pick up. I didn’t even glance at the caller ID.
“Hi, Em,” I said.
“How could you do it?” Grace shouted so loudly that I jerked the phone away from my ear. I didn’t know what I’d done, but I felt instant guilt, anyway.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Couldn’t you have left one single thing of Daddy’s in the house?” There was so much rage in her voice that she sounded like someone I didn’t know. What had I done now? I thought of Sam’s side of our closet, still so empty it echoed. Where his night table drawer had once been full of his books and pens and reading light, it now contained only a flashlight and some spare batteries. I’d donated his file cabinet. His desk drawers now held my stationery and school supplies.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The mug,” she said. “The purple travel mug I gave him.”
I pictured the mug. I saw myself reaching for it, an unattractive, no longer needed item taking up space in my cupboard. Why keep something we’d never use? I saw myself tucking it into the box for Goodwill. “Oh,” I said. “Oh, no. I…wasn’t thinking, honey. I saw it and you know how I can’t stand clutter and I forgot that—”
“It’s always all about you, isn’t it?” she shouted. “
She hung up and I sat there clutching the phone. She’d never spoken to me that way before, with that fury and certainly not with that language. I didn’t know she was even capable of speaking that way. I looked past the sting of her words and saw that she was right. I’d been selfish. And stupid. She’d bought that cup for Sam. I saw a painful reminder of him each time I looked at it, but she saw a treasured connection to someone she’d loved. I felt my throat tighten as I called her back, but she didn’t pick up. She’d said everything she had to say to me.
I pulled out of the parking lot. The cake would have to wait. I drove to Goodwill and got out of my helium-filled van and ran up to the front door. In the small drop-off room, a woman was handing a kitchen stool to the lanky, somber young guy who gave out the receipts.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I brought something here the other day and I need to get it back. Is that possible?”
“No, ma’am,” he said, taking the stool from the woman and setting it sideways on a pile of cartons. “No way.”
I looked through the open doorway behind him to the huge room where women wearing gloves were sorting through bags and boxes and all sorts of detritus. I tried to spot my lone small carton but knew it was a lost cause. Needle in a haystack.
I walked to my van and drove slowly and carefully back to the bakery, thinking all the while about what it had been like for Grace to open that cupboard and see that her last physical link to her father was gone. I felt myself inside my daughter’s skin. I could hardly stand how much it hurt.
I practically floated to Emerson’s house from my van as I held on to the cloud of balloons above my head. Her door was unlocked and I let myself in, freeing the balloons in her spacious living room.
“Em?” I called.
“In the kitchen.”
“I’m here. Just need to get some more stuff from the car.”
I made another trip to the van for the cake, which I carried to the side door that led into the kitchen. Shadow and Blue sniffed the air around me as I set the box on the granite counter. Emerson was washing a mixing bowl in the sink. “Hey.” She glanced up at me absently. “I made room in the fridge for the cake. Thanks for getting it.”
I moved the cake to the empty bottom shelf of her refrigerator. The other shelves were crammed with who knew what. Emerson’s refrigerator was never a pretty sight.
“I left the balloons in the living room,” I said. “I’ll spread them around a little later.”
“We have one small problem.” Emerson was scrubbing the daylights out of the mixing bowl and I knew she was stressing out. “Suzanne’s sister sent us a bunch of pictures and Jenny was working on making a collage out of them but she’s not feeling well and went up to bed. Do you have time to work on it? I had her put it in my office.”
“Sure.” I said. “Anything to keep my mind off…everything.” I smiled at Emerson, but she was too frazzled to smile back. “What’s wrong with Jenny?” I asked.
“She thinks she’s getting a cold.” She gave the bowl a final rinse and put it in the drainer. “She said she woke up with a sore throat. She helped me set out the plates and things on the table in the dining room and then crashed. I think she just doesn’t feel like helping. She’ll probably be fine for the party.”
I saw there was still some coffee in the pot and reached for it. “Okay if I help myself?” I asked.
“If you don’t mind heating it up.” She dried her hands on a dish towel, then walked past me to the pantry without so much as a glance in my direction.
“Are you all right?” I asked as I reached into the cupboard for a mug. I couldn’t help picturing my own cupboard, nice and orderly now without the purple travel mug towering above the others.
“I’m fine,” she said, pulling a package of napkins from the pantry. “I just—” she shook her head “—you know.”
“Yeah.” I put my arm around her shoulders. I knew about her conversation with the woman whose baby Noelle had carried. As strange as the revelations felt to me, they had to feel so much stranger to Emerson. We’d had little time to process everything and it was getting to both of us. Once the party was over, we’d be able to catch our breath. It was almost as though we needed to have another memorial service for Noelle. The first one was for a woman we didn’t really know.
“Well,” I said as I poured coffee into the mug, “I think I just screwed up big-time.”
She’d reached into a drawer for scissors and now held them above the napkins’ plastic wrapper. “What do you
