CHAPTER
eight
When I pulled into the parking lot of the grocery store, I was surprised to see so many other cars. I’d have thought—hoped, even—that the drizzle would have kept all the housewives at home. How wrong I’d been.
The very last thing I wanted was to push a cart through a barrage of well-meaning condolences just so that I could get a pound of butter, a couple cans of soup, and half a dozen other necessities.
Fitting my car into an open spot, I contemplated backing out and heading for home. Sighing, I resigned myself to the fact that I would eventually have to brave the public. That morning was as good as any, I supposed. I left the engine running while I mustered up the courage to go inside.
I sat in that car for so long the windows got steamed up.
Some impulse made me take a fingertip to the glass. I made a circle with lines radiating out from it. A sunshine for a gloomy day.
Just like that, I was taken back more than thirty years. Clara and me with matching bobbed haircuts. Hers looking smarter than mine, the way her hair bounced in golden ringlets while mine laid flat. I remembered that Clara had a little knick on her earlobe where Mother had cut her by accident with the shears. Clara had never been good at sitting still during haircuts.
We kneeled at the living room window, pouting at the rain and wishing it would dry up before it was too late. Mother had promised to take us to the park if the day was nice. Offers such as that were as hard to come by as her good moods.
“We’ll go,” she’d said after a quarter hour of watching us sit there. “Once the sky clears up.”
The way the clouds loomed, I didn’t think it ever would.
“Look at you.” Mother stood behind us, bent at the waist and with her hands on her knees. “A couple of gloomy Guses, huh?”
“We wanted to go to the park,” Clara whined. “But the sun isn’t coming out.”
Mother reached over us, huffing onto the window and drawing a sunshine into the steam her breath had left.
“There.” She straightened. “The sun’s out. Let’s have ourselves an adventure.”
“But, Mama,” I’d protested. “It’s raining.”
“Don’t be silly, Betty Jane,” she said, and then pointed at the glass. “It’s sunny. It can’t possibly rain on a day like this.”
I’d scowled, but Clara’s face lit up. She’d always loved when our mother’s mercurial spirit ran hot.
“Let’s go for a boat ride.” Mother nodded toward the sofa and grabbed the broom from the corner. “All aboard.”
“That’s what you say for a train,” Clara had said with a giggle.
“They say it for boats too,” Mother said. “Now get on.”
I sat cross-legged in the middle, feeling a spring push against my thigh. Clara took the very front, on her knees and leaning against the arm of the couch looking like the figurehead. Mother stood behind me on the cushion, rowing the imaginary water with the broom.
“There was once a girl who wanted to be a gondolier,” Mother started. “All she ever dreamed of was propelling a long boat down the Canale Grande in Venice, singing beautiful songs for those who rode along.”
I turned, facing Mother. She put a hand up to shield her eyes from the sunshine of her imagining before going back to rowing in earnest.
“The trouble was, girls weren’t allowed to be gondoliers.” She pulled her lips between her teeth and gave a slight shake of the head. “Her father forbade her from so much as stepping on a gondola.”
The girl, as it turned out, had a rebellious streak, Mother went on. She snuck out on rainy days when her father locked himself in his study. She’d put on a striped shirt and tuck her hair into the flat-topped straw hat of a gondolier and hop into one of the many boats left along the channel.
“She was the only one brave enough to take passengers to and fro in the rain,” Mother said. “She’d sing to them through the downpour. When there was no sun to be seen, she shone even brighter.”
I opened my car door, putting up my umbrella before standing under the see-through plastic dome of it. Droplets misted against the canopy, making the world look like gray and white polka dots.
There was no sunshine in sight.
I hummed as I went anyway.