One Week In December

by Holly Chamberlin

  This time, Julie didn’t have to feign absentmindedness. For a moment she really couldn’t remember what had become of the silver salt cellar her grandmother had bought in a flea market—so the story went—when, as an eighteen-year-old, she had traveled to France for a month with a wealthy aunt.

  “Now, let me think for a minute,” she said, squinting as if that action might aid recall. “Oh, yes, I remember now. I sold it.”

  Julie wasn’t a sentimental person. To her, expediency and practicality mattered far more than tokens or things and the arbitrary meanings people attached to them. To sell an object almost never used—and one she didn’t think very pretty—meant nothing more to her than what it was, a sale. It was a business transaction, and emotions had nothing to do with business transactions.

  To her oldest daughter, however, it meant something quite other. The look on Olivia’s face startled Julie.

  “Liv, dear, what’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I cannot believe that you sold your grandmother’s most precious possession.”

  Julie shrugged. “Actually, she didn’t much care for it, which is why she gave it to me.”

  “That’s not the point,” Olivia retorted. “Your grandmother touched that salt cellar. For all we know, her fingerprints were still on it!”

  The thought struck Julie as slightly macabre. Her daughter wanted to collect the fingerprints of a dead woman, who, from all Julie could remember, wasn’t a very nice woman to begin with. She thought of the old habit of putting a bit of a dead loved one’s hair in a locket and shuddered. “Oh, Liv,” she said, “aren’t the living more important than the dead and their artifacts?”

  “No, they’re not! How can you say that? If everyone took the position that history didn’t matter, then—”

  Olivia stopped abruptly. Julie watched her daughter carefully. She seemed overwhelmed by her own emotions.

  “Then what?” she prompted. “Oh, honey, I’m not saying we can’t treasure and cherish memories and stories and traditions. And I certainly believe that we should learn from mistakes made in the past. All I’m saying is that—”

  Olivia interrupted her. “I’m going to get that salt cellar back. When exactly did you sell it? Who did you sell it to? Maybe I can still track it down. Was it to a dealer in Boston? Do you have the receipt? If I leave early tomorrow morning, and if the snow slows down, I can make it to Boston in time to—”

  Julie reached for her daughter’s arm, but Olivia stepped away. “Olivia,” she said. “Don’t be absurd! That troublesome old salt cellar is probably long gone. Besides, your proper place is right here with your family. And with your husband. Not chasing down some dusty old—artifact.”

  Olivia stalked off a few feet, then abruptly turned to face her mother. “Why did you sell it anyway?” she demanded. “On a whim?”

  “No, not on a whim. The boiler needed to be replaced and I didn’t want to dip into our savings. That old salt cellar was just sitting there, doing nothing but taking up space and collecting dust, so I thought I’d see if it was worth something. Well, it turned out it was worth something, just about the cost of a new boiler.”

  “A boiler!” Olivia cried, her face a mask of horror and incomprehension. “God, Mom, why didn’t you ask me for the money?”

  “Oh, Liv, don’t be absurd,” Julie said with a laugh. “I’m not asking my children to pay for repairs to my home. Besides, I didn’t say your father and I didn’t have the money. I just didn’t want to spend it.”

  “So you sold a precious family heirloom instead.”

  Julie was beginning to lose patience with her oldest child. “Liv, it was only a salt cellar! It wasn’t, oh, I don’t know, a functioning body part! I’m not dealing in the illegal selling of human organs!”

  Olivia suddenly stalked off to the other end of the room, and then back, as if her body contained negative energy it just had to burn. “Mom, don’t you understand that objects have meaning beyond their physical presence or their usefulness or their monetary value? The objects we own are—they’re talismans. They bespeak memory. They’re treasures.”

  Julie sighed. How had her daughter become so . . . What was the word? Fixated. Obsessed. It didn’t seem normal.

  “Well,” she said, “in my opinion, these objects we say we own far too often own us.”

  “That makes no sense, Mom. And anyway, that salt cellar wasn’t yours to sell!”

  Julie raised her eyebrows. “Oh? Then whose was it? Yours?”

  “It was no one’s to sell. We are the custodians, our family, we are the keepers of our past.”

  “Custodians!” Julie couldn’t help but laugh. “That’s ridiculous, Liv. This is a family, a living, breathing organism, not a museum.”

  “Yeah, well, next time don’t do me—don’t do this family—any favors.”

  Julie felt hurt, and annoyed. But she tried to retain an even temper. Shouting wasn’t going to get her point across; maybe reason would, and maybe it wouldn’t. It was still worth a try. “I truly don’t know why you’re so upset, Olivia,” she said. “We have plenty of family heirlooms. I’d be more than glad to give you a few special pieces. James likes to cook, doesn’t he? Well, we still have all of Great-Grandma Rowan’s recipes.”

  “This is not about James. This is about the family.”

  If James wasn’t Olivia’s family, then her daughter’s marriage was likely in worse shape than she’d imagined. Julie sighed. She felt defeated and, more annoyingly, puzzled. “Well, it’s too late to do anything about the salt cellar now. What’s done is done, what’s gone is gone.”

  Olivia rubbed her eyes and it suddenly struck Julie that her daughter looked older than her forty-two years. There were lines around her mouth that hadn’t been there six months ago, and deep shadows ringed her eyes. Could sadness—emptiness—really wreak such havoc? Apparently it could.

  “I’ve got some sorting to do,” Olivia said, dropping her hands and turning toward the stairs.

  “Liv? Before you go . . .”

  “What?” she said, turning back with obvious reluctance.

  Julie wasn’t a coward. She would risk an explosion on the chance that her daughter would open up about any trouble she and her husband might be having. “Is everything okay between you and James?”

  Olivia looked stunned. “Of course it is,” she said. “Why would you even ask?”

  “Well, I don’t know, you both seem a little—well, not yourselves. I couldn’t help wondering if maybe the subject of adoption had come up again.”

  “No,” she said flatly. Firmly. “It hasn’t.”

  “Oh. Well, and then this news about Becca wanting to tell everything to Rain . . . I thought it might—upset you. After all you and James went through trying to start a—”

  Julie stopped mid-sentence. A look had come across her daughter’s face that frightened her. It was a look of—fury. Olivia stalked back toward her mother.

  “You want the truth, Mom?” she said. “I’ll tell you what upsets me. I’ll tell you what’s upset me for the past sixteen years. The fact that you and Dad and Grandma decided to give Rain to David and Naomi and not to me.”

  Julie was alarmed by her daughter’s anger. She wasn’t afraid, at least, not for her own sake, but for her daughter, she was. She’d had no idea Olivia had been harboring such terrible resentment toward her family, a resentment that easily might have been fueled by the trouble she’d had conceiving—and by the ultimate acceptance of the fact that she would never be a biological mother.

  “But, Liv,” she said, hoping her sympathy was obvious, “you were single, on your own, working your way through grad school. David was married, settled. And he and Naomi planned on starting a family soon, anyway.”

  Olivia poked her forefinger at her own chest. Julie flinched at the force of the gesture. “I’d planned on having a family, too, Mom,” Olivia said. “And my being single was no reason for you to deny me custody of Rain. Plenty of single people are parents, and d
amn good ones at that. I’ve always been responsible. For God’s sake, Mom, I babysat for David, Becca, and Lily. It’s not as if I had no experience being around children. And you remember I took that child psychology class in college.”

  One college course didn’t make you an expert on anything, but Julie let that comment slide. “I’m sorry, Liv,” she said. “But . . . why didn’t you say anything to us back then? At least your father and I would have known your feelings on the matter.”

  Olivia let out a brief and nasty laugh. “Because I was a fool. I thought you or Dad or Grandma would know how I might feel. But you probably never even considered my feelings, did you?”

  “We’re not mind readers, Olivia. I’m sorry, but as far as I recall, you never indicated to any of us that you wanted to be Rain’s adoptive mother.”

  “Yeah, well, what good would it have done, anyway? You still would have chosen David. David is the favorite. He always has been and he always will be.”

  “Oh, stop that, Olivia,” Julie said, with rising anger. “You sound like a child. David and Naomi came to us with an offer to be Rain’s parents. And their willingness convinced us that giving Rain to them was the right thing to do. I refuse to be made to feel guilty about this situation. By you or Becca or by anybody.”

  Olivia shook her head. “Fine. Wash your hands of all responsibility. Sell off the family’s property. Deny any guilt in passing over your oldest child in favor of the favorite child. Life must be really easy for people like you. People without a trace of sentiment or family feeling. People who don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves.”

  Before Julie could open her mouth to reply—and she had no idea what to say to that horrible and unfair accusation—Olivia stormed from the living room and clomped up the stairs, leaving her mother feeling, for the first time in years, truly wounded.

  27

  Lily leaned against the doorjamb and watched her mother, her perfect mother, as she stood at the kitchen sink, washing dishes. Lily had always thought of her mother as one of the most straightforward, honest, and dependable people she had ever met.

  Until now. Until Cliff’s cruel betrayal and Nora’s shocking revelation and Becca’s strange demand. Until Lily’s mind and her heart had begun to accept the incredible complexity of people and their motives.

  There had to be more to Julie than Lily saw before her. There had to be more than she had ever seen and maybe more than she ever would see. There had to be some event that Julie kept all to herself, like a youthful engagement to another man, or a miscarriage, or—impossible thought!—an affair of her own. Secret desires, maybe never acted upon but cherished. Hidden resentments. There had to be.

  Or did there have to be? Maybe Julie Rowan was keeping nothing to herself. Maybe some people were, indeed, “open books,” showing their one and only face to the world. Maybe some people simply had nothing to hide from the world. They lived one hundred percent honestly and behaved one hundred percent ethically. If guilt was possible, then why couldn’t innocence be possible, too?

  Maybe. But Lily was beginning to doubt that a truly innocent life was a possible one.

  Her mother squatted to retrieve a new sponge from the cabinet under the sink. Really, Lily thought, her mother had the energy of a person half her age. Most people she knew, even some people Lily’s own age, would have needed to grab on to the sink for help in rising, but not her mother.

  Lily’s thoughts drifted back to Cliff. Cliff had kept his affair a secret from Lily. For weeks it had been going on with Lily none the wiser, until a well-meaning girl in her dorm, who’d heard a rumor from a friend of the girl Cliff was cheating with, alerted her. At first, of course, Lily couldn’t believe that Cliff—her Cliff!—would ever have betrayed her. But then, suspicion crept in as it is wont to do and, screwing up her courage, Lily confronted the guy she had considered the man of her dreams.

  It had taken Lily’s persistent questioning over several hours before Cliff finally broke down and admitted that yes, he’d slept with Ashley Griggs from economics class, and that yes, it had happened more than once. Maybe more than twice; he couldn’t exactly remember. He thought he might have been drunk the last time.

  How did you not know if you were drunk, Lily—who hardly ever drank—had wondered.

  “Why did you lie to me?” Lily had asked then, bewildered. “When I first asked you if you’d cheated on me with Ashley, why did you swear that nothing had happened?”

  Cliff claimed that he hadn’t wanted to hurt her, that’s why he hadn’t confessed before and that’s why, when confronted, he’d lied about his innocence. He was sorry for the affair. It had been wrong of him. He’d hoped that if Lily never found out about it, they could go on just like before. He’d wanted to spare her the ugly truth.

  But Lily had wondered if she could believe him. Maybe he hadn’t told her about the affair because he was afraid of getting into trouble, of losing his attractive, intelligent, warmhearted girlfriend. And as long as he could pull off a sordid relationship behind her back, well, why not keep his mouth shut? He could, as the saying goes, have his cake and eat it, too.

  Lily simply didn’t know. Maybe secrets were essential to life, at least to human life, to society, whether “society” meant a neighborhood, an extended family, a husband and wife, or a small group of friends. Maybe secrets weren’t what were so bad. Maybe it was intent that really mattered. If you kept a secret to protect someone from being hurt—assuming of course your decision wasn’t entirely selfish, assuming you weren’t keeping quiet because if the truth got out you’d be in big trouble—maybe then you weren’t doing anything wrong. Maybe, instead, you were being kind. Maybe you were being good and unselfish.

  It was complicated, this thing called life. People wore masks. One person might harbor various personalities within herself, and might comprise several layers of characters. And because of this, a person might never, ever know for sure if or when she was doing the right thing or the best thing or the smartest thing. And if a person couldn’t be sure about the quality of her own words and actions, how then could she ever judge the words and actions of anyone else?

  Sureties, Lily was coming to realize, were not a part of human interaction. Maybe that old saying about death and taxes being the only inevitable, definite things was true.

  Take her grandmother, for example. Lily had always seen her grandmother as—well, as perfect, as a person without doubt or cause for regret. How naïve she had been! Nora had known deception and secrecy, too, just like everyone else. She had known heartache.

  Lily’s cell phone rang. It was the tone she’d chosen to indicate a call from Cliff, a passage from a pop song he loved. Once she’d thought his having a special tone was—special. Lily put the phone on Silence. He could leave a message if he had anything important to say.

  “I didn’t know anyone was there!” Julie had turned from the sink at the sound of the phone.

  “Sorry, Mom.” Lily came all the way into the kitchen and flopped into a chair at the table. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “Oh, I don’t scare easily. I was just startled. Who was that on the phone?”

  “Cliff.”

  “Why didn’t you take his call?” Julie asked, folding a dish towel over an old-fashioned drying rack by the sink.

  “Because I didn’t want to talk to him.”

  Julie joined her daughter at the table. “Has he been calling a lot? Or, what is it, sending typed messages?”

  “Text messages. Texting. Yeah,” she said. “He’s been pretty relentless.”

  “Well, I hope you’re not thinking of getting back with that boy.”

  “Not really,” Lily said, surprised by her own reply. Not very long ago she’d been considering that very possibility. “Why?”

  Julie shuddered for effect. “I never liked him. He gave me a bit of the creeps.”

  Lily was stunned. “The creeps! I can’t believe this! Why didn’t you ever say anything to me?”

&nb
sp; Julie reached over to pat her daughter’s arm.

  “As if you would have listened to your mother! No, Lily, every woman has to find out certain things on her own. Besides, you know I don’t like to talk badly about a person. Especially one I don’t know very well. Remember, I only met the boy two or three times. Evidence, or the lack of it, Lily, that’s what you need to be careful of when forming an opinion about someone.”

  “Well,” Lily argued, “if you even suspected he was going to cheat on me, I think you should have said something. You should have warned me.”

  Julie waved her hand as if dismissing an annoying fly. “Oh, it was nothing as specific as that. I just didn’t care for the boy. It was something about his face, something I thought I saw lurking there. Anyway, he’s in the past, so let’s let him stay there.”

  Lily was stunned. What other secrets was her family keeping? She felt disoriented, as if everything she’d thought she could rely on was being revealed as an illusion.

  “Well,” she said finally, “I still think that if everyone thought Cliff was a jerk, someone should have given me an honest opinion!”

  “First of all,” her mother was saying, justifying her silence on the matter of Cliff, “I have no idea what the other family members thought about Cliff. And second, it’s very hard to advise someone about a matter of the heart. And it can be very dangerous. People tend not to want to hear that their significant other is a—jerk, as you put it. Especially if it’s true. If I had protested your relationship with Cliff, you might very well have run off and married him by now.”

  “Oh, I would not have run off and married him!” But even as she protested, Lily wondered if her mother was right about relationship advice, that people really didn’t want it. She thought of Nora and wondered if any of her friends had offered their opinions on what Nora should do about her cheating husband. Assuming Nora had told anyone about Thomas’s affair, and now Lily remembered that Nora had claimed she hadn’t. Maybe she’d been too ashamed to tell anyone. Or maybe—and Lily didn’t much like this idea—maybe Nora had wanted to protect Thomas’s reputation among their friends.