“Really?” Meredith said.
“She always said the secret was to slap the dough against the pastry board. When I was a girl, we often fought about this. I said it was unnecessary. I was wrong, of course. ” Mom shook her head. “Later, I could never make that dough without thinking of my mother. Once, when I served it to your father, he said the strudel was too salty. This was from my tears, so I put the recipe away and tried to forget it. ”
“And did you?”
Mom glanced out the window. “I forgot nothing. ”
“You didn’t want to forget,” Meredith said.
“Why do you say this?” Mom asked.
“The fairy tale. It was the only way you could tell us who you were. ”
“Until the play,” Mom said. “I am sorry for that, Meredith. ”
Meredith sat back in her seat. “I’ve waited for that apology all my life, and now that I have it, it doesn’t matter. I care about you, Mom. I just want us all to keep talking. ”
“Why?” Mom said quietly. “How can you care? Either one of you?”
“We tried not to love you, too,” Nina said.
“I would say I made it easy,” Mom said.
“No,” Meredith said, “never easy. ”
Mom reached out and poured three more vodkas. Lifting her glass, she looked at her daughters. “What shall we drink to?”
“How about family?” Stacey said, showing up just in time to pour a fourth shot. “To those who are here, those who are gone, and those who are lost. ” She clinked her glass against Mom’s.
“Is that an old Russian toast?” Nina asked after she’d downed her vodka.
“I’ve never heard it before,” Mom said.
“It’s what we say in my house,” Stacey said. “It’s good, don’t you think?”
“Da,” Mom said, actually smiling. “It is very good. ”
On the walk back through town, Mom seemed to be standing taller. She was quick to smile or to point out a trinket in a store window.
Meredith couldn’t help staring. It was like seeing a butterfly emerge from its chrysalis. And somehow, seeing her new mother, or her mother in this new light, made Meredith feel differently about herself. Like her mom, she smiled easier, laughed more oft en. Not once had she worried about the office, or her girls, or missing the ship. She’d been happy just to be, to flow on this journey with her mom and sister. For once, they felt as intertwined as strands of a rope; where one went, the other belonged.
“Look,” Mom said as they came to the end of the street.
At first all Meredith saw were the quaint blue wooden shops and the distant snowy peak of Mount Edgecumbe. “What?”
“There. ”
Meredith followed the invisible line from her mother’s pointing finger.
In a park across the street, standing beneath a streetlamp twined in bright pink flowers, there was a family, laughing together, posing for silly pictures. There was a woman with long brown hair, dressed in crisply pressed jeans and a turtleneck; a blond man whose handsome face seemed hardly able to contain the breadth of his smile; and two towheaded little girls, giggling as they pushed each other out of the picture.
“That is how you and Jeff used to be,” Mom said quietly.
Meredith felt a kind of sadness. It wasn’t what she’d felt before: not disappointment that her kids didn’t call, or fear that Jeff didn’t love her, or even worry that she had lost too much of herself. This new feeling was the realization that she wasn’t young anymore. The days of frolicking with her little girls were gone. Her children were on their own now, and Meredith needed to accept that. They would always be a family, but if she’d learned anything in the past few weeks it was that a family wasn’t a static thing. There were always changes going on. Like with continents, sometimes the changes were invisible and underground, and sometimes they were explosive and deadly. The trick was to keep your balance. You couldn’t control the direction of your family any more than you could stop the continental shelf from breaking apart. All you could do was hold on for the ride.
As she stood there, staring at strangers, she saw her marriage in moments. She and Jeff at the prom, dancing under a mirrored ball to “Stairway to Heaven” and French-kissing . . . her in labor, screaming at him to stay the fuck away from her with those ice chips . . . him handing her the first pages of his first novel and asking her opinion . . . and him standing beside her when Dad was dying, saying, Who takes care of you, Mere? and trying to hold her.
“I’ve been an idiot,” she said to no one except herself, forgetting for a moment that she was standing in the middle of a busy sidewalk, flanked by eavesdroppers.