“There is no me and Alex Montgomery,” Rosa insisted. “And—not to change the subject—did I just hear you ask me to be your maid of honor?”
Linda took a deep breath and beamed at her. “I did. You’re my oldest and dearest friend, Rosa. I want you to stand up with me at my wedding. So, will you?”
“Are you kidding?” Rosa gave her friend’s hand a squeeze. “I’d be honored.”
She loved weddings and had been a bridesmaid six times. She knew it was six because, deep in the farthest reaches of her closet, she had six of the ugliest dresses ever designed, in colors no one had ever seen before. But Rosa had worn each one with a keen sense of duty and pride. She danced and toasted at the weddings; she caught a bouquet or two in her time. After each wedding, she returned home, carrying her dyed-to-match shoes in one hand and her wilting bouquet in the other.
“…as soon as we set a date,” Linda was saying.
Rosa realized her thoughts had drifted. “Sorry. What?”
“Hello? I said, keep August 21 and 28 open for me, okay?”
“Yes, of course.”
Linda finished her tea. “I’d better let you go. You need to deal with Alex Montgomery.”
“I don’t need to deal with Alex Montgomery. There’s simply no dealing to be done.”
“I don’t think you have a choice,” Linda said.
“That’s ridiculous. Of course I have a choice. Just because he came back to town doesn’t mean it’s my job to deal with him.”
“It’s your shot, Rosa. Your golden opportunity. Don’t let it pass you by.”
Rosa spread her hands, genuinely baffled. “What shot? What opportunity? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“To get unstuck.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“You’ve been stuck in the same place since Alex left you.”
“Bullshit. I’m not stuck. I have a fabulous life here. I never wanted to be anywhere else.”
“I don’t mean that kind of stuck. I mean emotionally stuck. You never got over the hurt and distrust of what happened with Alex, and you can’t move on. Now that he’s back, you’ve got a chance to clear the air with him and get him out of your heart and out of your head once and for all.”
“He’s not in my heart,” Rosa insisted. “He’s not in my head.”
“Right.” Linda patted her arm. “Deal with him, Rosa. You’ll thank me one day. He can’t be having an easy time, you know, since his mother—”
“What about his mother?” Rosa hadn’t heard talk of Emily Montgomery in ages, but that was not unusual. She never came to the shore anymore.
“God, you didn’t hear?”
“Hear what?”
“I just assumed you knew.” Linda jumped up and rifled through the stack of daily papers. She returned with a Journal Bulletin, folded back to show Rosa.
She stared at the photo of the haughtily beautiful Emily Montgomery, portrait-posed and gazing serenely at the camera.
“Oh, God.” Her hands rattled the paper as she pushed it away from her on the table. Then, in the same movement, she gathered the paper close and started to read. “Society matron Emily Wright Montgomery, wife of financier Alexander Montgomery III, died on Wednesday at her home in Providence…”
Rosa laid down the paper and looked across the table at her friend. “She was only fifty-five.”
“That’s what it says. Doesn’t seem so old now that we’re nearly thirty.”
“I wonder what happened.” Rosa thought about the way Alex had been last night—slightly drunk, coming on to her. Now his recklessness took on a different meaning. He’d just lost his mother. Last night, she had dropped him off at an empty house.
Linda leveled her gaze at Rosa. “You should ask him.”
Four
Rosa drove along Prospect Street to the house where she’d grown up. Little had changed here, only the names of the residents and the gumball colors of their clapboard houses. Buckling concrete driveways led to crammed garages with sagging rooflines. Maple and elm trees arched over the roadway, their stately grace a foil for the homely houses.
It was nice here, she reflected. Safe and comfortable. People still tended their peonies and hydrangeas, their roses and snapdragons. Women pegged out laundry on clotheslines stretched across sunny backyards. Kids rode bikes from house to house and climbed the overgrown apple tree in the Lipschitzes’ yard. She still thought of it as the Lipschitzes’ yard even though Linda’s parents had retired to Vero Beach, Florida, years ago.
She pulled up to the curb in front of number 115, a boxy house with a garden so neat that people sometimes slowed down to admire it. A pruned hedge guarded the profusion of roses that bloomed from spring to winter. Each of the roses had a name. Not the proper name of its variety, but Salvatore, Roberto, Rosina—each one planted in honor of their first communion. There were also roses that honored relatives in Italy whom Rosa had never met, and a few for people she didn’t know—La Donna, a scarlet beauty, and a coral floribunda whose name she couldn’t remember.
The sturdy bush by the front step, covered in creamy-white blooms, was the Celesta, of course. A few feet away was the one Rosa, a six-year-old with a passion for Pepto-Bismol pink, had chosen for herself. Mamma had been so proud of her that day, beaming down like an angel from heaven. It was one of those memories Rosa cherished, because it was so clear in her heart and mind. She wished all the past could be remembered this way, with clarity and affection, no tinge of regret. But that was naive, and by now, she had figured that out.
She used her ancient key to let herself in. Pop had given it to her when she was nine years old, and she had never once lost it. In the front hall, she blinked the lights a few times. Out of habit she called his name, though it had been some years since he’d been able to hear her.
An acrid odor wafted from the kitchen, along with a buzzing sound.
“Shit,” she muttered under her breath, clutching the strap of her purse to her shoulder as she ran to the back of the house. On the counter, a blender stood unattended, its seized motor humming its last, rubber-scented smoke streaming from the base. She grabbed the cord—it felt hot to the touch—and jerked it from the wall. Inside the blender, the lukewarm juice sloshed. The kitchen smoke alarm blinked—what good was that if Pop wasn’t looking?
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, you’re going to kill yourself one of these days,” Rosa said, waving the smoke away from her face. She peered through the window and saw him out in the backyard, puttering around, oblivious.
On the kitchen table, a newspaper lay open to the Emily Montgomery obituary. Rosa pictured her father starting his breakfast, paging through the paper, stopping in shock as he read the news. He’d probably wandered outside to think about it.
She opened the windows and turned on the exhaust fan over the range, then emptied the blender carafe into the sink. As she cleaned up the mess, Rosa felt a wave of nostalgia. In the scrubbed and gleaming kitchen, her mother’s rolled-out pasta dough used to cover the entire top of the chrome and Formica table. Rosa could still picture the long sleek muscles in her mother’s arms as she wielded the red-handled rolling pin, drawing it in smooth, rhythmic strokes over the butter-yellow dough.
The reek of the burnt-out motor was a corruption here, in Mamma’s world. The smell of her baking ciambellone used to be so powerful it drew the neighbors in, and