Dead Letter Day (14 page)

“Melina,” she cried, giving me a hug and a kiss.

“Mama,” she said, more quietly, kissing my grandmother on the cheek, careful not to knock her off balance.

“I didn’t know you’d be here,” I said. I would totally have put on more makeup if I’d known. Aunt Kitty is a girly girl and has tried to girly me up pretty much since my birth. I really try to humor her because I adore her, but I am way too old for rumba panties.

My hand went to my stomach again. What if I had a little girl? I sucked at girly. She’d have to rely on Aunt Kitty, who let’s face it wasn’t exactly au courant fashion-wise anymore, and Norah.

“I didn’t know I’d be here either, but then I heard your mother was making a brisket. What’s the occasion?” Kitty looped her arm through my elbow and started toward the house.

“I don’t think there is one, except that I wanted brisket.” And apparently, my mother loved me.

Aunt Kitty smiled up at me (she’s also the shortest member of the family except Grandma Rosie). “I guess that’s occasion enough.”

It’s not that brisket is so difficult to make, at least not the way my mother does it, but it is time-consuming. It has to cook low and slow and be sliced at precisely the right moment that it’s still tender enough that it falls apart under your fork, but maintains its integrity as a slice and doesn’t shred.

We all went inside. “Thank God you’re here,” my dad said to Ted. “The estrogen level was rising so fast I thought I was going to drown.”

Ted laughed. “There are worse ways to go.”

My father snorted—SNORTED!—and said, “Spoken like a man younger than I am. Beer?”

I looked around. “Where’s Patrick?” My brother is almost always here for Friday night dinner.

“Traffic on the causeway,” my mother said, sticking her head out from the kitchen. “Come in here and help.”

My brother has been getting out of chores since he started college by blaming “traffic on the causeway.” I’m not saying the traffic doesn’t exist. It does. It sucks. You’re trapped once you get on the causeway. I know that. I’m just saying that if a person always gets to not set the table because of traffic on the causeway, it’s because they want it that way.

He’s always been a little smarter than me. Traffic is only his newest ruse.

My father started pouring wine for the ladies. “None for me, Dad. Thanks,” I said.

He froze for a second, the wine bottle poised over a glass. “Okay.” The room seemed awfully quiet for a few seconds and then the bustle started up again. I was on salad, one of the few things I can be trusted not to screw up. Aunt Kitty was on cleaning green beans and Norah had to finish mashing the potatoes. Ted disappeared somewhere with my father.

I tried to imagine the scene with a baby on the counter in one of those holder things that people tote them around in. There was barely room for all of us who were cooking. And it’s not like it would stay a baby for long. Pretty soon it would be running all over the place. I teach enough kids to know how active they are. My mother’s house was totally not childproof.

Forget my mother’s house, what about the apartment? My place had baby land mines everywhere. Open sockets. Sharp-edged tables. Actual weaponry.

“Melina, are you listening?”

My mother’s voice broke into my reverie. “What? Sure. I mean, what did you need?” I asked.

“The tomato is not going to dice itself.” She smiled, but with one of those tight smiles that let me know I was doing something to get up her nose.

I looked down. Apparently I was standing there with my knife poised over a tomato on a cutting board and not actually using the knife on the tomato. I got to work.

My mother shook her head and went back to making gravy, which I think is true magic. I’ve never been able to make it without huge lumps in it, except for one time when I went after it with an immersion blender which just made the gravy frothy in addition to being lumpy. Can I say that frothy, lumpy gravy is one of the most wrong substances on the planet?

My brother made his entrance about thirty seconds before the brisket hit the table. He didn’t even have to carry so much as the horseradish from the kitchen. He and our dad did one of those shoulder to chest man hugs, he shook hands with Ted, kissed my grandmother and my mother and my aunt, beamed at Norah and gave me a quick hug. Then he did a double take. “You okay?” he asked me.

“Fine. A little tired.” I was going to have to invest in some of that under-eye stuff that hides dark circles.

“You never get tired.” He slid into his place and Dad set a beer down in front of him.

Luckily the conversation veered off from there. Patrick is working on his master’s and he already talks like a professor, but truth be told, he always knew how to hold court. I used to occasionally resent his natural ability to command everyone’s attention, but tonight I was grateful. I had way too much on my mind to keep up my usual façade with my
family. Even so, I saw both Grandma Rosie and Aunt Kitty casting occasional glances my way. I didn’t like that one bit.

One of the great things about being Grandma Rosie’s ride is that she gets tired pretty fast these days. By eight thirty, she was yawning. She barely made it through her slice of yellow Bundt cake with the chocolate ganache icing, for which my mother is rightfully famous, before her head started to do the droop and jerk.

“Ready to go home, Grandma?” I asked as I picked up her plate, noting that Patrick suddenly had to make a phone call and was nowhere to be found right when it was time to clear the table. Plus he’d eaten the icing out of the center of the Bundt cake. It was where the icing was purely icing. It was like the tenderloin of the icing. I wondered if my mother would let me take some leftover cake home with me.

Grandma smiled up at me. “I am, dear. Just give me a second to powder my nose.”

Grandma clip-clopped to the bathroom with her walker while I helped my mother pack up a little care package of leftovers to take home with her. My mother tucked a section of hair that had come out of my braid behind my ear. “Do you want to have coffee sometime this week?” she asked.

“Do you have a potentially demonic barista you want me to check out?” I asked, sealing shut the container of brisket.

“No. I just want to have coffee with my daughter.”

I looked up. She looked…hurt. Damn. I’d missed something again. Truly, ’Canes might often be out to kill me, but they were soooo much easier to read.

“Sounds good, Mom. How about Wednesday? Does that work for you?”

She smiled. “It sounds great.”

Grandma came out of the bathroom and the whole family shepherded her back out to the Buick. It was like the slowest moving parade ever. It was fine with me. It gave me a second to enjoy the night. There’s nothing like a crisp fall night in a nice northern California suburb. It’s all about the smell of fresh cut lawns and crisp leaves.

I sensed something else, too, though. I turned in a slow circle, trying to figure out where it was coming from. The signature was so faint, I could hardly make out if anything was there at all. Maybe I was imagining it. Although if I was, why was the hair on the back of my neck starting to rise.

My mother had my grandmother in the car and was helping with her seat belt while Aunt Kitty tried to put the walker in the trunk of the Buick. I started toward her, but Ted was already there. He took the walker away from Aunt Kitty and slipped it into the trunk. I imagine it helped to be over five feet tall and not to be tottering around on high heels. He definitely made it look easy, though.

Of course, Ted made everything look easy. He did everything with an easy grace, even tying his shoes. Would the baby inherit that? Would our baby come out genetically predisposed for that kind of athleticism? What would a baby that was half me and half Ted look like? I bet there was a website that I could look at.

“You ready, Melina?” Norah called out from the backseat of the Buick.

Everyone was standing there and looking at me. Great. “Sure.” I flashed them all a big smile. “Let’s roll.”

I hopped in the back of the Buick with Norah, and Ted backed the car down the driveway.

“What were you looking for back there?” Norah whispered to me.

“I’m not sure. I thought I sensed something, but it was too faint to really get a sense of what it was. Whatever it was, I doubt it was powerful enough to do anything,” I whispered back.

Ted pulled onto the freeway and headed back toward downtown Sacramento and then hung a right on Alhambra to get back to the Sunshine Assisted Living Community. We pulled up in front. Ted retrieved the walker while I helped Grandma out of the car, and then I walked her in.

The lights were all on, but the front lobby had the empty feeling of a business closed for the night. Of course, it was after nine. Pretty much all the residents were back in their apartments, either in bed or getting ready to get there. Sunshine residents were totally the early-to-bed type.

Grandma nodded at the girl behind the receptionist desk. “Good night, Maricela. I’m home for the night.”

Maricela smiled and said, “Welcome back. I’ll mark you back in.”

We headed back down the hall. Grandma Rosie was even slower on the return trip than she’d been leaving tonight. I don’t think the wine or the heavy meal was doing much for Grandma’s speed. If we got much slower, I was pretty sure we’d actually be going backward. I tried to do some deep breathing and looked at the watercolors that decorated the hallways to stay calm.

She shuffled a few steps more forward. “So have you told Ted yet?” she asked.

“About what?” I asked, peering at a still life. Why did they always put one wilted flower in those paintings?

“About the baby?” she asked, shuffling a few more steps forward.

I froze. “How did you…? I mean, what do you…?”

She waved one hand at me and then put it back on the walker. “I’m an old lady. I know a pregnant woman when I see one.”

I looked down at my stomach and she laughed.

“No. It doesn’t show there yet.”

“Then where does it show?”

“On your face, sweetheart. In your eyes.” Grandma kept going, one halting step in front of the other. “I take it the answer to my question is no, then. You haven’t told Ted.”

“I haven’t told anyone.” I’d barely admitted it to myself.

Now Grandma did stop. “Are you thinking about…not having the baby?”

Was I? I supposed so. I’d always felt like the decisions women had to make about these things should be private and personal. I’d never wanted to join that particular debate. Now I was going to have to have it with myself. “I’m not sure.”

Grandma nodded and started up again, heading toward her apartment. “It’s not an easy decision to make.”

“I don’t know if I’m ready, Grandma,” I admitted, falling into step beside her again.

She laughed. “No one ever is, especially not if they think they are.”

“So what should I do?” I asked as we arrived at her door.

She handed the keys over to me to unlock it. “You have to do what’s right for you and for Ted and for the baby.” She looked up at me and smiled. “Although I wouldn’t mind getting to meet my great-grandchild. No pressure, though.”

“Thanks tons, Gram.”

She laughed, then suddenly her face got serious. “This is going to be terribly hard on your mother.”

I winced. “You mean the whole unwed-pregnant-daughter thing?”

“Heavens, no. She’s just going to worry herself sick over you. You know you’re her favorite after all.”

“I am not her favorite. Patrick is. He always has been.” Patrick who played soccer and went to prom and got good grades and never had weird unexplained absences.

“Pffft.” Grandma walked into her apartment and clapped her hands to turn on the lights. “You only think that because she overcompensates. Trust me, a mother knows.”

I was going to have to think about this one. Could that be right? I’d have to completely rewrite my whole relationship with my mother.

“I didn’t think she would ever get over you almost drowning when you were three.” Grandma plopped down into her rocking chair.

That was news to me. Of course, I’d had a whole lifetime to figure out myself after that. “I don’t remember that.”

“How could you? You were a baby. That was the thing. She hadn’t protected her baby.” Grandma frowned, then. “And afterward, you seemed so different. The doctors couldn’t find anything, but your mother was sure that you’d changed somehow. Do you remember anything about that at all?”

We were definitely plowing into some deep water there. “Like you said, I was pretty much a baby.” I kissed Grandma’s cheek. “I gotta go. Norah and Ted are waiting.”

“I understand.” She grabbed my hand and held it. “Tell him, Melina. He’s a good man. He’ll do the right thing.”

I was pretty sure she was right and that was part of my problem.

6

“YOU OKAY?” TED ASKED AS I SLID INTO THE CAR.

“Fine. I wish everyone would stop asking me that.”

“Well, until you come clean, you probably won’t get that wish,” Norah said from the backseat.

Did they know, too? Was I broadcasting on some sort of pregnancy frequency without even knowing it? “What do you mean?”