Rosemary and Time
Ellie carr listened to the message on her answering machine, gently nudging her cat from her ankles. Her sister’s voice threw her. Annie announced her news before hanging up. Mercy was dead.
The women in Ellie’s family were hardened lifers. They stormed past brothers, husbands, sons and nephews, charging into old age well suited to their armor. The men were dead before they reached the age of reduced subway fare and a guaranteed seat on the bus, before tooth loss and memory loss that followed, before they knew what had hit them. They were driven from the land of the living by denial and fear, bothered to an early grave by the tenacious sex who grew up with them, married them, or carried them in blissful unborn ignorance for nine months. Even relaxed, the women looked angry, mouths set in stern recognition of their plight. Aunt Mercy had survived a century. She had probably not left without a fight.
Rummaging through a desk drawer, Ellie found an old family photograph, one of only a handful she hadn’t tossed. She flattened a ragged tear in the snapshot, scrutinizing
a family gathering. A stranger might easily misinterpret
the faded, scalloped-edged black-and-white photograph, reminiscent of a pre-digital era. Gathered around a dining room table laden with a Thanksgiving feast was a picture-perfect assembly of parents, uncles, aunts and cousins. Ellie’s formidable grandmother sported a chrysanthemum corsage the size of a small child’s head.
a family gathering. A stranger might easily misinterpret
the faded, scalloped-edged black-and-white photograph, reminiscent of a pre-digital era. Gathered around a dining room table laden with a Thanksgiving feast was a picture-perfect assembly of parents, uncles, aunts and cousins. Ellie’s formidable grandmother sported a chrysanthemum corsage the size of a small child’s head.
Ellie recalled scenes along dimly lighted corridors in the Museum of Natural History: dioramas of indigenous families seated around the fire, elders narrating ancestral tales, women tanning hides and stringing necklaces of oyster shells, while raven-haired children ran in naked pursuit of a mangy pup—just moments before the bloodshed.
Ellie—now sixty-three—was maybe five or six years old in the photograph. Nothing had changed. She was still the outsider. Ellie’s marriage had replenished the stale cup of familial dysfunction; she’d abandoned the provincial disapproval of her own kind for the pretentious indifference of her Park Avenue in-laws.
Separated at twenty-nine, she’d sworn off the diminishing returns of family affairs. She’d only called her sister, compelled by relief and the misplaced familiar. After a briefly impassive response to Ellie’s impending divorce, Annie had launched into a tirade, about her job, how jealous her coworkers were, how much better she was than, well, everybody. Something in the force of her sister’s anger caused Ellie to ask, “Is everything all right? I mean, with you?”
“I…can’t,” Annie stuttered.
“Sure you can. Tell me,” Ellie said.
Silence on the other end of the line—time-traveler quiet—until Ellie said, “You still there?”
“You knew. You always knew,” Annie mumbled, before the line went dead.
Soon after Ellie’s divorce had become final, her cousin Thom had telephoned out of the blue. She had not spoken with him in some time. She had just begun to breathe easier. When the phone rang then, in early November, she’d known who it was before she answered.
“Been a while, El. I was thinkin’?”
Please don’t let it be Thanksgiving.
“Ellie? You there?”
“Uh huh. Sorry, I’m here. You just caught–.”
“Let’s do Thanksgiving. I know you’re probably busy.”
She detected a whiff of sarcasm.
“But c’mon, hon, you know? Just like the old days. We’ll do it here!”
Just like the old days. That was before she’d married outside the tribe, when their close friendship was like balm on a wound. She’d called him Tom-Tom. “Here” was doubtless a proud, down-at-heel Victorian—a lopsided fixer-upper—among others of its kind somewhere in New Jersey.
“Who will be there?” she asked, regretting it immediately. But he took her question as an affirmation and reeled off the usual suspects. His mother—Ellie’s Aunt Mercy—and her sister, Aunt Violet. His brother, David—named after their father—was coming with Russell, of course. Thomas mentioned a few friends from the neighborhood who might drop by after dinner, names unfamiliar to her.
“Nana?” Ellie asked. Nana Carr was in a nursing home on Staten Island. At ninety, she’d lost her intimidating girth but not her punishing reach. She’d chosen the residence for its hellish commute. Three older daughters—Flora, April and Jasmine—had fled far from harm’s way. Only Mercy, Violet, and Ellie’s father, Will, had remained.
“Not Nana,” he said, and they laughed conspiratorially, like old allies. “You think Uncle Will can make it?”
Will was the youngest, a prematurely balding man of resigned posture and a submissive nature, so unlike his five strapping sisters. He made the crushing journey from Hartford, Connecticut to Clove Lake Nursing Home every month. He kept his head low for a couple of hours of his mother’s xenophobic harangue, aimed at the staff. He endured her bitter disappointment with men, all men. He could, as he’d often said, make the journey blindfolded. He often made the return trip blind. He’d scope out the necessary watering holes. A spot at the snack counter on the ferry, wolfing a pretzel the size of an inner tube. He’d wash that down with a couple more beers he’d sneaked on board as he searched for the Statue of Liberty, with a rueful heart. In a deli at the bus stop outside of the ferry terminal, he’d grab a tallboy of Rheingold with the ludicrous straw concealed in a brown paper bag. The real return on his good deed was found back in Manhattan, at Dave’s Tavern on Ninth Avenue, where he’d rush through a supper of peanuts and a hard-boiled egg crusted with salt. This necessitated a boilermaker or two before he directed his unsteady gait to Port Authority.
Her mother had long since left Will to drink himself along the same bottom line in Hartford.
“No, you won’t see my father,” Ellie said.
Thomas hesitated. “Um…okay. So I’m thinking, maybe Annie?”
In the right mood, Ellie’s younger sister had a glorious laugh, like a giddy chorus of clowns shot from a circus cannon. But Annie was a daisy-strewn minefield. It sometimes happened that her laugh—her infectious giggle—seduced you. Then it was best to proceed with extreme caution. She was four years younger than Ellie. Annie’s rosebud pout had become a perpetual sneer, her doll-like frame grown into a torturously thin body. When she was little, her cheeks had invited pinching. Her sorrowful eyes begged you to pick her up for a cuddle. But then you did. As if she’d burst into flame, she’d scream to be put down.
“Why not?” Ellie said.
Thomas suggested Ellie make the call.
Neither Ellie nor Thomas mentioned Garrett, Annie’s seven-year-old son, who had been placed in his father’s custody. Ellie suspected her nephew and brother-in-law had had enough of the anger Annie hemorrhaged. It was off-limits to ask about Garrett, and it broke Ellie’s heart.
She could hardly blame her cousin’s reticence, just as she could not resist his exuberance. She did not know then that Thomas was coming to conclusions, wrapping things up.
“Sure. I can do that. Where are you living now?”
“Super!” Thomas cried. He rattled off an address in Plainfield, New Jersey. “This will be our last move, I swear!”
Ellie laughed. “Let’s do it!”
On a leaden Thanksgiving morning, Ellie settled into the back seat of a Flash Taxi at the Plainfield bus station. “Do you mind?” she asked the driver, slightly lowering a window. She inhaled the scent of burning firewood; like an undertow, it took her back.
When Ellie was a girl, family gatherings at Thanksgiving and Christmas were a regular affair at her cousins’ home in Cranford, New Jersey. In summer they took it outdoors, converging on the picnic grounds of a little park a few short blocks from their conventional gray-and-white clapboard Colonial with a deep porch fronting three stories. Pink and white begonias trailed from hanging baskets. Beneath the porch, at the top of a lawn freshly mown, popcorn balls of pastel-colored hydrangeas bloomed. A bulky mutt named Skippy had to be prodded from the porch swing. Clean, empty milk bottles waited at the front door—it was everything Ellie’s childhood in public housing in Queens was not.
She lowered the window further, remembering the sharp, intrusive twang of lighter fluid in her nostrils before she’d smell the sweet, smoky charcoal that promised hot dogs and hamburgers. Corn on the cob, almost always forgotten until the foil was scorched and impossible to scrape from desiccated kernels. She remembered her panicked flights from rank outdoor toilets live-wired with treacherous wasps.
From about nine years old or so, her sister Annie went from cheerful to charred in no time. She’d storm from the picnic table, unprovoked, to circle the park again and again. Her reedy legs worked furiously, in sync with balled fists pumping rage. Whenever someone caught sight of her ponytail, laughter erupted. The grownups placed bets on her endurance.
Thomas’s brother David was five years older than Ellie. David, for a time, seemed unable to keep up with the speed of his own growth. As a teen he’d sweetened his grandmother’s sour nature with music. Cousin David’s crew cut bobbed as his fingers flew up and down a bulky accordion. He swayed in too-short chinos to the bubbly dance tunes he’d taught himself to play while watching the Lawrence Welk Show. Nana Carr patted tight spirals of a fresh perm, humming while drowning bees in soda pop bottles, never taking her eye off the park’s perimeter for the unwelcome arrival of a family who might upset a neutral balance with their darker skins.
Ellie remembered little of their grandmother’s companion. “Uncle” John was a red-faced, genial man who kept out of Nana’s way. He made himself useful by falling asleep under the nearest tree. Ellie, Annie and Thomas never knew their grandfather. Cousin David barely remembered him. Nobody spoke of him. Ellie’s father and Uncle David pitched softball with Aunt Violet’s husband, Joe. With the classic ease of film stars, they slouched in joking conversation, cracked leather mitt on one hand, unfiltered cigarette in the other. They tossed the ball lazily and Ellie couldn’t take her eyes off them. They were men who had fought wars. When Uncle David absently rolled his shirtsleeve above an anchor tattooed on his bicep, Ellie thrilled. He had a butcher shop in Union. Aunt Violet and Uncle Joe were childless. Vi doted on her nieces and nephews as if they were her own. Ellie’s dad and Uncle Joe had secrets.
In the late afternoon, when darkened trees had split the sunlight that stretched like claw marks across the grass, ice cubes rattled in Uncle Joe’s big red metal cooler. Aunt Mercy and her sister Vi smoothed their modest cotton sundresses, directing frosty glances at their husbands digging for cold beers, momentarily turning their attention from Ellen, Ellie’s flirtatious mother, who laughed loudly and wore a midriff-baring halter and clingy pedal pushers. Ellie and Tom-Tom made for the bleachers, where they commandeered their pirate ship, or reinvented it as a fortress, or lay upon the wooden planks at the edge of the softball field, pondering their future. They would never marry. Ever.
Ellie had known from the time of Uncle David’s death, when she was twelve, that those fatherless boys were gay. It was the singular connection she had with both of them. Neither of Ellie’s cousins could wield a bat or throw a ball. Those were the early signs, at least according to Ellie’s father. In the days following Will’s death, not long after the last Thanksgiving, Ellie had been searching through his meager belongings when she’d come across a photo of her father and another young man. They were in Coast Guard whites, embracing like a new couple. Scrawled on the back of the photograph was the message: Love you always. Your “buddy” Stan.
She’d been missing her cousin Thomas. They’d had only one brief meeting at Uncle Joe’s funeral. Amidst the somber gathering, a very angry Aunt Violet had dropped a bomb: Uncle Joe had fathered a child during the war when he was stationed in Italy.
Ellie felt it was a good idea to reconnect, now that she was rid of her husband, who’d caused Thomas to accuse her of betrayal. It might be fun. It might be healing. Just as she knew Thomas and his “friend” Tony—as the rest of the family referred to her cousin’s partner—would be revamping another aged beauty’s lackluster complexion, shoring up its creaking interior. They were the anomaly, native New Jerseyans who worked from their garage, restoring furniture, rewiring lamps, mending crockery. They had no inclination to live or work anywhere but New Jersey. They would make do until they opened their own shop.
“We’re here, miss,” said the driver, interrupting Ellie’s reverie.
Ellie saw Thomas just ahead, his lanky, almost gaunt figure hunched under an umbrella in the pearl-colored sleet. He waved the driver to the curb. In his shirtsleeves he seemed not to notice the cold, and grabbed her bags.
Behind him rose a stately old Victorian, more down at heel than his other homes had been. It was grand, though. Settled by Quakers, Plainfield’s dilapidated houses came to be discovered by aesthetes—young men who commuted to jobs in Manhattan. Evenings found them reared archly above renovated marble mantelpieces, very dry martini in hand. They decorated their homes with the spirited vengeance of the repressed. On weekends they left no curio unturned. They scoured flea markets in New Jersey and neighboring Pennsylvania for the missing pieces.
The cousins shared a tentative hug before Thomas loped ahead of her. Ellie grabbed a scarred porch column at the top of the steps. She flicked white paint specks from her hand. Gallon cans of Billiard Green stood beside the front door. Thomas leaned in. She smelled alcohol, cigarettes and neglected teeth. “Sorry I couldn’t pick you up, hon. Tony’s frantic.” He shoved a can with his foot. “This’ll have to go in the garage.”
She followed him into the house. Her cousin’s long-limbed, desultory lope contrasted with Tony’s squat, smoldering jab at life. The Carrs were light-haired, square-jawed Germans. They were mostly escapees from Lutheranism into born-again Christian Fundamentalism. Ellie’s immediate family was the exception, making only desultory church visits—Christmas, Easter, weddings and funerals.
Thomas was a benign pot-smoker who had never left his hippie comfort zone, replete with stoner accoutrements. His thinning hair collected at the back of his neck in a lank ponytail. He doused his mother’s religious fervor with alcohol and more pot.
There was, again, a monastic guest room, still referred to as “Tony’s room.” Tony was Italian-American, a lapsed Catholic, with a wellspring of jokes that left no race, gender, or creed unscathed. Ellie had found that disturbing at first and then hateful. She remembered why she had avoided these occasions, wincing internally. Nobody mentioned the queen-sized waterbed in the master bedroom. Thomas and Tony—and Thom’s brother, David—remained closeted within the families, allowing only Ellie in.
At ten in the morning the house was redolent with wet plaster, cigarettes, and roasting turkey. Ellie suspected the turkey would be the only bit of the meal that would not come out of a can or a box. Tony was the cook whose reputation had reached “legendary proportions.” Ellie thought it more apt to call his idea of a dinner party “legendary portions.” Everything was huge: bowls of overdone spaghetti drowned in canned tomato sauce. Rubbery loaves of ready-made garlic bread. There was always an abundance of cheap Chianti dispensed from a box. He never bothered to disguise the jars or the packaging. Ellie marveled at his shameless acceptance of the accolades.
Tony appeared, clutching a weighty cut glass goblet filled with tomato juice. He eyed Ellie’s deep-pleated men’s trousers, baggy wool cardigan, and the vintage vest she wore over a voluminous, white long-sleeved shirt. Seeing the floppy gray felt hat and the necktie beneath, he bellowed, “Annie!”
“Um, it’s El? Remember?” She removed her hat, revealing a soft knot of light brown hair on top of her head.
“Woody Allen, the Je—the comedian. His movie. This what they’re wearing in the big city nowadays?”
Ellie laughed, “You like?” She followed him into the kitchen.
Packages of frozen sweet potatoes thawed on the counter. Soon enough they would be boiled to a lifeless mash, suffocated under a puffy quilt of miniature marshmallows.
Tony eyed Ellie’s shopping bag warily.
“Ellie brought some stuff, Tone,” Thomas offered.
“From the farmer’s market,” Ellie cheered. She ticked off the contents: fresh spinach—lots of it—garlic, rosemary, and pignoli.Ignoring Tony’s scowl, she showed him the label. “These are pine nuts.”
“I know what they are.” In his world, pignoli appeared at dessert, baked into sweet round confections. Cookies? Yes. Spinach? Never.
Before Tony could insist that he’d take care of everything, Thomas assured him, “She’ll prepare it.” They shuffled uncomfortably in the cluttered kitchen like manacled pachyderms until Thomas suggested, “Have a Bloody Mary, El. He’s just made a fresh batch.”
By midday the rest of the family had turned up as if for a wake—laden with offerings but unsure of their motives. Aunt Violet brought pies from the Pie Factory. Annie blew in bitching about the traffic from Hartford. She’d made an incredible dessert. “But it got ruined in the car so I just chucked it at a rest stop.” Aunt Mercy had her bible. Cousin David and Russell were the last to arrive. Identically dressed in ill-fitting dark blazers, they looked comically unaware. Ellie had been to their legendary parties in a reconverted warehouse in Greenwich Village. She had seen them in their leathery best. Russell was an executive in an oil company, but Aunt Mercy understood it was her son, the public school teacher, whose name was on the lease. They also had a second bedroom. Russell presented a bottle of rosé. “We had it at a party last week. It’s the rage.”
It’s in a real bottle, thought Ellie.
Annie stepped back for the expected once-over, smirking with disapproval. “Who are you s’posed to be, El? What’s-her-name, that actress?”
Ellie knew Annie was disappointed. Impossibly thin in a black ankle-length wool skirt and black turtleneck sweater, Annie thumbed a strand of pearls, staring vacantly at Ellie.
“I’m comfortable and I like thrift shops,” Ellie said.
Annie, inspecting her manicure and picking at an invisible bit of lint on her sweater, made a note of her older sister’s outfit, one that she would replicate.
“It’s stupid,” she snipped.
Aunt Mercy inquired after Will. “Is your father all right, only—?”
“Only what? Your brother, Aunt Mercy, you should call him.”
Her aunt clasped her hands, shaking her head. “You have to learn generosity of spirit, Ellen.” No one ever called her Ellen.
Aunt Vi had cornered her nephew, David. She cupped her glass, relating the story she’d just heard from Annie, how Will’s drinking was getting out of hand. “Fell down in the street! Can you imagine?” David cleared his throat sympathetically.
Russell sank into the claret-colored velvet sofa after raising the volume on the football game. Ellie thumped down next to him.
“You hate sports.”
He raised his glass to hers, smiling thinly. “No I don’t,” he answered definitively. “I love sports.”
Tony darted among them. A half-filled pitcher of Bloody Marys sloshed in his grip. “C’mon. Dinner’s ready. Who needs a refill?”
They stood around the oval mahogany table covered with a vintage lace medallion tablecloth. On it sat a laughably oversized turkey alongside bowls of oatmeal-colored stuffing, shrunken heads of pale Brussels sprouts and doughy rectangles of biscuits. Canned cranberry sauce shimmered like a blood clot. Elaborate crystal decanters filled with ruby-colored Chianti shone like ambulance lights from the center of the table. Mercy called for heads to be bowed. She prayed. Ellie raised her head, partly in defiance. Mercy’s eyes were closed. Her assertive chin tilted upwards, her palms open and extended before her. Ellie expected the usual grace, giving thanks for what we are about to blah, blah, blah, but her aunt’s sermon caught her off guard.
“Our president, who has allowed the devil into the White House, guide him O Lord.”
Ellie shifted uncomfortably, looking around. Jimmy Carter? She expected to signal Thomas, but his chin dug tightly against his chest. His hands gripped the chair before him.
Mercy sang out tonelessly, “Help us in our fight to take back the souls of our children. Keep them from the devil who would lead them into darkness, away from your teachings.”
Ellie dropped her head. She chewed her lip, fearful for her restraint. When Mercy thanked the Lord for Ellen’s return to them, Ellie seized up. When Mercy requested that they sit while she read a passage from her bible, Ellie wiped her sweating palms on her lap. Before her aunt had put her bible aside, Ellie had lunged for the nearest decanter.
“What’s this?” Annie hoisted a platter, sniffing the spinach. She picked at a pine nut. “What are these?”
“Pignoli. It’s a recipe I thought—,” Ellie offered.
Annie gagged. “Pigwhatsis?”
“Pigwhatsis!” Tony shrieked. “Annie, you’re killing me.”
Vi piped in. “Ellie always has to be different, like her moth—.” Mercy shot her sister a warning look but Violet was undeterred. “What? What did I say? She’s just like her mother. Ellen was always…she had to be different…you know?”
Annie put the platter down, untouched. “It smells weird.”
Ellie spooned a vivid green heap onto her own plate. “That’s fresh rosemary. Not that you’d know.”
“Speaking of pigs, there was this rabbi.” Tony launched into a rapid-fire round of coarse jokes. Annie’s shrill laughter rose above the others’. It continued throughout the meal, louder with every joke, every glass of wine. Ellie rose. She began gathering dishes, halting Tony’s schtick. “Uh oh,” he muttered, “Ellie doesn’t approve.”
Ellie had drunk too much. Steadying herself, she said, “Not only are these jokes racist, they suck as jokes—not even funny. I don’t know what you all are laughing about.”
“You’re not a…you’re not still Jewish, are you El?”
Ellie stopped on her way to the kitchen with the nearly full platter of spinach. She glared at her sister. “I never was Jewish. What the hell is your problem?”
Violet, too, had imbibed, ignoring Mercy’s disgust. “You married that…that Jewish man. That means you are, too.”
Thomas joined Ellie at the kitchen sink, where she’d plunged her hands into hot, soapy water.
“You’re too sensitive, El.” He picked up a dish and began drying.
“Too sensitive?” she cried. “I don’t get it, Thomas. You don’t even flinch when he tells fag jokes.”
Aunt Mercy appeared in the doorway. “Thomas, your friends have arrived. Is everything all right?” He threw down the towel, hurrying past his mother.
“Ellen, you seem lost. It might help if you sought counsel in—?” Mercy smiled like a dog, lips pulled back, teeth bared.
“In what?” Ellie scraped the sodden heap of spinach into the trash. “In your fucked-up world? No, Aunt Mercy, everything is not all right.”
Mercy stiffened. “Okay, Ellen, I’ll leave you to—.”
“Don’t call me Ellen.” Ellie glared at her. “No one calls me that.”
Her aunt turned back to her. Mercy’s eyes narrowed as if on a target. “We’re not having this conversation, Ellen.”
Ellie headed for the back stairs, her face burning from alcohol and indignation.
Annie was buttoning her coat, furious. “You always fuck things up, you know that?”
“And you’re always leaving,” Ellie shot back.
She skirted around buckets and paint cans, tripping over paint-spattered tarps covering the floor of the narrow hallway. The doorway of the master bedroom at the top of the stairs was sealed with a thick plastic curtain that she pulled aside. Soon Thomas was seated beside her on the waterbed, and they rocked together as she sobbed. He could stand it, he said, because he had to, because the alternative was worse. If he came out to his mother she would not stop until she’d defeated the devil.
“My brother and Russell take her to plays in the city, you know, the opera, museums. They spoil her with nice restaurants. She doesn’t want to lose that. I don’t want her to lose that.” They sat in silence until Thomas rose and opened a window. “Annie’s gone.”
Ellie bounced up. She took the joint he offered, inhaling deeply.
With the arrival of her cousin’s friends the party heated up, a lively second act. The dolorous aftermath of the meal lay trampled under the husky tones of Donna Summer. They were feeling the love again. Apart from one of the guests, Ellie was sure they were all gay. She swooned into drunken conversation with the young man. Sal was proudly Italian American, cute in a muscle-bound kind of way. He smelled of cheap cologne.
“What are you doing with this bunch?” she teased.
He laughed. “You’re the cousin I heard about? The one from the city?” He watched as the soft knot atop her head came undone. Her hair fell to her shoulders in relaxed waves. He was easily ten years younger, and instantly smitten. “I live up the street. These guys are the most fun to be around.”
Ellie grinned. She whispered into his neck. “I’m fun to be around.”
Aunt Mercy stood before them, hands on hips. “Pie?”
David and Russell prepared to leave, encouraging Ellie to join them. “You can sleep on the bus,” David urged. “We’ll get you a cab back to your place.”
“No, I’m staying.” Ellie grabbed Tony’s arm. “He’s been good enough to give up his room, haven’t you, Tone?”
“It’s okay,” David said
Ellie laughed. “Yeah. It’s okay. It’s all okay.” She kissed them in turn, crying, “Turn it up! Let’s dance!” Aunt Mercy replaced her apron with her coat. Ellie watched as she hurriedly bundled Violet through the front door.
Ellie woke to a stinging attack, like a chisel refashioning her brain. It was short-lived relief to discover she was alone in the little bed. She’d dress, call a taxi, and sneak out before they woke. Fragments of the evening broke through the painful aftershocks. She had been the life of the party—danced with Sal and later cheered his dream to someday open a pizza parlor in Atlantic City. She buried her face in her hands, nearly gagging from the smell of cologne.
Mercy stood at the foot of the stairs, dishtowel in hand. “He’s left already,” she announced dryly.
Ellie slumped on the stair. “How come you’re—?
“I thought the boys would need help cleaning up. I got here as that young man was leaving.” She studied her niece. “Ellen, you need to—.”
“To what!” Ellie started down the stairs. “I know, I know. I ruined everything.”
Mercy pulled a small package from the pocket of her apron. “You need to take these back.” She handed her the pignoli, and a fringe of rosemary. “That dish was awful. Nearly ruined Tony’s dinner.”
Here it was, some thirty years later. Ellie still shivered from the memory. She listened to her sister’s message again before deleting it. She had not spoken to Annie since that Thanksgiving. Now Mercy was dead. Her sons had died years ago. Thomas, not long after Ellie’s father. David—and Russell—in the early 80s, within months of each other, from a scourge as deadly as their mother’s intolerance.
Soon she would retire from her job. Instead of editing others’ stories, she might write her own. She had a few good friends. She lived a contented life, alone with her cat. She had booked a flight to Paris in a few days. She smelled roasting potatoes and the aromatic pine-like scent of rosemary. Her dinner was nearly ready.
