Winter Garden

“Another cooking lesson. This is awesome,” Nina said, pouring the noodles and water into a strainer in the sink. Then she dished up two plates, grabbed the salad, and returned to the table, carrying a bottle of wine with her.

“Thank you,” Mom said. She closed her eyes in prayer for a moment and then reached for her fork.

“Have you always done that?” Nina said. “Prayed before dinner?”

“Quit studying me, Nina. ”

“Because that’s the kind of thing a parent generally passes on to their children. I don’t remember praying before dinner except at the big holidays. ”

Mom began to eat.

Nina wanted to keep questioning her mother, but the savory scent of the stroganoff—rich beef chunks, perfectly browned and then simmered for hours in a sauce of sherry wine, fresh thyme, heavy cream, and mushrooms—wafted up to her, and her stomach growled in anticipation. She practically dived into this meal that so represented her childhood. “Thank God you have enough food in the freezer to feed a starving nation,” she said, pouring them both some wine. When silence answered her, she said, “Thank you, Nina, for saying so. ”

Nina tried to concentrate on the food, but the silence got to her. She had never been a patient woman. It was strange; she could sit still for hours waiting for the perfect shot, but without a camera in her hand, she needed something to do. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore. “Enough,” she said so sharply that Mom looked up. “I’m not Meredith. ”

“I am aware of that. ”

“You were too tough for us when we were girls, and Mere, well, she stuck around and she never changed much. I left. And you know what? You don’t scare me or hurt me so much anymore. I’m here now to take care of you. If Mere has her way, I’ll be here until you move into Senior World, and I’ll be damned if I’ll eat every meal under a cone of silence. ”

“A what?”

“We must have talked at dinner when I was a kid. I remember talking. Even laughing. ”

“That was the three of you. ”

“How come you never really look at me or Meredith?”

“You are imagining things now. ” Mom took a drink of wine. “Eat. ”

“Okay, I’ll eat. But we are going to talk, and that’s that. Since you are a lemon in the conversation game, I’ll start. My favorite movie is Out of Africa. I love watching giraffes move across the sunset in the Serengeti, and I’m surprised to admit that sometimes I miss the snow. ”

Mom took another drink of her wine.

“I could ask about the fairy tales instead,” Nina said. “I could ask about how it is that you know the stories word for word or why you only told them to us with the lights out, or why Dad—”

“My favorite author is Pushkin. Although Anna Akhmatova reads my mind. I miss . . . the true belye nochi, and my favorite movie is Doctor Zhivago. ” Her accent softened on the Russian words, turned them into a kind of music.

“So we have something in common after all,” Nina said, reaching for her wine, watching her mother.

“What is that?”

“We like big love stories with unhappy endings. ”

Her mother pushed back from the table suddenly and stood up. “Thank you for dinner. I am tired now. Good night. ”

“I’ll ask again, you know,” Nina said as she passed her. “For the fairy tale. ”

Mom paused, took a slowed step, and then kept going, around the corner and up the stairs. When her bedroom door thudded closed, Nina stared up at the ceiling. “You’re afraid, aren’t you?” she mused aloud. “Of what?”

Bundled up in her old terry-cloth robe, Meredith sat out on her porch, rocking in a wicker chair. The dogs lay beside her feet, tangled together. They appeared to be sleeping, but every now and then one of them whined and looked up. They knew something was wrong. Jeff was gone.

She couldn’t believe he’d done this to her now, in the wake of her father’s death and in the midst of her mother’s meltdown. She wanted to latch on to that anger, but it was ephemeral and hard to hold. She kept imagining one scene, over and over and over.

They would be at the dining room table, she and Jeff and the girls. . . .

Jillian would have her nose buried in a book; Maddy would be tapping her foot, asking when they could go. All of that teenage impatience would disappear when Jeff said, “We’re breaking up. ”

Maybe that wasn’t exactly how he would say it, or maybe he’d chicken out and let Meredith say the poisonous words. That had certainly been their parenting pattern. Jeff was the “fun” one; Meredith laid down the law.