A salesclerk approached us, carrying a box of tissues. “Everything okay?” she asked cheerfully, not in the least bit flustered by Lilly’s gush of tears.
“Fine.” I plucked two tissues from the box she offered. Then took two more, just to be on the safe side. “We’re a little emotional. First baby.” I dabbed at my eyes. Now I was going to have to buy the playsuit. I’d cried in the woman’s store and then used her tissues.
“Not a problem,” the young woman said. “Happens all the time. We’ve got some nursing bras on sale in the back, if you’re interested. Buy two, get one free.” She pointed in that general direction as she walked away.
I looked at Lilly and she looked at me, and we both started to laugh. I don’t even know why. I guess because it seemed like a silly response on the part of the salesclerk. How did tears equal nursing bras in her head? I handed Lilly a tissue. “You’re going to have raccoon eyes when we meet the girls. They’ll be worried something’s wrong.”
She sniffed and rubbed under her eyes. “More likely they’d be worried if I hadn’t been crying.” She looked up at me and blinked. “Okay now?” she asked.
“You’re perfect and beautiful, as always.” I gave her my best smile. “You want to check out the nursing bras?”
“Mom,” Mia called from the sidewalk.
We’d taken a table outside on the deck of my girls’ favorite organic restaurant, just a block west of the Rehoboth boardwalk.
“Hey,” I called over the rail.
She came up the steps. She was wearing denim shorts and her pizzeria work T-shirt. Dark blue Toms on her feet.
When she leaned over to kiss me hello, I smelled tomato paste and garlic. “Where’s Maura?”
“Coming. Hey, Aunt Lilly.” Mia leaned over the back of Lilly’s chair to kiss her.
“Hey, sweetie.” She offered her cheek. “Sit next to me.” She patted the chair beside her.
Mia slid into the chair across from me and picked up one of the menus from the center of the table.
“Have you seen your sister?” I asked. “About so tall.” I held up my hand. “Girl who looks a little bit like you?”
“She’s coming.” Mia lowered her gaze to the menu.
“But you were the one who had to work. I thought she was off.”
“She was, but she came into work anyway. She was in the kitchen doing something for Little Tony. Cutting up peppers or something. I don’t know. Green tea?” she asked Lilly, looking at her frosty glass.
“With mint. Want to try it?” Lilly slid the glass toward Mia.
Mia took a sip. “That’s good. I’ll think I’ll have that, too.”
“The antioxidants are so good for you,” Lilly explained, sounding like a cross between a kindergarten teacher and green tea spokeswoman on TV. “Even at your age.”
“Catechins.” Mia passed the glass back. “Learned about it in my nutrition class.”
I was impressed she knew about antioxidants but too wrapped up in Maura’s tardiness to switch gears. “But she is coming, right?”
“I guess, Mom. She said she was.” Mia gave me a quick, exasperated look over the top of the menu in her hand and then spoke to Lilly again. “Are there any specials today? Last week I had this crazy bean soup. They served it cold. It sounds gross, but it was so good.”
“On the board.” Lilly pointed to a chalkboard mounted on the wall next to the door.
The restaurant was tiny inside, just a couple of tables and a counter where one could order food to go. The deck, built right off the sidewalk, wasn’t much bigger; it sat maybe fifteen people. The place was packed; we’d been lucky to get a table. The food was expensive but organic, fresh, farm to table fare. So I sucked it up and agreed to meet here when my girls suggested it. Who was I kidding? I’d have agreed to meet them on the moon if they’d asked me.
“Why don’t you call Maura?” I asked Mia. “We’ll wait for her if she’s coming, but if she’s not coming—”
“Can’t call her.” She was staring at the menu, her brows knitted. “What’s buffalo mozzarella?”
“It’s an Italian mozzarella made from the milk of domestic buffalo,” Lilly explained.
“Ewwww.”
“Mia, why can’t you call Maura?” When she didn’t answer me, I raised my voice an octave. “Mia?”
She groaned. “Her phone wouldn’t come on, so I gave her mine.”
“You gave her yours?” I asked. Teen girls did that to a mother, I’d learned. Caused them to continually repeat phrases, like complete idiots.
Mia slowly lowered her menu to meet my gaze. “I gave her my phone to call you. She said she’d call and tell you she was on her way. I was already on my way here, so I didn’t need it.”
“I can’t believe she broke another phone.” I glanced at the menu, making no effort to hide my annoyance with my oldest daughter. I wasn’t that hungry, but I’d been looking forward all morning to lunch with Mia and Maura and Lilly. It was just like Maura to ruin it for me.
“Her phone’s not broken, Mom. It’s fine. This sounds good.” Mia pointed at something on the menu, showing it to Lilly. “Bacon here doesn’t have nitrates,” she explained.
“So if it’s not broken, why—”
“Mom, it got a little wet. She’s drying it in a bag of rice.” Mia set down the menu to look at me across the table. “Please, let’s not get into it when she gets here.”
“Do you know how much one of those phones costs?” I asked. “I—”
“Mom,” Mia interrupted. “I know. Phones are expensive. But I didn’t do anything to my phone, and I’ve only got one hour before I have to be back at work, and I don’t want to spend it talking about how Maura dropped her phone in the toilet. Or how irresponsible she is or how it’s time she started paying the consequences of her actions.”
“In the toilet?” Lilly asked, sounding horrified. “She dropped it in the toilet?”
“Happens all the time,” Mia told her. “You stick it in your back pocket.” She pretended to push a phone into the rear pocket of her jean shorts. “And when you go to pull up your shorts—”
“I got it.” Lilly pulled her reading glasses from her bag.
Mia returned her attention to me, softening her tone. “I’m not trying to be mean or anything, Mom, but all you two do is argue.”
I wanted to disagree, but she was right.
“It hurts my feelings,” Mia said softly, looking right at me. “Everything is always about Maura.” Her voice wavered. “Just once in a while it would be nice if we talked about me. About my SATs or my college applications, or”—a tear ran down her cheek, and she brushed it away with the back of her hand—“or how much I really liked Sam and he never even called me after I gave him my stupid phone number.”
“Mia,” I whispered, totally blindsided by what she was saying.
I could hear Lilly sniffing on the other side of the table.
“Mia, I . . . I’m so sorry.” I was so choked up that I could barely speak. I reached across the table to take her hand.
“It’s okay, Mom.” Mia exhaled. “Don’t make a big deal.”
“Mia, why didn’t you tell me you felt this way?” I managed.
“Because I—” She let me hold her hand for a minute and then pulled away. “I don’t want to argue with you.”
“That’s not arguing,” I said gently. “That’s telling me how you feel. So tell me. Tell me now how you feel when your sister and I get into it.”
“It’s not a big deal.” She hesitated, looking down at the table. “But I get tired of it, you know. Because she gets all the attention and pretty soon—” She stopped and started again. I could tell this was hard for her to say. “You know. I won’t have you.”
“Mom, pick up. Mom, pick up,” came a voice from inside my bag.
For a second I didn’t move.
“Mom, pick up. Mom, pick up,” my handbag repeated.
Mia reached for the menu again. “That’s really obnoxious
.”
I slipped my hand into my bag, wrapped my fingers around the cell phone, and pulled it out. “Tell me about it,” I said to Mia. Then to Maura, “You on your way?”
“Be there in a minute. I borrowed Viktor’s bike,” Maura told me cheerfully. “You think you could get me a bike? This is way easier than trying to find a place to park the car.”
“See you in a minute.” I hung up and looked at my daughter across the table. “I’m sorry, Mia. I never meant to make you feel as if you mattered less. I’m always telling other people how great you are, your good grades, how responsible you’ve been since I got sick.”
She just sat there for a minute, then stole a glance in my direction. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but the look Lilly gave me made me bite back my words. We all sat there silent for a minute, then I got to my feet. “Be right back.”
As I went by, Lilly grabbed my hand. “You want me to come with you?” she asked quietly.
“It’s one of those teeny-tiny bathrooms.” Mia was studying the menu again. “You know, the kind you have to back into. I know this girl Theresa, and she’s so big, I don’t know how she fits in there.”
I met Lilly’s gaze, sunglasses to sunglasses. “I’m fine,” I told her, adjusting my head scarf. “I’ll be right back.”
Lilly let go of my hand, and I ducked inside, past the counter where our waiter was picking up plates of sandwiches. There was no one in the teeny-tiny bathroom. I backed in, as Mia had instructed.
I closed the lid on the toilet and sat down and had a good cry. I never, ever intended to neglect Mia. It was just that Maura . . . Maura took up so much damned time. And here I’d been, feeling like I’d done a pretty good job raising my girls, feeling like they were going to be okay when I died. And now . . . now the guilt, piled on all the other guilt I already had, was almost overwhelming. I had totally screwed things up and hadn’t even known it. How could I die now? How could I leave Mia, thinking for one second that she was somehow less to me, that I loved her less?
28
Lilly
“What does buffalo mozzarella taste like?” Mia asked me, nose in the paper menu again.
There was emotion in her voice, not related to cheese. Her mother had just excused herself for the bathroom. To have a good cry I was sure.
“Not like . . . buffalo . . . right?” Mia asked.
I had to laugh. “Not like buffalo. It’s a cheese made from milk that just happens to come from buffalo. They raise them in Italy to specifically make this kind of cheese. It’s supposed to be really creamy, and it has a robust flavor.” I was quiet for a minute, and then I laid down my menu. “Mia, are you okay?”
“Sure.” She continued to study the lunch selections, or at least pretend to.
“You know your mom loves you.”
“Of course.”
“Very much. And moms don’t have favorites. It’s just that Maura—”
“Is a pain in the ass.” Mia finally put down the menu. “I know. You think I don’t know that? But did it ever occur to any of you that maybe that’s why she’s a pain in the ass?”
“To get your mom’s attention?” I asked.
Mia folded her arms over her chest. “To get more of it than me.”
I thought about that for a moment. “I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know that your mom has always tried to be fair. You’re the one she depends on. I think she worries about Maura because . . .” I tried to search for the right words. This was so hard for me—to talk with Mia about McKenzie dying. I couldn’t imagine how hard it had to be for McKenzie. “Because she knows you’re going to be okay when she passes. But Maura—”
“I’ll take care of her. Mom knows I will.”
Hearing a seventeen-year-old say such a thing hurt me so much that I almost felt a physical pain. “She does know that.” I brushed my hand over her head, smoothing her pretty ponytail. Her hair was exactly the color McKenzie’s had been. I remembered McKenzie’s ponytail looking identical when we were Mia’s age. Which seems so crazy—that I knew McKenzie when she was the age Mia is now.
“How are you doing?” I asked. “With your mom being sick?”
Mia reached out and took my glass of iced tea and stirred it with the straw. “Good. I mean . . . okay.”
“Nobody is okay with their mom dying, Mia.”
“I bet Aunt Janine was okay with her dad dying. With Aunt Aurora blowing him away.”
“Different circumstances,” I said, seeing through her ploy. Redirection. I’d been reading all about it in a parenting book. I wasn’t going to let her get away with it. “We’re not talking about Buddy right now, so no changing the subject. I’m serious. You seem to be handling your mom’s cancer very well. Maybe too well.”
Mia leaned forward and sipped my tea from the straw. “I guess I’m dealing fine. What’s my choice?” She looked at me. “She’s going to die whether I deal with it or not. Right?”
I pressed my lips together, not sure if I wanted to laugh or cry. Mia was so her mother’s child. Logical. Practical. Tough. But not afraid of her own emotions. “Do you talk with your mom much?” I asked. “About her dying?”
“Not really. Some.” She took another sip of my tea and pushed it away from her. “When we do, I try to keep it about dumb stuff. Stuff that’s not that important, like staying in Newark until we graduate next year. Which pieces of her jewelry we want. Stuff like that.”
“You don’t talk to her about how sad you are?”
Mia chewed on her lower lip. “Not really, because”—her voice caught in her throat—“because I don’t want her to worry.” She nibbled on her lower lip. “You know, about us.”
I didn’t know what to say, what to do, so I just listened.
“I don’t want her to know how scared I am,” Mia continued, “about what’s going to happen. What it’s going to be like not to”—she stopped and started again—“have her. I mean, what right do I have to be scared, Aunt Lilly? I get to stay here.” She turned to look at me, her eyes full of tears. “Mom’s the one who’s going to die and get put in the ground.”
Mia’s last words came out in a sob, and I pulled her to me. She wrapped her arms around me and rested her cheek somewhere between my breast and my baby belly.
“Oh, Mia. Mia,” I soothed, stroking her gorgeous red hair. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I’m so sorry. If there was any way I could take this from you, I would. Any one of us would.”
Mia didn’t say anything else and neither did I. Instead, I just held her until we heard a bicycle bell dinging and Maura went flying by us on the sidewalk below. “Check this out,” she hollered, lifting her hands off the handlebars and managing to swerve around a large trash receptacle.
“You’re going to feel stupid if you crash Viktor’s bike,” Mia hollered after her, wiping her eyes.
Maura brought the bike to a halt, whipping it around to nose into a bike rack at the end of the building. “You order yet?” She got off the bike and left it without a lock, coming down the sidewalk and up the steps. “I’m starving.” She slid into her mother’s chair and looked at her sister. “What’s going on?” She looked at me, then back at Mia. “We’re not having a cry fest, are we?”
Mia sniffed and picked up the menu, ignoring her sister’s comment. “I think I’m getting this grilled panini made with buffalo cheese. What are you going to get, Aunt Lilly?”
Just then, McKenzie came out of the restaurant. “What did I miss?” she asked, leaning over to kiss Mia on the top of the head before she pointed to Maura and directed, “Slide in.”
“It’s too sunny in that spot. You can slide in.” She stood up to let her by.
There was a moment of palpable tension when McKenzie didn’t do what all three of us expected her to do—which was slide in.
“Slide in, Maura. The medication I’m taking doesn’t allow me to sit in direct sun.”
“Well, you�
��re at the beach,” she muttered under her breath. And slid over to the other chair.
I could have sworn I saw Mia smile behind her menu.
“And give your sister back her phone,” McKenzie said.
“Yeah, did Mia tell you? Mine got wet. I don’t think it’s going to work again. I went to the phone store this morning. I can definitely get the upgrade. It’s only like a hundred dollars.”
“Sorry it took me so long to get back.” The waiter walked up to the end of our table. He was a college-aged boy: clean-cut, with a goofy smile. “What drinks can I get for you ladies?”
McKenzie waited until the waiter took her girls’ drink orders and went back into the restaurant. “Give your sister back her phone,” she repeated calmly.
“Okay, okay.” Maura pulled it out of her pocket and pushed it across the table to Mia. “But I’m expecting a call. Answer if it’s a 222, but not if it’s 234,” she told her sister. She glanced at her mother. “I was thinking that after lunch Mia could ride the bike back to work and we could go to the phone store and get my new phone. My numbers are uploaded onto iCloud, so I won’t lose anything.”
McKenzie placed her menu on the edge of the table. “I’m not buying you another phone, Maura. I told you that last time.”
“Mom, I have to have a phone.”
“I’m not buying you another. You’ll have to buy the replacement yourself or get your father’s spare.”
“He’s got a nice flip phone you can use,” Mia put in.
I would have laughed, but I could tell Maura was getting angry. It was nice to see McKenzie stand up to her daughter and not allow herself to be taken advantage of or bullied.
“Mom, I have to have a phone. What if you need us? What if you have to go to the hospital or something?” Maura was obviously flabbergasted.
“I can call a flip phone,” McKenzie said. She looked at Mia. “I was thinking I’d get the sandwich with the buffalo mozzarella. If you’re on the fence, you could get something else and we’ll share.”
“Mom, I can’t use a flip phone.” Maura said it as if her mother had suggested she communicate by ham radio. “I need a smartphone for . . . for school and stuff.”
As Close as Sisters Page 20