Lucy attempted to distract Milo with funny stories about her family so they might not seem so crazy. She talked about all manner of things while they rode from house to house delivering meatballs, keeping up a constant chatter. Like how Great-Uncle Lando had bought a box of New Year’s Eve supplies off the back of some guy’s truck at a deep discount because it was July. Blow horns and clackers and bags of exploding confetti. There were even a bunch of HAPPY NEW YEAR tinsel tiaras that he was especially proud of and couldn’t wait to make everyone wear at Dad’s party.
That was when she realized funny and crazy were two shades of the same color, like burgundy and red, and so she stopped talking about her family altogether.
“Your uncle G invited me to your dad’s party,” Milo said.
“Believe me, you don’t want to come. There’s going to be too many people, which means a lot of yelling. Plus, they’ll make you work filling champagne glasses or mixing the antipasto salad or worse.”
“Worse like what? Removing bodies in the dead of night?”
“Ha.”
“I’d like to come. Uncle G invited Grams, too.”
If Lucy could have fallen over and died, she would have. Dead meant she wouldn’t have to suffer any more embarrassment at the hands of her family. Plus, how much was too much for Milo?
The Pink Kitchen Deli activities were one thing, the Family Gathering activities were something else entirely. The Belly Button Aunts would bring their pouches of herbs, and Great-Aunt Lilliana would announce her premonitions, and then there was the way her family ate polenta and how many courses there were so that if you stuffed yourself with too much ravioli or sugo meat, you wouldn’t have enough room for the pork butt and roasted peppers and then the Belly Button Aunts might think you were sick and insist on lighting a candle to the saints for your health. Then there was always the pinochle and the fistfights.
Nonnina’s urn would have its own chair next to Papo.
“Suit yourself, I guess.” Lucy felt her face tense up the way it had while Dad had been gone.
After an hour of deliveries—all commenced while chasing an escaped dog, holding a crying baby while Mrs. Frank looked for change and drinking endless glasses of lemonade—Lucy decided they’d earned their lunch and the two dollars in tips they’d been given. Lucy was hot, damp from sweat and hungry as she led the way down Madden Avenue and stopped in front of the Calvary Catholic Cemetery, her sunhat flopping.
“You stay here. I’ll just drop off the flowers, and I’ll be out in five minutes,” Lucy said, trying to be sensitive to the fact that Milo might not want to be reminded that people, in fact, die.
Instead, Milo grabbed his rucksack and marched toward the cemetery gates like he was facing down death itself. Lucy followed with the bouquet Great-Aunt Lilliana had given her.
Big Nona’s headstone was carved with China roses, the kind Big Papo had grown because they meant grace and lasting beauty. Big Papo’s was right beside hers. They’d died within two months of each other, their hearts so intertwined, Great-Aunt Lilliana had said, they couldn’t live one without the other. There were a few more Rossi family headstones that stood side by side in the shade of two sycamores. Milo sat on the grass right between them, elbows on knees, chin in his hands.
“It’s nice here,” he said. “The grass looks like carpet.”
Lucy nodded, taking her sunhat off and running a hand across her sweaty forehead. “Mr. Jefferson keeps things tidy. I’ve seen him on his hands and knees, even, trimming around the headstones. He’s obsessed with grass. Don’t get him started, or he’ll talk forever.”
“You’ve got to have pride in what you do. No matter what you do. That’s what my dad says.”
“That’s a fact,” Lucy said.
Lucy handed him his meatball sandwich and offered him a bottle of RC Cola. Just then, a brilliant blue dragonfly touched down on the cap of the bottle.
“They’re everywhere,” Lucy said.
“Only in the summer. And only in certain climates. Dragonflies like it here,” Milo said. The dragonfly hovered and then sped away. “She’s a beautiful specimen. Did you know that Sikorsky, which designs helicopters, used a dragonfly wing as a model?”
“I did not know that.”
“They used two thousand different drawings on an IBM computer and came up with the perfect wing.”
“How do you know it’s a she?”
Milo took out his sketchbook and flipped through, stopping on a page with several detailed pencil drawings of dragonflies. He pointed to the rounded edges at the bottom of one set of wings, and the S-curved edges at the bottom of another set. “The rounded ones are female.”
A breeze lifted the edges of Milo’s book, and Lucy glimpsed shimmering colors, just like the wings of the dragonflies. “Can I look?”
He handed it to her, and she flipped the pages slowly. Notes and pencil sketches of different parts of the dragonfly. Wings and abdomens, eyes and tails. Toward the back were watercolors, different species that looked like they’d been plucked from a dream, with soft edges and colors. They sparkled and shined with iridescence, just like the real live things.
“How did you do that?” Lucy said.
Milo chewed a bite of sandwich. “I use mica chips. I crush them with a rock and add it to the paint.”
“Mica is almost a three on the Moh’s scale of mineral hardness,” Lucy said.
If Milo found that a strange observation, he didn’t say so.
“Sometimes I cheat and buy eye shadow. Wish I had a camera for the looks on people’s faces at the drugstore. Sometimes they’ll say, ‘What a nice kid, buying eye shadow for your mom.’ And I’ll say, ‘Nope, it’s for me,’ and let them think what they want.”
He laughed and stuck Lucy’s floppy hat on his own head, which then made her laugh. She touched the thick paper and read their names. Seaside Dragonlet, Gray Petaltail, Vivid Dancer.
Golden-winged Skimmer.
She looked carefully at the red dragonfly, the way its wings were darkest near the body and became lighter and lighter until the farthest tips of the wings were invisible, like the flames of a fire. Beyond the invisible tips of the wings were the lightest of swerving lines meant to look like heat, maybe. At least that was how it looked to Lucy.
“Where did you see it? The golden-winged skimmer?”
Milo pressed his lips together. “Just before I left Fayetteville. Cross Creek feeds into the Cape Fear River, and there’s this perfect place for dragonflies. So I’d just take a folding chair out there sometimes and sketch for hours. I’d send Dad my sketches in letters. Sometimes he’d send back his own. But he’s a terrible drawer, so they were mostly meant to be funny.”
Milo reached in his back pocket and took out a tightly folded square of paper, unfolded it and handed it to Lucy.
Lucy smiled. It was a cartoon sketch of a dragonfly with pointy wings and googly eyes. There was a line drawn to each part and labeled by name: googly eyes, beer belly, bbq ribs, spindly legs.
The line that pointed to the wing said Grandpa Bud.
Milo looked over her shoulder. “Grams says the wings of a dragonfly carry the souls of the departed. Grandpa Bud was my grandpa and we’d tease her about it sometimes, that Grandpa Bud was probably having the time of his life flying around with the dragonflies. She’s pretty superstitious.”
Lucy snorted. “No wonder she likes my family.”
They sat together, quiet for a little while. Listening to the water burble in the fountain, and watching the zigging and zagging dragonflies, Lucy was overcome with a sense of homeostasis.
Later, as they gathered their trash and packed up to leave, Milo said, “You’re lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“To have such a big family. I just have Grams. Mom’s an only child, and Dad grew up in a boys’ home in Iowa. Grams has a brother in Florida, Uncle Sticks, but that’s it.”
“I think you’re the lucky one,” Lucy said. “When I’m around my family, I always feel like I’m waiting for something to explode. Champagne bottles. Ravioli. Tempers.”
“I can see that,” Milo said. “But I still think you’re the lucky one.”
Just then, the brilliant blue dragonfly caught in her peripheral vision. It hovered above Noona Peterson’s headstone, just to the left of Big Papo’s. Lucy read the inscription as she had so many times before:
When we try to pick out anything by itself,
we find it hitched
to everything else in the universe.
—John Muir
Those words always put a picture in Lucy’s mind: a night sky with shimmering threads connecting stars into constellations. She thought again about her family. How they all seemed connected by invisible string. All but her. She wanted desperately to feel those connections, to know she belonged. But didn’t know how to get there.
She was lucky, she supposed, just like Milo said. Her family might be a circus, but they were her circus. And even if she didn’t quite feel connected, she wasn’t sure what she’d do without them.