Hello Beautiful

Sylvie

October 1982–March 1983

There was a line outside the funeral home during the three sessions of the wake. Inside, Sylvie stood in a row beside Rose, Julia, and Emeline and said thank you so much every time a stranger told her how wonderful her father had been. One woman said she’d stood next to Charlie at the bus stop on Loomis every day for years, because their commutes lined up, and he’d been kinder to her than anyone else in her life. Mr. Luis, who had provided the flowers for Julia’s wedding and now for the wake and funeral, said that when he’d first moved to Pilsen, Charlie had helped him negotiate a low rent for the flower shop. “My business never would have existed without him,” Mr. Luis told the Padavano women. “I didn’t believe in myself, but Charlie, who had just met me, somehow did.”

Charlie seemed to have had a habit of helping young mothers: Several women said he had bought them baby formula when they couldn’t afford it. Head Librarian Elaine appeared before Sylvie at the second wake and told her, in a stern voice, that her father had been a lovely gentleman and that he’d once done her a meaningful favor. Sylvie wasn’t aware that her father and Head Librarian Elaine — who was fifteen years older than her parents — had ever met or even been in the same room together. A few men, who must have been drinking buddies, entered the funeral home worse for wear and were eyed nervously by Rose’s friends. Co-workers from the paper factory arrived wearing white shirts and dark ties, as if it was their uniform. “It’s impossible he’s gone,” one of the youngest workers said.

Sylvie agreed. It was impossible.

Many guests wept, on and off, as if their tears were for Charlie but also for their own personal heartbreaks. An early lost love, a miscarriage, the pounding headache of never having enough money. In a setting where weeping was acceptable, they would take their opportunity. They followed a clear path: First they waited on the line that hugged the far wall, then stopped in front of the open casket, then turned left to give their condolences to the Padavano women. At that point, they either exited the room or moved into the center, where there were seats. The Padavano women never spoke publicly at the wake, but during each session a different man, from a different part of Charlie’s life, would rise and speak about him in a choked voice.

Sylvie never approached the casket. She’d glimpsed her father when they’d first arrived in the room. Dead Charlie looked still, waxy, gone, and she had no desire to see his empty body up close. She stayed rooted to her spot as if it were a locked cell. She listened to her voice express thanks or whatever other words seemed appropriate. She watched her hands be enveloped by strangers’ hands. When old women insisted on kissing her, she allowed them her cheek. William carried over a chair at one point for his pregnant wife, but Rose sat down on it instead, despite the fact that she had been turning down offers of chairs the entire night.

Mrs. Ceccione ducked in and out without coming near the Padavano women. She had been avoiding Rose since Cecelia moved in with her, but she was no doubt worried she would go to hell if she didn’t show her respect for the dead. Relatives and cousins Sylvie had met only a handful of times because so-and-so hated so-and-so arrived and departed in tears or huffs. “That woman,” Rose whispered angrily to her daughters at least once per wake session, but usually Sylvie didn’t even know to whom she was referring. There was an infrastructure of grudges that had shaped Charlie’s and Rose’s extended families and kept them away from one another. When the Padavano sisters thought of family, they’d always pictured only the six people who lived under their roof. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins had always been framed as enemies or potential enemies. Sylvie watched people wash in and out of the room on a tidal schedule of theatrical grief, but she was mostly aware of who was missing: Cecelia and the baby.

Cecelia and Izzy had been released from the hospital that afternoon. The original plan, constructed largely by Julia, had been for Cecelia to go straight from the hospital to Rose, where the baby would serve as a peace offering between the mother and her youngest daughter. But that plan had evaporated when Charlie died. Sylvie had been the one to answer the kitchen phone when Cecelia called from the hospital, crying so hard Sylvie didn’t know who it was at first. Rose had taken the news as if it were a bolt of lightning. Her body tightened, then released, and she fell to the living room floor. Sylvie knelt next to her. Emeline — the terrible sentence, Dad is dead, still in her ears — ran back to the hospital to be with Cecelia. Julia didn’t know yet; she was sitting peacefully on a bus to Northwestern.

The first thing Rose had said, in a strange new voice, was, “She was the last one to see him? He was with her?”

Sylvie had been confused at first. “Cecelia?”

“Her,” Rose said, in the strange voice.

“He died in the hallway,” Sylvie said. But she knew then that the opening to Cecelia and the beautiful new baby had been shut. This death, and the betrayal Rose saw in it, had ruined any chance of reunion. Sylvie stayed on the floor, but she drew back from her mother. Charlie had always tempered Rose and insisted she be softer. He had no doubt been thinking the baby would be the fix as well. Sylvie wished she had spoken to him about it; she and her sisters should have brought him in on the plan. If they had, maybe he wouldn’t have gone to visit Cecelia in the hospital. Maybe this wouldn’t have happened.

Still, she told her mother, “It has nothing to do with Cecelia. His heart gave out.”

“Not with me,” Rose said. “It wouldn’t have happened on my watch.”

Charlie’s favorite armchair was behind them. The armchair where he spoke in meter, and drank his drinks, and told his daughters how much he loved them. Sylvie had never cared if his paycheck got smaller or if he drank too much. He had been her person, and they’d passed books back and forth between them her entire life. She had noticed as a little girl that Charlie never went into the back garden, and so Sylvie never did either. That early impulse to follow her father, to imitate him, had built a fence between her and Rose.

The funeral took place five days after the death. So many people showed up at St. Procopius that they couldn’t all fit inside the large church. Rose wore a black dress with a piece of black lace pinned to her hair. She sat in the front row with Sylvie and Julia at her sides. William flanked Julia in his dark wedding suit. On Sylvie’s other side, Emeline twisted in her seat to see if her twin had entered the church, because surely Cecelia wouldn’t miss this. Sylvie caught her sister’s eye to ask, Do you see her? Emeline shook her head.

Sweating under her thick dress and tights, Sylvie remembered the last time she’d been alone with her father, about a month earlier. After dinner one night, Rose had sent the two of them to pick up a big order from the market. She’d done the shopping earlier; their job was to carry it home. The order wasn’t ready, so Mrs. DiPietro gave Charlie a small glass of beer and they waited on the back steps of the shop. There was a small, spiky garden at their feet, and Charlie studied it. “Doesn’t hold a candle to your mother’s,” he’d said.

“How would you know?” Sylvie held her hair up over her head, trying to get some air on her neck. The sun was setting, but it had been an unusually warm September day. “You never go in the backyard.”

He gave a small smile. “I presume her greatness.”

Her father looked tired, and Sylvie remembered wondering if he’d been sleeping poorly. Probably his heart was beginning to fail; it was failing that day on the stoop, with the beer in his hand. Maybe Charlie had sensed it, because he’d said, “Sweetheart, I knew that you skipped a heap of classes in high school.”

Sylvie looked at him in surprise. “You did?”

“Butch was an old friend, so I told him to turn a blind eye for as long as he could and then give you a harmless punishment.”

Butch McGuire had been Sylvie’s high school principal, and after more than a year of missing more math and chemistry classes than she attended, he told her that the penalty was repainting the wall behind the school. Cecelia had helped her, always happy to have a brush in her hand. Emeline tended to them with snacks. Sylvie had believed that both her parents were unaware of her truancy and her punishment. “Why?” she asked, meaning, Why did you do that, and why are you telling me now?

“What were you doing during those missed classes?”

“Reading.” Sylvie waved her hand. “The classes were a waste of my time. If I’m not interested in something, I have no hope of learning it.” She’d read in a park near the school, storing novels in the hollow of an ancient oak she thought of as her friend. Sylvie didn’t tell her sisters what she was doing, because she knew Julia would be furious and insist she return to the classroom, and she didn’t want the twins to think that what she was doing was acceptable. That had been, perhaps, when Sylvie first became aware that she was choosing a different path than Julia. Sylvie was reading novels she hid in a tree — a tree she talked to about her thoughts and worries — while Julia was leaping every academic hurdle placed in front of her.

Charlie nodded. “You’re too young to really understand that life is short, but it is. I didn’t want to stop you when you were walking away from something that didn’t matter to do something that did. You and I are cut from the same cloth, baby girl. Neither of us would expect school or work to fill us up. We look out the window, or into ourselves, for something more.” He studied her. “You know that you’re more than a librarian’s aide and a college student, right? You’re Sylvie Padavano.” He said her name with delight, as if she were a famous explorer or warrior. “It’s because you know that more is possible that you’ll always see the pointlessness in following a stupid rule or clocking in and out of a boring class. Most people can’t see that distinction, so they just do as they’re told. Of course, this makes them bored and irritated, but they think that’s the human condition. You and I are lucky enough to see that it doesn’t have to be that way.”

The truth in Charlie’s words shivered up Sylvie’s spine.

He grinned at her. “I’m giving a bit of a speech, aren’t I? Well, so be it. We’re not separated from the world by our own edges.” Charlie set down his beer glass, empty now, and rubbed his hand up and down his arm, as an example of one of his edges. “We’re part of the sky, and the rocks in your mother’s garden, and that old man who sleeps by the train station. We’re all interconnected, and when you see that, you see how beautiful life is. Your mother and sisters don’t have that awareness. Not yet, anyway. They believe they’re contained in their bodies, in the biographical facts of their lives.”

Sylvie felt like her father had shown her a part of herself she hadn’t known existed. When Sylvie looked back on that moment — now, from the funeral pew, and later, over the course of her life — it would always be one of her great joys that her father had said this to her and that she was able to delight him by paraphrasing one of his favorite poems: “We are not contained between our hats and boots.” And then Mrs. DiPietro had come outside with their bags, and the father and daughter had walked home, their arms touching, molecules dancing between them, and the stars turning on like tiny lightbulbs in the evening sky.

The priest was talking about Charlie, trying to make his job sound important, trying to make it seem like Charlie had run his household, even though the priest knew it was Rose who made every decision, and Sylvie ached at how this priest and all the people at the wake defined Charlie with his biographical facts, when he had been so much more. He was vast, and beautiful, and more present in the gift of baby formula to a young mother than in any day he’d spent at the paper factory. He was his acts of kindness, and his love for his daughters, and the twenty minutes he’d spent with Sylvie behind the grocer’s that evening.

That conversation had helped Sylvie understand herself in a new way. She looked for third doors because she was like her father. Julia sought to collect labels like honors student, girlfriend, and wife, but Sylvie steered away from labels. She wanted to be true to herself with every word she uttered, every action she took, and every belief she held. There was no label for kissing boys for ninety seconds in the library, which was part of why it made Sylvie happy and Julia uncomfortable. Sylvie would keep boycotting boring classes to read in parks. She wouldn’t settle for less than true love, even though her sisters had issued a collective sigh when she told them that Ernie had asked her out on a proper date and she’d turned him down. She would wait, forever if necessary, for a man who saw the expanse of her, the way her father had. Sylvie shifted in the pew, her thoughts bunched up in her head. Rushed and hot and mucky with the tears she hadn’t yet shed. She knew now — inside her body, her bones, her cells — that her father was gone. He was gone and no one else really knew her. Julia, Emeline, and Cecelia each saw a slightly different Sylvie: She was soft with Emeline, in response to her sister’s softness, and playful with Julia because they enjoyed challenging each other. Sylvie was curious in Cecelia’s presence, because her artist sister spoke and thought differently from anyone else she knew.

Sylvie looked around at the bent heads, her sweating, weeping sisters and her rock-faced mother, and knew they were all in trouble. Charlie had seen and loved each of them for who they were. When any of his girls — including Rose — had come into view, he’d always given them the same welcome, calling out, Hello beautiful! The greeting was nice enough to make them want to leave the room and come in all over again. He’d delighted in Julia’s ambition and nicknamed her his rocket. He’d taken Cecelia to the art museum on Saturday mornings. He’d kept a shared inventory of the neighborhood kids with Emeline, because Charlie loved to watch his daughter light up while explaining a child’s interests and the specific reasons he or she was remarkable. Sylvie and her sisters had known themselves under their father’s gaze. And with that gaze gone, the threads that had tied their family so tightly together had loosened. What had been effortless would now take effort. What had been home for all of them was now merely Rose’s house. Emeline was already sleeping on Cecelia’s floor at Mrs. Ceccione’s to help with the baby. Julia was married. Sylvie knew in that moment that she would have to move out too.

She walked back to the house with Rose after the funeral; she intended to talk to her mother about moving out but didn’t want to do it that day. Perhaps they could agree on a timeline that wouldn’t seem too abrupt for either of them — maybe a month? But Rose didn’t look at her, or speak, while they made their way home. Rose walked straight into her bedroom and changed into her gardening clothes. On her way outside, she passed Sylvie with her face turned away.

“Can I do something for you, Mama?” Sylvie said. “What would you like for dinner?”

Rose stopped. “Your sisters all left me,” she said, her voice thin. “Everyone has left.”

Sylvie said, “I’m right here,” but her mother gave no indication of having heard her, and Sylvie wondered if maybe she wasn’t right here. Her certainty wavered, and with it her sense of self. Sylvie had the sensation of fading away in her black dress and tights. Under Charlie’s gaze, Sylvie had been whole; now, in front of her mother, she was porous, disappearing.

“You should go stay with one of your sisters,” Rose said. “I’d like to be alone.” She opened the back door and walked outside. Sylvie stood still for a moment in the empty house, fighting for air, because it felt like her lungs had seized up. Rose’s second daughter wasn’t enough, and would never be enough. When she was able to breathe normally, Sylvie went to her room to pack her belongings.

That night she slept on William and Julia’s couch. She brought her clothes in paper grocery bags. Sylvie was surprised at how little she owned. The room she and Julia had shared all their lives was so tiny, there had never been room for more than their single beds and a dresser. Sylvie had never bought books, because of her relationship with the library. Lying on the couch in her nightgown, under a rough blanket, with the grocery bags lined up neatly in sight, she felt tangled in a net of grief. Her father was dead, and her mother had turned her away. My soulmate would save me, she thought. He would see me, and I would feel more solid. But this brought a fresh sadness, because if she ever did meet this man, he would never have known her father. Sylvie studied the ceiling for most of the night. She felt tears deep inside her, but they couldn’t seem to find a way out. She still hadn’t cried.

The next morning at the library, she pinned a notice to the huge public bulletin board: In need of a house sitter or pet sitter? Need someone to water your plants while you’re on vacation? I will do chores in exchange for a bed. Please find Assistant Librarian Sylvie at the front desk.

No one came near her, though. Not even her boys, though she would have loved to have been kissed or held, even for a moment. Two of them, Ernie and Miles, had attended the wake but avoided making eye contact with her. She hadn’t told them about her father, but someone had hung the funeral mass and death announcement on the library bulletin board. Everyone Sylvie encountered seemed to sense that she was wearing death, so they gave her a wide berth. Once or twice she sniffed her clothes, to make sure she wasn’t emitting a terrible odor. She pushed her cart up and down the stacks. She did her college reading in the library when she wasn’t on a shift, and then slept on Julia and William’s couch at night.

“Did you tell Mom you’d be staying here for a while?” Julia asked.

Sylvie shook her head. “She’s relieved I’m not there.”

“But she’s so alone,” Julia said. “She’s never lived alone before.”

“You visited her this afternoon.”

Julia reached up to make sure her hair was behaving itself. “I think she’s in the garden all day, every day. She hardly spoke while I was there. I know she’s mourning, but…”

Sylvie spoke with certainty. “Mama doesn’t want me there.”

The next afternoon at the library, Sylvie saw her mother walk past the wide windows. Rose was still in black, though she no longer had the piece of lace on her head. She walked slowly, with an erect carriage. She didn’t look into the library, even though the chance of her daughter being there was always high. Sylvie didn’t run outside to speak with her either. She stayed frozen at the desk and watched as Rose walked the full length of the windows before she disappeared.

—

Julia developed a habit of climbing onto the couch with Sylvie in the middle of the night. Because Julia had a new curviness — she wasn’t visibly pregnant to strangers, but she’d had to buy larger bras — this involved Sylvie lying on her side on the very edge of the cushions. She had to wrap her arms around Julia to keep from falling off. The night pulsed around them, and Sylvie was grateful to be crushed against her sister. It was late November; several blurry weeks had passed since their father had died.

“What are we going to do?” Julia whispered.

With her eyes closed, Sylvie could pretend they were in their single beds, in their childhood room. They had, after all, talked back and forth in the darkness for as long as either of them could remember. She said, “You’re going to have a baby. I’m going to qualify for a higher paycheck soon, and I’ll find my own place.”

Sylvie had switched her college focus from English literature to library sciences, because she knew Head Librarian Elaine needed a new librarian and would hire her if she had the necessary qualifications. Every day, Sylvie looked at studio apartments in the classifieds, reassured that with the new job she would be able to afford a tiny studio.

Julia said, “I feel like Beth.”

Sylvie hugged her sister closer. While they were growing up, only Sylvie, Emeline, and Cecelia ever made that pronouncement. Julia had never said she was Beth before. When Julia was sick with the flu or a cold, she drank orange juice and sucked zinc tablets and ate salads, in order to fuel herself to get to the other side. Sickness or disappointment was simply something to be conquered. She wouldn’t even joke about surrendering.

But Julia’s eyes had looked panicked ever since Charlie’s death. Because Sylvie understood her older sister so well, she knew Julia was not only mourning him but reeling from the fact that he had died at all. Julia hadn’t planned for him to die, and that shock threatened her entire worldview. Their father’s absence was, after all, unfixable.

“We’ll figure it out,” Sylvie said. “You’ll come up with a new plan. You always do. It’s probably just hard to do that when you’re pregnant. Give yourself some time.”

“Was I wrong to try to fix everything?” Julia laid Sylvie’s hand on her abdomen. The baby’s movements had become discernible in just the last few days.

Sylvie went quiet, because when the baby did move, the sensation was delicate and impossible to catch unless you were still. She had the thought that Julia’s small bump felt like a drum, but the percussion was inside the instrument. Sylvie felt something and was thrilled: bubbles, perhaps the waving of a tiny hand. “No,” she said. “You weren’t wrong.”

There were moments of quiet, when one sister or the other would almost fall asleep. Only once had they both slept deeply, and William found them curled around each other in the morning. Usually they slid in and out of rest. Sylvie clung to her sister in part because she felt unmoored at night. She was swallowed up by the sky and her blanket and the paper bags holding her clothes. In the darkness, Charlie was missing, and Rose glared in Sylvie’s direction with an anger she didn’t understand but that made Sylvie’s body tighten with guilt nonetheless. Sylvie knew that Cecelia cried at each milestone Izzy reached because she’d lost both her parents and the world her little girl was supposed to grow up in. Rose, brutally silent, two houses away from Cecelia and her granddaughter, was descending deeper and deeper into stubborn grief. The last time Julia had been to see her, Rose sent her away.

Sylvie was almost asleep when her sister said, “After the funeral, William asked to be excused from his teaching-assistant job for the rest of the semester — he told the department that he needed time with me because my father died.”

“That was nice of him.”

“But we need the money. I was counting on it, and he didn’t ask me before talking to his adviser. I’d rather William taught, anyway — this makes a terrible first impression. The professors there are going to think he’s lazy, or soft.” Julia said the word soft as if it was the most damning criticism she could think of.

Sylvie considered this. Her brother-in-law limped around the apartment and smiled at Sylvie to let her know that he didn’t mind her being there, although of course he must. She didn’t feel in a position to criticize him. “Did you tell him any of this?” she said.

“It’s too late to change anything. Will you do me a favor?”

This didn’t need a response, so Sylvie simply waited.

“Will you read his book? He calls it a work in progress. I nagged him until he finally let me read it, and I don’t know what to make of it. At all.” Julia looked at Sylvie with wide eyes. “I’ve been avoiding having conversations with him, because I don’t know what to say. You’re the reader — you’ll see what he’s trying to do. And if it has potential to help him? Get a job after graduate school?”

This many question marks from Julia were unusual. We’re all unstitched, Sylvie thought. How much longer can this continue?

“Of course. I’ll read it tomorrow at the library. Or today, depending on what time it is.”

Julia kissed her cheek. “Thank you so much. You can’t tell him you read it, obviously.”

Sylvie tried to read her watch in the dark, a bubble of panic threading up her middle. What time was it? Was it close to dawn? With no sleep, the days took on the emotional cast — and the loud losses — of the night.

—

She started reading at a library table before her shift, and continued while eating a sandwich at lunch, and picked it up again on the bus on the way to class. Julia had handed her a physical mess: about two hundred typewritten pages held together with a rubber band, inside a paper bag. Sylvie’s first impression was that it was indeed a work in progress. Some chapters started and then stopped in the middle of a paragraph. There were question marks inside sentences, intended for William to answer at some point. There were footnotes filled with suggestions, ideas, and queries from William about what direction the material might go in.

It was ostensibly a book about the history of basketball, and it started in 1891 in Massachusetts, when Dr. James Naismith invented the game — using peach baskets as hoops — in order to keep off-season track athletes in shape during the frigid winter. The book jumped around according to what seemed like William’s whims, but still, it was roughly chronological. It covered the sport’s first league in 1898, Dr. Naismith’s thirteen rules, and the fact that until 1950 all the players and coaches in the official games were white. When the narrative broke off, William was in the middle of explaining the battle between the American Basketball Association and the National Basketball Association in the 1970s, when the two leagues fought for stars like Dr. J and Spencer Haywood. Interspersed with the history were the stories of specific games: A game in Philadelphia when Bill Russell battled the giant Wilt Chamberlain. A 1959 college game in which Oscar Robertson had 45 points, 23 rebounds, and 10 assists. The manuscript ended in the middle of game five of the 1976 finals between the Boston Celtics and the Phoenix Suns. The game went to triple overtime and was the longest finals game ever. William’s writing was solid — clean and unobjectionable — but Sylvie found herself little interested in the main narrative of the story; it was the footnotes and embedded questions that fascinated her. The footnotes seemed to be a conversation William was having with himself. He wrote things like:

Why am I so interested in Bill Walton’s injuries?

Am I just writing to catch up with the present day? Is that enough?

How could my father and so many other men in Boston hate Russell so much? I can’t even bear to write about what happened to his home there.

Where is the science on why these men grow so tall, when their parents are often short?

There’s no thread to this project.

This is terrible, I’m terrible.

Several times, William wrote: What am I doing? Why am I doing this? Who am I?

Once, toward the end of the unfinished narrative, a footnote read: It should have been me, not her.

Sylvie reread the footnotes. They felt like an answer key for a different story, not the history of basketball they were attached to. What did It should have been me, not her mean? That statement couldn’t be connected to basketball, could it? Was the her Julia?

The anxiety embedded in the questions made Sylvie shiver, and the bus rattled beneath her as if in agreement. Charlie had said to Sylvie: “We look out the window, or into ourselves, for something more.” In these footnotes, William was looking inside himself, but what reflected back was apprehension and uncertainty. Who am I? William didn’t seem to recognize the person in the mirror, or perhaps he didn’t see anyone there. Sylvie remembered the last time she’d stood in front of Rose and the feeling that she was disappearing. Sylvie had felt that way, to some degree, every minute since her father died. She’d become worried that it was her father’s attention that kept her intact, kept her Sylvie, and she felt great sympathy now for her brother-in-law. Sylvie had been feeling this way for only a month, and it was terrible. The size of this manuscript, and the effort in its pages, showed that William had been in this place for a long time.

When Sylvie finished reading, she was on the bus back to Julia’s apartment after her night class. She fit the manuscript into the paper bag and stared at the window, which showed her glassy reflection. She saw the outline of William’s face overlaying her own. Sylvie had always liked her brother-in-law; she felt comfortable around him, and they shared a smile occasionally when Julia talked with a lot of exclamation marks. Emeline, the barometer of everyone’s moods, had always described William as sensitive. But William had belonged to Julia from the moment Sylvie met him, so she’d never truly considered him as anything other than the man her sister had chosen. She wondered now, for the first time, if Julia had made a mistake. The writer of these pages was filled with her sister’s least favorite qualities: indecision, self-doubt, sadness. Julia was like a star baseball player who lived at the plate, smacking away any uncertainties with her bat. The only explanation that made sense was that Julia didn’t know this lived inside her husband — or hadn’t, until she’d read these pages too.

Sylvie felt a heightened physical awareness on the bus seat, her cells tingling as if they had just woken up. She felt the weight of the manuscript on her lap, the cloudy windowpane, Julia’s possible mistake, the tiredness of having spent weeks barely sleeping on someone else’s couch, her father’s gone-ness. Sylvie felt something move inside her too, but before she could figure out what it was, she’d started to cry. She fought to stay silent, so as not to draw any attention to herself on the half-filled bus, but the salty tears slicked her cheeks and soaked the front of her coat.

When she got back to the apartment it was late, and her sister and William had already gone to bed. Sylvie brushed her teeth, tugged her nightgown over her head, and fell onto the couch. She felt William’s questions like pinpricks to her skin. They reappeared in the darkness and seeped into her, demanding answers.

What am I doing? I’m lying on a couch in my sister’s apartment.

Why am I doing this? Because my father died, and he was my home.

Who am I? Sylvie Padavano. She heard her name in Charlie’s voice, said with relish, and smiled.

This last question, and the answer, made Sylvie realize for the first time why her mother had always frowned at her and not at her sisters. Rose recognized in Sylvie what had always bothered her about her husband. “Ugh, Whitman,” Rose would say in disgust when Charlie recited his lyrical lines. Not because Rose cared about Walt Whitman, but because she blamed the poetry inside Charlie for his lack of success in life. The reason his salary stayed small, the reason he refused to get upset when the furnace broke and yet would drag her outside to admire a full moon, the reason he didn’t care what people thought of him and yet hundreds of people turned out for his funeral. Sylvie was spiked with the same stuff Charlie was, and so when Rose looked at her daughter, she didn’t see Sylvie; she saw the failure of her own marriage and her personal failure in convincing Charlie to be who she’d wanted him to be. Sylvie thought of Julia, who had so much of Rose inside her. She knew that any glimpses Julia caught of the faltering sentences inside William would also be despised.

With her eyes closed, Sylvie placed herself on the wide expanse of her brother-in-law’s uncertainty. It resembled one of the foggy, rambling moors she and her sisters had loved in Victorian novels. Sylvie felt at home on the rough terrain, filling her lungs with murky air. Since Charlie’s death, she’d felt like she was spilling out of her edges and messily trying to scoop herself up at the same time. Her sisters and mother were safe, with their aspirations and routines; Sylvie was her heartbreak and loss. William wasn’t safe either, and his questions kept Sylvie company. She and her brother-in-law were both struggling to inhabit their own skin, a goal that would sound absurd to almost anyone else.

When Julia appeared, Sylvie scooched over and hugged her older sister harder than usual.

“Are you okay?” Julia whispered.

Sylvie shook her head and buried her face in her sister’s neck. She could feel the baby flutter inside her sister and then into her own flat belly. She needed this hug, and she was also buying time before Julia asked her questions and Sylvie tried her best to answer.

“Is the manuscript good?”

“Yes and no.”

“Will it help him get a professorship?”

“No.”

“What does it mean…what is it?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never read anything like it.”

—

Rose called a family meeting on a Saturday when Julia was eight months pregnant and Izzy was four months old.

“A family meeting, including Cecelia?” Julia had asked, when she visited their mother in her garden. (“Her getup has gotten even worse,” Julia told Sylvie that night. “She wears Daddy’s pajamas under the baseball equipment.”)

“Of course not,” Rose had said. “You, William, Sylvie, and Emeline.”

The listed people turned up at the house at four o’clock on the designated day. All three sisters paused on the front step and glanced down the street toward Mrs. Ceccione’s house. None of the sisters had told Cecelia about this meeting — they couldn’t bear to tell her she’d been excluded — but of course she knew. Sylvie had gotten Cecelia a part-time job at the library, and their shifts often overlapped. Emeline slept on a cot in Cecelia’s room, and Julia called Cecelia once a day to see how she and the baby were. Cecelia, like all of them, listened to everything her sisters said and everything they didn’t. This meeting had been so clearly omitted, this hour wiped off the shared calendar, that it might have been the only thing Cecelia knew for sure.

Rose was already in her spot at the dining room table when they came in. She looked thinner in the cheeks and was wearing a faded housedress.

“I have to sell this place,” she said, when they were seated around her. “I can’t afford to live here anymore.” She waved her hand casually, to indicate the walls, bedrooms, and history that surrounded them. “I don’t need its size either.”

Sylvie leaned back in her chair. It had never occurred to her that this house could be sold. When Rose and Charlie were first married, Charlie had gotten a great deal on the purchase, probably through a drinking bet — though that was never clearly stated — during a period of racial tension in Chicago, when a lot of white people were fleeing the city. Closing this deal had been perhaps the greatest achievement of Charlie’s life, in Rose’s eyes.

Sylvie’s sisters looked as shocked as she felt: Julia’s face had gone white, and Emeline was blinking more than normal, which is what she did when she was scared or surprised.

“I thought you owned the house outright,” Julia said. “Daddy always boasted about not having a mortgage.”

Rose frowned. “I had to take one out about ten years ago, so we could feed and clothe you girls.”

This sank in. The saints on the walls stared down at them. There was a blank spot where St. Clare of Assisi had been. They all knew that the framed image now lived under Cecelia’s bed down the street.

“You can’t leave your garden,” Emeline said. Julia, William, and Sylvie nodded with relief. That statement was true. What was Rose without her garden? Rose’s existence had always taken place in the garden, as if her roots sat beside those of the herbs, lettuce, and eggplants.

“Too much work,” Rose said. “I’m finished. This house is finished. You’ve all moved out.”

She didn’t look at Sylvie when she said this, but Sylvie felt the dart her mother had thrown twist into her chest. You said you wanted to be alone, she thought. I did what you asked.

“I’m moving to Florida,” Rose said. “To a condo on the beach. I know a few ladies from the neighborhood there, and they’re setting me up. With the sale of this house, I’ll be fine.”

“Florida?” This was the first word William had spoken since they’d sat down. “You can’t do that.”

Rose fixed her eyes on him.

“Your daughters need you.” He took a breath. “Mom. We need you.”

“I’m about to have the baby,” Julia said. “You need to wait, please.”

The air in the room felt strange: heavy yet about to move, as if on the threshold of a storm. The Padavano girls shifted in their chairs. They could all feel Cecelia down the street, holding her daughter as if she was a life preserver, trying to listen to words she couldn’t hear.

“I wanted to let you all know in person,” Rose said.

Where are you? Sylvie thought. Are you already in Florida? She remembered her glimpse of Charlie in the coffin — waxy and gone. This was almost worse. Her mother was in front of them, blood pumping through her body, but she was absent. She’d taken leave: Perhaps since the day of the funeral? While Sylvie sat on the floor beside her, right after the news? Or had she been wanting to be somewhere else for years, and now she saw the chance to break free?

Emeline said, “We all miss Daddy. We should be together. I brought pictures of Izzy, Mama. She’s so beautiful.”

She pulled the photos out from under the table, but the mention threw Rose onto her feet. She was walking away while she said, “Feel free to take some food from the garden on your way out.”

Three of the four Padavano girls were left gripping the dining room table, as if everything were being pulled away from them at once.