Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [99]
“Everyone’s been great. We have so much food. Food and flowers. I’m sick to death of flowers.”
Thankfully, I hadn’t asked if she’d received mine. We sat together at the table while I ate. She pulled her legs up to her chest, tucking her knees inside her oversized T-shirt, which made a small hole in the upper left shoulder rip wider.
“It’s hot,” she warned after I’d already burnt my tongue and spat the noodles back onto the plate.
She shook her head. “I can’t take you anywhere.”
I was to sleep in the spare room, the space they’d allocated for the flower arrangements. The odor of decaying blossoms was suffocating.
“Sorry there’s not much room,” she said. “I told you: flowers.”
“I don’t mind,” I said.
I found my arrangement on the center of the dresser. A small bunch of white lilies, and planted in the center—exactly as I had not requested—a silver balloon that read With Sympathy in blue cursive.
In high school I read a book about a Jewish family that sat shiva to mourn the loss of their adult son. They covered the mirrors in black cloth, and they didn’t cook or clean or wash themselves. For seven days they had no business but grief. Visitors were to console the family, but were not to speak unless the family initiated conversation.
There were no such clear guidelines for Christian grieving. In my eagerness to project the right spirit, I’d only packed dark clothes. I’d come prepared to sit, to listen, to cry. But Zoë, like her father, dealt with grief the same way she’d dealt with the cancer itself: She worked. When I got up at seven, Jerry had already left for the local paper where he worked as assistant editor. Zoë was in her parents’ bedroom, sorting labeled boxes.
“Her clothes,” she explained. “She’d already boxed the summer ones.”
She’d known.
“Can I help at all?”
We dismantled Fay’s closets for hours, Zoë all business. These pants were to go in this bag, and those shirts were to go in this pile. The jewelry would be auctioned; anything with stains we would rip for the ragbag. She was as ruthless as she was careless. One by one I folded and bagged and boxed the precious artifacts of a mother and a wife.
“Zoë, don’t you want to keep some of these things?” I asked, hesitating to force yet another beautiful shawl into the already overstuffed bag of scarves and hats.
“For what?” Zoë asked shortly.
“You could keep a few for yourself,” I suggested gently. “Something to remember her by.”
“Dad’s selling the house. He can’t afford this place, let alone storage for me to hoard junk for some sentimental whim.”
Of course: the price tag for chronic disease. I finally connected the seemingly unrelated comments she’d been making about auctions, about the housing market, about the insufficiency of her father’s salary. He would live the rest of his life under the financial burden of his wife’s prolonged illness. I worked without saying another word.
When I returned from carrying the last box to the car, I found Zoë sitting on her mother’s bed staring at a framed photograph of her parents. They were standing on a beach, Fay in a blue dress. Their wedding day.
Zoë started when I stepped forward, as if caught doing something shameful. Then a change came over her expression; there was a glint of mischief in her eyes. “Want to see something?”
She took me to her old bedroom. It was tidy, simple: a bed, a rug, an elegant oak dresser. On the dresser sat a glass canister of cotton balls and decorative bottles of cheap lotion.
Beside the lotions sat a mannequin head.
“The wig head, for the wig of the day,” Zoë explained. She opened the closet to reveal a shelf that housed several such mannequins. Each wore a wig of real human hair. Auburn, blond, short, long, curly, straight.
“You weren’t kidding about it being an obsession,” I said.
“Somewhere along the way, she gave up trying to look like Fay and enjoyed being a new Fay every day.”
“What