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“Really?” I squinted, trying to connect the smirking beauty in the picture to the slack-faced, gray-haired woman I’d seen sitting in the truck outside the bakery. “Wow.”
“And this,” she said, flipping the page, “is Jack and me.”
I leaned in to look at the photograph: two little kids, one a chubby-cheeked, short-haired toddler and the other an even chubbier-cheeked bald baby, sat together on a blanket with a plastic bucket in between them. The toddler had a little shovel and was digging in the sand with it. The baby had an identical shovel and appeared to be chewing on the handle. I laughed. “Which one is you?”
Mom gave me a funny little smile and pointed to the toddler. “That’s me. I was about a year older than Jack.”
“Are there more photos?”
“Oh yes. He and his mother lived here for several years.”
“Does Diana know you found these?”
Mom flipped the album shut. “No, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell her just yet.”
“Because once she gets her hands on them, she’s not giving them back.”
“She’s welcome to them once I’m finished here,” she said. “But I have a lot to deal with today, errands to run before the stores close, and I won’t be here to monitor your grandmother. Can I trust you to do that?”
For a moment, I thought about asking her about the bruise under Mimi’s jaw. But she was already on her feet, walking away, the photo album tucked under her arm.
“Of course.”
Mom looked relieved. “Good. She’ll like that. You’re so patient withher.” She hesitated at the door. “I think you should know, when we take her back to Willowcrest, she’ll be moving into memory care. Having her here, seeing it up close, it’s become clear that she’s deteriorating. You should prepare yourself.”
Adam had said nearly the same thing last night, but this was different. My mother’s tone was cold, matter-of-fact—and did I hear relief in her voice? But then she smiled and said, “Let’s enjoy today. Keep her company, listen to her stories. Savor the moment. You know.”
I nodded.
I knew.
When I think of it now, I think of that—cling to it, the idea that before my grandmother was dead, she was already gone. Lost in another world where she was still young, still full of promise, still looking forward to a whole life with the man she loved. She was unusually quiet that day, perched on her favorite green sofa in the parlor, her eyes flicking this way and that. She watched as Adam and Richard and William wrangled the Christmas tree into an upright position. The tree was huge, fully filling up the space by the window, so wide that its outer branches scraped the spines of the books in the built-in shelves. The smell of balsam was everywhere.
“I think it’s too—” William started to say, but too late, and there was a moment of petrified silence as the tree’s top scraped across the ceiling, leaving a long dirty mark. The men looked in terror at one another, at me, at Mimi, and back at one another—and burst out laughing all at once.
“Oopsy-daisy,” Richard said, setting off a fresh round of hysterics.
Mimi smiled serenely. “Our man Smith will take care of that,” she said, and the smile became a smirk. “I’ll see to it, don’t you worry. He’ll scrub it until it gleams.”
“Who’s Smith?” William said while Adam stared and Richard flailed wildly in a show of violently shushing him.
“He’s the ghost of Christmas past,” he said. “Or he’s just some guy.Either way, if Mother says he’s going to clean the ceiling, I for one believe her.”
“Papa says he has to do everything I say,” Mimi said, and then the smile faded from her face. “He does, but he hates me for it.”
The rest of us exchanged looks, but Diana walked into the room then, letting out an appreciativeooohwhen she saw the tree. She was wearing an apron and carrying a bowl of oranges, and the scent of nutmeg and cinnamon wafted in behind her. She’d found Mimi’s recipe box stashed away in a kitchen cabinet and had spent all day industriously baking cookies, a pumpkin pie, and some sort of holiday cake flavored with oranges that was a recipe passed down from my grandfather’s mother, the Greek side of the family. My mother had disappeared hours earlier to go to the market, but I thought that even if she came back empty-handed, we had enough sugar and alcohol to last the night—and that if things kept going as they had been, we might even enjoy ourselves.
“Someone should check out the attic. Dora said there are lights and ornaments,” Diana said. She set the oranges on the coffee table and slid in beside Mimi on the sofa, pulling a box of whole cloves out of her apron. “Mother, how are your hands? Would you like to make pomanders? I’ve already pierced the rinds.”
“How lovely,” Mimi said, and began pressing the cloves into one of the oranges, her fingers moving deftly over the surface, transforming it into a spiked sphere. The smell of citrus and spice filled the room. If someone had walked in at that moment, they could have mistaken us for a happy, normal family having a Hallmark holiday, baking cookies and making crafts and being kind, not cruel, to one another.
I left Mimi with Diana sitting beside her and climbed the stairs to the third floor, then made my way into the attic. It was a mess up there, full of boxes and trunks that someone, maybe my mother looking for the missing-now-found photo albums, had rifled through and then left open and in disarray. The Christmas stuff was guarded by a boxhalf-full of ledgers like the ones spread out on the floor in the library, and a trunk stuffed with men’s work clothes, coveralls and flannel shirts and a waxed jacket that someone—my grandfather, maybe—might have worn on damp mornings when he left at dawn for the docks. I smelled dust and mold and a hint of ancient cologne as I shoved it aside, aiming my phone’s flashlight into the dark behind it, looking for the string lights. I found them a moment later, just as my phone buzzed with a message. It was from Adam: a selfie with a caption that said,Waiting for u. He was in the little powder room under the stairs—I could see the wallpaper in the background—and he was holding an ornament above his head. It was the kind of thing you’d find in a bin at a dollar store: a brightly colored plastic frog in a Santa hat, straddling what looked like a rocket. I squinted and then guffawed.
Not a frog,I thought.A toad. A toad riding a missile.“Missile toad,” I said aloud. “He’s standing under the missile toad.”
I grabbed a box of lights and started downstairs, still laughing, shaking my head. There was a time, not that long ago, when I would have had to pretend I was too cool for this sort of earnestness. I would have told the story to my friends and laughed along with them at Adam’s expense, and when they asked if I had texted him back, I would have rolled my eyes and said, “Ugh, of course not,” and then enjoyed their approving nods. But here in the privacy of this old, whispering house, surrounded by a bickering family whom I didn’t need to impress, I could admit that I liked it. This was what I wanted. I was going to go downstairs and kiss my boyfriend under the missile toad, and I could imagine that stupid ornament hanging in a series of doorways, a reminder of the first holiday we’d ever shared. I could see the two of us laughing at it, embracing under it, one, two, five years from now.
Once, Adam had said that he believed things happened for a reason, that fate had brought us together. I’d laughed at him then, told him I didn’t believe in fate.
