On the morning she sat at her piano in her robe, her glasses lying on the lid, the fallboard propped to the reveal of simple gold lettering. Outside a strong wind blew and broke the petiole of russet leaves till they freed and fell, and Saint wondered if anything died a more beautiful death.
“What is this?” Norma said.
Saint did not turn to notice that her grandmother wore a navy dress with a gorse flower hat, like she could not decide whether to celebrate or mourn.
“It’s a song by a frog with an introspective soul,” Saint said, and watched the season like it was her last, like it would not be so noteworthy again.
“It’s sad,” Norma said.
“It isn’t. It’s for the lovers and the dreamers.”
Saint stared at the painting of the white house as she played, and she thought of the way his fingers delicately grasped the brush, the way he breathed as he brought color into her world. The night before she had sat in the hallway and listened to the telephone ring, fought the urge to answer, and instead listened to his voice on the machine as he talked of a gold rush, a summer in Colorado’s Kingdom. She had woken her grandmother and made her promise to keep the recordings after she moved.
Saint and Norma ate breakfast together for the last time. It had been decided that Saint would move into the small house on Alexander Avenue, a gift from Jimmy’s mother as his parents fled Monta Clare for retirement in the warmth of Florida. A house where reminders of everything before sang so loud she forgot her own rhythms. He told her they would decorate together, that they would head to Monta Clare Hardware and pick out colors she liked, and they would rip out the old bathroom and kitchen.
Saint dressed in an ivory gown with a lace bodice, simple and unfussy, but when she walked down the creaking staircase her grandmother’s smile told her she had done enough for him, for the church and the townspeople that would fill it to witness the rookie cop marry the rookie veterinarian.
“I thought you would wear your French braid,” Norma said.
“Not today.”
She had wanted to get a car, but Jimmy had balked at the expense, and so grandmother and granddaughter set off toward the church together, walking slow to take in a morning already beginning to turn.
A few neighbors came out and smiled, and a little girl waved and clapped her hands. And when they met the crossroads with Rosewood Avenue Saint breathed deep.
The church was a fade of variegated gray; the pinnacles rose, and before them Saint took Norma’s hand at the far end of a winding pathway she had walked a thousand times before, in anticipation and fear and, mostly, relief.
“And these are happy tears?” Norma said, and carefully dabbed at Saint’s cheeks. And then she knelt and used that same handkerchief to clean the mud and grass from Saint’s flats. Norma stayed down there, her knee on the damp ground as she looked up at her granddaughter backed by a church they had spent the better and worst parts of their lives looking to.
“He will be kind to you. I promise,” Norma said.