On the morning of my ex-husband’s wedding, I was fastening the last tiny button on the back of my daughter’s dress when she asked me a question I wasn’t ready for.
“Mom?”
“Yeah, sweetheart?”
Amelia was standing in front of the full-length mirror in my bedroom. She’s nine. She was wearing a pale lavender dress with a white sash and little puffy sleeves. Her grandmother had bought it for the wedding. Amelia had picked it out herself, at the mall, three weeks earlier. She said lavender was “calm.”
She was staring at herself in the mirror.
But she wasn’t looking at the dress.
“If Dad marries Aunt Lina,” she said slowly, “is she still Aunt Lina?”
My fingers stopped on the last button.
“Of course, sweetheart.”
Amelia frowned at her reflection.
“Even if she keeps saying she’s going to be my bonus mom?”
I swallowed hard.
“She’s still your aunt,” I said. “That doesn’t change.”
Amelia nodded. Slowly. Like she was filing that away somewhere.
Then she asked another question.
“And you’re still her sister?”
I had to look away.
I looked at the window. At the dresser. At the pile of laundry on the chair in the corner. Anywhere but at my daughter’s face in that mirror.
I couldn’t answer that.
Amelia thought about her question for a few more seconds. I could see her thinking. She chews on the inside of her cheek when she thinks. She’s done it since she was three.
Then she turned around. She picked up the little white gift bag sitting on my bed. Lina had sent it over the day before. Dropped it on my front porch without knocking. It had pink tissue paper sticking out of the top and a little card tied to the handle with a ribbon. For my flower girl! Love, Aunt Lina.
Amelia held it in both hands.
“Okay,” she said.
Just that.
Okay.
Something about that okay stayed with me. For the whole rest of the morning. Even after my mother pulled into the driveway and honked.
It wasn’t a happy okay. It wasn’t a sad okay either.
It was the kind of okay a kid says when she’s decided something. And she’s not going to tell you what it is.
My mother came up the front walk in a mint green dress with a matching jacket and a big brooch shaped like a flower. Her hair was done. She’d had it done at the salon that morning. I could tell. It was stiffer than usual.
She came into the front hallway. She looked me up and down. At my old sweatpants. At my T-shirt with a coffee stain on the front. At my bare feet.
“You’re really staying home,” she said.
“I already told you I was, Mom.”
She sighed. Loudly. The kind of sigh that’s meant for an audience.
“Annie,” she said. “This bitterness has gone on long enough. Lina is your sister.”
I looked at her.
That was the part nobody in my family seemed to want to remember.
Lina was my sister.
And she married my husband anyway.
“She deserves to be happy too, Annie,” my mother said. “Everybody deserves to be happy.”
Amelia was standing by the front door. Holding the little white gift bag. Watching us.
Watching me.
I didn’t want to have another fight in front of her. I’d had too many in front of her already. Over the last eighteen months. In kitchens and driveways and on the phone with the volume too loud.
So I just said, “Have a good time, baby.”
I knelt down and hugged my daughter.
“I love you, Mom,” Amelia said into my neck.
“I love you too, sweetheart. So much.”
She held on a beat longer than usual.
Then she let go.
At the door, my mother stopped. She turned around.
“You could try acting like a sister,” she muttered. “For one day.”
I shut the door behind them before I said something I’d regret for the rest of my life.
I stood there with my back against the closed door for a long time.
My other three kids were in the living room.
Kelly, who’s seven. Maddie, who’s five. And Toby, who’s three. Arguing over cartoons. Kelly wanted the one with the talking dogs. Maddie wanted the one with the princess who turns into a mermaid. Toby wanted the one with the trucks.
They weren’t going to the wedding. Ryan had asked. I’d said no. Kelly and Maddie were too young to sit still through a ceremony. Toby was too young to understand what a ceremony was.
And honestly, I didn’t want them there.
Only Amelia had wanted to go. She’d asked me. Very seriously. Two months ago. Sitting at the kitchen table.
Mom. Is it okay if I go to Dad’s wedding?
I’d looked at her for a long time.
Do you want to go?
She’d thought about it. Chewing the inside of her cheek.
I think I need to, she said.
I didn’t understand what she meant. I let her go anyway.
I curled up on the couch under the gray fuzzy blanket. Toby climbed into my lap with his truck. Maddie leaned against my arm. Kelly sat on the floor with her face two inches from the TV screen.
And I tried very hard not to picture the ceremony.
Three towns over. At the Willow Creek Inn. A big white farmhouse with a barn and a garden and a ballroom with chandeliers.
I tried not to picture Ryan standing at the altar in a gray suit.
Lina walking down the aisle in white.
My parents in the front row. Smiling. Crying. Taking pictures on their phones.
Everybody pretending there hadn’t been another wife first.
Another sister.
Another baby.
I closed my eyes.
And right away, I heard Ryan’s voice.
From the day my marriage ended.
Honey, I love you so much. I’ll see you soon at our usual hotel.
It was a Thursday. In March. Eighteen months ago.
I came home early from the grocery store. I’d forgotten my coupons, so I didn’t stay as long as I planned. I came in through the garage door into the kitchen with three grocery bags in my arms.
The kids were upstairs. Napping. Or supposed to be napping. I could hear Kelly singing to herself through the ceiling.
Ryan was in the kitchen. With his back to me. On the phone. Standing by the window, looking out at the backyard.
He didn’t hear me come in.
“Honey, I love you so much,” he said into the phone. Soft. Warm. In a voice he hadn’t used with me in years. “I’ll see you soon at our usual hotel.”
I stopped in the doorway.
He laughed. Into the phone.
“No, no. I’ll make something up for her,” Ryan said. “A work thing. Something. Don’t worry about it.”
He laughed again.
“She believes everything I say,” he said. “Like a complete idiot.”
The grocery bag on my wrist slipped.
I didn’t drop it on purpose. My arm just went weak. All the strength went out of it.
The bag tipped sideways. A jar of pasta sauce slid out of the top. The big jar. The garlic and basil kind that Ryan liked.
It hit the kitchen floor.
Crash.
Red sauce everywhere. Across the white tile. Glass in a hundred pieces.
Ryan turned around.
He was still holding the phone against his ear.
For half a second, neither of us said anything.
