Hello Beautiful

Mrs. Ceccione ducked in and out without coming near the Padavano women. She had been avoiding Rose since Cecelia moved in with her, but she was no doubt worried she would go to hell if she didn’t show her respect for the dead. Relatives and cousins Sylvie had met only a handful of times because so-and-so hated so-and-so arrived and departed in tears or huffs. “That woman,” Rose whispered angrily to her daughters at least once per wake session, but usually Sylvie didn’t even know to whom she was referring. There was an infrastructure of grudges that had shaped Charlie’s and Rose’s extended families and kept them away from one another. When the Padavano sisters thought of family, they’d always pictured only the six people who lived under their roof. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins had always been framed as enemies or potential enemies. Sylvie watched people wash in and out of the room on a tidal schedule of theatrical grief, but she was mostly aware of who was missing: Cecelia and the baby.

Cecelia and Izzy had been released from the hospital that afternoon. The original plan, constructed largely by Julia, had been for Cecelia to go straight from the hospital to Rose, where the baby would serve as a peace offering between the mother and her youngest daughter. But that plan had evaporated when Charlie died. Sylvie had been the one to answer the kitchen phone when Cecelia called from the hospital, crying so hard Sylvie didn’t know who it was at first. Rose had taken the news as if it were a bolt of lightning. Her body tightened, then released, and she fell to the living room floor. Sylvie knelt next to her. Emeline — the terrible sentence, Dad is dead, still in her ears — ran back to the hospital to be with Cecelia. Julia didn’t know yet; she was sitting peacefully on a bus to Northwestern.

The first thing Rose had said, in a strange new voice, was, “She was the last one to see him? He was with her?”

Sylvie had been confused at first. “Cecelia?”

“Her,” Rose said, in the strange voice.

“He died in the hallway,” Sylvie said. But she knew then that the opening to Cecelia and the beautiful new baby had been shut. This death, and the betrayal Rose saw in it, had ruined any chance of reunion. Sylvie stayed on the floor, but she drew back from her mother. Charlie had always tempered Rose and insisted she be softer. He had no doubt been thinking the baby would be the fix as well. Sylvie wished she had spoken to him about it; she and her sisters should have brought him in on the plan. If they had, maybe he wouldn’t have gone to visit Cecelia in the hospital. Maybe this wouldn’t have happened.

Still, she told her mother, “It has nothing to do with Cecelia. His heart gave out.”

“Not with me,” Rose said. “It wouldn’t have happened on my watch.”

Charlie’s favorite armchair was behind them. The armchair where he spoke in meter, and drank his drinks, and told his daughters how much he loved them. Sylvie had never cared if his paycheck got smaller or if he drank too much. He had been her person, and they’d passed books back and forth between them her entire life. She had noticed as a little girl that Charlie never went into the back garden, and so Sylvie never did either. That early impulse to follow her father, to imitate him, had built a fence between her and Rose.

The funeral took place five days after the death. So many people showed up at St. Procopius that they couldn’t all fit inside the large church. Rose wore a black dress with a piece of black lace pinned to her hair. She sat in the front row with Sylvie and Julia at her sides. William flanked Julia in his dark wedding suit. On Sylvie’s other side, Emeline twisted in her seat to see if her twin had entered the church, because surely Cecelia wouldn’t miss this. Sylvie caught her sister’s eye to ask, Do you see her? Emeline shook her head.

Sweating under her thick dress and tights, Sylvie remembered the last time she’d been alone with her father, about a month earlier. After dinner one night, Rose had sent the two of them to pick up a big order from the market. She’d done the shopping earlier; their job was to carry it home. The order wasn’t ready, so Mrs. DiPietro gave Charlie a small glass of beer and they waited on the back steps of the shop. There was a small, spiky garden at their feet, and Charlie studied it. “Doesn’t hold a candle to your mother’s,” he’d said.

“How would you know?” Sylvie held her hair up over her head, trying to get some air on her neck. The sun was setting, but it had been an unusually warm September day. “You never go in the backyard.”

He gave a small smile. “I presume her greatness.”

Her father looked tired, and Sylvie remembered wondering if he’d been sleeping poorly. Probably his heart was beginning to fail; it was failing that day on the stoop, with the beer in his hand. Maybe Charlie had sensed it, because he’d said, “Sweetheart, I knew that you skipped a heap of classes in high school.”