock us,” someone—I think it was the woman in a blue dress—said when I hesitated. “Between us, we’ve got three divorces, one face-lift and possible other unconfirmed work, two adulterous affairs—of course they were long ago, but one was interracial, which adds an extra bit of spice—a gambling addiction—”
“It’s an enjoyable habit, not an addiction,” the woman to her left shouted.
“—and heaven knows what else,” the woman in blue concluded.
So I took a deep breath, and then I started my story with the sweet, surprising kiss on the school bus coming home from that track meet. Over slices of turkey and mashed potatoes and broccoli and secret sips of gin from the flask circling the table, I described our reconciliations and final breakup.
“So you did love him,” a widow named Betty said.
I nodded. “Just not enough. Or maybe not in the right way.”
“You were right to let him go,” she said. Her eyes grew distant. “I married a guy I cared for. And two years later, I met the love of my life.”
“What happened?” I whispered.
“I stayed married to the first guy. The second guy married one of my friends. And I never stopped wondering, ‘What if?’”
I squeezed her hand.
“San Francisco? That’s where you’re living now?” Thelma, the tallest widow, appraised me through narrowed eyes over the rim of her coffee cup. “I’ve got a great-nephew who lives in Seattle.”
“It is in another state, you know,” Nana pointed out.
Thelma batted away the objection. “Oh, they’re all having sex over the Internet now anyways. What I was going to say is, my nephew travels all the time for work. He goes to San Francisco regularly.”
“Is this the guy who sent you the video showing how to do Beyoncé’s moves?” someone asked.
Thelma nodded. “‘All the Single Ladies.’ We practiced it last week, but we didn’t let Betty do the pelvic thrusts on account of her osteoporosis.”
“They were just jealous of my moves,” Betty said.
With each laugh, each sip of gin, each touch, I began to feel better.
* * *
Nana and I stayed in her room until almost ten o’clock, sitting next to each other on her bed, talking and sharing the box of Godiva I’d brought. Neither of us wanted to say good-bye.
“You know, I don’t think you truly regret breaking up with Griffin,” Nana said. “Hold on, is that the dark caramel you’re taking? Put it back, young lady, or I’m going to press the emergency button next to my bed.”
“I already licked it,” I said.
“Liar,” Nana said. “You take the milk chocolate caramel. Anyway, I was going to say that you don’t begrudge Griffin happiness, do you?”
I nodded. “I wanted him to find someone else, partly because then I wouldn’t feel so guilty, but mostly because he deserves to. So why am I conflicted about it? What’s wrong with me?”
“Nothing.” She smoothed my hair back from my face with her right hand, which wasn’t as crippled as her left one. “Things would have changed anyways, you know. Sounds like they already were changing. You’re happy in San Francisco, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I miss it here, though. I miss you and Dad.” And I miss Janice.
Nana’s hand came to rest on mine. “But we’re still in each other’s hearts. Even if we don’t see each other as much. Even through changes.”
“Always,” I said.
“What do you think about the great-nephew in Seattle?” Nana asked.
“I kind of like the idea of a guy who sends a group of eighty-five-year-old women Beyoncé’s dance moves,” I admitted.
“Whoever he is, wherever he lives, you’re going to find him,” she said. Her voice was as gentle as a whisper. I knew I had to go soon, because she was getting tired, but it seemed important for her to tell me this one last thing: “But you won’t forget the ones you leave behind. You’ll always love them, too. I think that’s all most of us really want. To feel like we matter. To know we’re loved.”
* * *
I drove home extra slowly, wary of black ice and other motorists who might be full of hot spiced rum, and it was almost midnight when I pulled into Dad’s driveway. I checked the car to make sure I’d removed every bit of trash before I got out, since he wouldn’t be back home for two more months. Tomorrow morning I’d clean out the refrigerator, sweep the floors, and turn down the heat before heading out to catch my flight. I’d take a final look at Griffin’s house through my bedroom window, then shut the door.
Something was on our front porch.
As I came closer I saw it was a box, maybe a foot and a half long and equally as wide, wrapped in red paper and tied with a big silver bow. I brought it inside and turned on a lamp in the living room, and then, before I even took off my gloves and coat, slowly untied the bow and peeled back the paper.
I opened the lid of the box and saw a burst of yellow, the shine of a strip of satin trim.
I heard her words again, as clearly as if Janice was standing next to me:I always feel better when I curl up with it and think about all the love stored in it. It’s the most special thing I own.
I lifted the blanket out of the box and held it against my heart; then I closed my eyes.
The story continues with a twist: Now it’s told from Ilsa’s point of view in Love, Accidentally, the new eShort Story by Sarah Pekkanen, available now for download from your online retailer.
Read on for a first look at Sarah Pekkanen’s dazzling new novel
Skipping a Beat
Coming in February 2011 from Washington Square Press
When my husband, Michael, died for the first time, I was walking across a freshly waxed marble floor in three-inch Stuart Weitzman heels, balancing a tray of cupcakes in my shaking hands.
Shaking because I’d overdosed on sugar—someone had to heroically step up
and taste-test the cupcakes, after all—and not because I was worried about slipping and dropping the tray, even though these weren’t your run-of-the-mill Betty Crockers. These were molten chocolate and cayenne-pepper masterpieces, and each one was topped with a name scripted in edible gold leaf.
Decadent cupcakes as place cards for the round tables encircling the ballroom—it was the kind of touch that kept me in brisk business as a party planner. Tonight, we’d raise half a million for the Washington, D.C., Opera Company. Maybe more, if the waiters kept topping off those wine and champagne glasses like I’d instructed them.
“Julia!”
I carefully set down the tray, then spun around to see the fretful face of the assistant florist who’d called my name.
“The caterer wants to lower our centerpieces,” he wailed, agony practically oozing from his pores. I didn’t blame him. His boss, the head florist—a gruff little woman with more than a hint of a mustache—secretly scared me, too.
“No one touches the flowers,” I said, trying to sound as tough as Clint Eastwood would, should he ever become ensconced in a brawl over the proper length of calla lilies.
My cell phone rang and I reached for it, absently glancing at the caller ID. It was my husband, Michael. He’d texted me earlier to announce he was going on a business trip and would miss the birthday dinner my best friend was throwing for me later in the month. If Michael had a long-term mistress, it might be easier to compete, but his company gyrated and beckoned in his mind more enticingly than any strategically oiled Victoria’s Secret model. I’d long ago resigned myself to the fact that work had replaced me as Michael’s true love. I ignored the call and dropped the phone back into my pocket.
All Is Bright Page 2
