“Look, you both have red hair! Sort of like family already.” Rose’s father had smiled hopefully at them over the carved turkey, steam from bowls of potatoes and stuffing and green beans nearly fogging his glasses. Rose had glared at him, only too aware of the vast difference between her own unwieldy, blond-streaked curls and Joan’s glossy, fire-hydrant waves, meant for a shampoo commercial.
Joan’s mother, Aileen, had been easier: thick-waisted and gentle, always baking cookies and freezing leftovers and wondering if everyone was warm enough. Her very presence was somewhat miraculous—Rose couldn’t remember her father, already old to have a daughter her age, ever going on a single date. Rose’s own mother had died the summer before Rose started high school after a brief, brave fight against an unfair cancer. Grief had seared Rose and her father into a team of two then, no new members allowed. Together they’d encouraged each other’s introversion—four years had passed in a blur of takeout containers and books strewn across the dining room table, punctuated only by tedious classes and noisy bus rides with a backpack that’d seemed illegally heavy.
The autumn Rose had left for college, her father took an early retirement from the university. She’d encouraged him to join a book club with all his new free time. You need to do something with me gone. You’ll forget how to talk to people like a normal human being. She’d even found a group, one whose reading list she knew he could tolerate. By chance, Joan’s mother had also just joined; five months later and there they were “one big happy family.”
After that Christmas, Rose had stayed in school for as long as she could: undergraduate degree, apprenticeship in conservation. All completed in New York, just a train ride away. Whenever she needed to escape the dazzling chaos of the city, she’d spend the weekend studying in the lull of her father’s library, discussing her courses over dinner. Then Aileen died—abruptly, a stroke. Rose had tried to come back more often, but by the time she’d finished her master’s, her father’s health had faltered past repair. Two wives buried proved more than he was willing to endure. I’m enduring! Rose had sometimes wanted to shout, shaking his bird-boned shoulders. And you’re leaving me alone. She didn’t think twice about giving up her small apartment in the city to move back in and take care of him. They became a team of two, again: takeout dinners and books. Public radio programs and medication demarcating their days.
By then Joan had come home too, with an engineer husband and a toddler in tow. She’d cut her hair and exchanged the giggly, lip-glossed version of herself for one with greater girth and calm. Every Monday night the doorbell would ring and Rose knew it’d be her—standing on the doorstep with dinner (casseroles, lasagnas, wide glass pans wrapped in tinfoil and filled with recipes from Taste of Home magazine), asking if Rose was getting enough sleep. It was Joan who’d come up with the idea for the bookshop, a way for Rose to establish her restoration business, plus get a small profit from book sales. They lived in a university town, after all; it’d be a perfect fit. Rose had agreed, and in what seemed like the blink of an eye had found herself putting a down payment on a storefront. Sometimes she felt like a movie character in a dream sequence: like she’d just woken up one day and was there, here, back home, a bookshop and cat owner. In the end, she was left with no real awareness of how it’d all happened—just a sense that it was inevitable, her life quietly arranging itself around a particular gravitational pull.
Now, six months after her father’s marble headstone had been lowered into the damp cemetery grass, with the empty house hers alone, Rose wound up at Joan’s at least one night a week. More, if Mark was traveling for work.
Joan straightened up, the clothes in a tight wad at her hip. She stole a peek at Rose from the corner of her eye.
“Joan. I know it’s something when you look at me like that.”
“Rosebud, I think you should see the computer. I left the page up.” She shifted her attention to Henry, who, deprived of his shirt and hungry, appeared to be debating whether to cry.
Rose’s body stood of its own accord.
In the living room, the music swelled. L’amour est enfant de Bohème, il n’a jamais jamais connu de loi…The glowing square of the computer beckoned her from the far end of the room. As she padded across the carpet, a photo on the screen came into focus. William. Clean-shaven, suited, a more polished sort of handsome than he’d been at the shop. At his side, a woman with Scandinavian good looks posed for the camera. She wore an immaculate white shift dress, hair falling in straight blond curtains from a perfect center part. They’d been photographed at a gallery—behind them hung colorful paintings, blurring into the background. Together they looked impossibly chic, the sort of couple you’d watch stepping into the backseat of a car parked outside an expensive restaurant and imagine what that life must feel like. A short paragraph of text ran down the right margin of the page: his training, a summary of projects with links to each exhibition. Then the last line:
“Lomazzo lives in Connecticut with his wife and their two daughters.”
Rose squinted at the screen, trying to interpret his expression. Had she just imagined it then—the surge of warmth when he’d clasped her hand? She didn’t remember seeing a wedding ring. Maybe they were separated? A small hope fluttered in the pit of her stomach, immediately squelched by reproach. No, she shouldn’t wish for misfortune like that. She must have just imagined it. Staring at the photo, Rose realized with some surprise how far she’d allowed her thoughts to wander: she’d already pictured him coming back into the shop and casually asking her to lunch, as if the idea had just occurred to him. She’d seen them strolling, side by side, beneath the cherry blossoms that would unfurl their origami petals all through town within a month. They’d already gone to dinner together in her mind, even—there’d been candles. Two years of caregiving and here she was, raw with loneliness, spinning up fantasies about the first handsome man to touch her. Rose rubbed her face in her hands until her cheeks tingled with heat.
From the kitchen came the crash of a pan, the quick braying of Henry’s sobs. Rose leaned to turn the volume up. Maria Callas’s voice bloomed to fill the room, her powerful aria drowning out all else.
Tout autour de toi, vite vite , il vient, s’en va, puis il revient….Tu crois le tenir, il t’évite. Tu crois l’éviter, il te tient…
* * *
The next day even the sky couldn’t seem to hold a cheerful mood, erasing any patch of blue with smudgy gray cloud cover. Rose sat at her desk, watching the passersby out on the street. First the morning crowd, coffee cups in hand. Then a lunch rush of students from the university halls a few blocks away, chattering in pairs, scuttling back to class clutching crumpled to-go bags. Already, she’d casually shuffled through the stack of papers William had left; now she couldn’t help but put together a quick assessment of what a repair might cost. The number was high—she brought it down to a more reasonable sum.