Fixing Delilah Read Free Page B

sent us packing. It was at Papa’s funeral, after the church service but before the burial. They’d said I was too young for that part—the burial—but after all the screaming, Mom and Aunt Rachel didn’t go to the cemetery, either. As we backed out of the driveway—gravel back then, I remember it crunching under the tires—I watched the house and the willow tree in front of it get smaller and smaller until they both disappeared.
    It was the last time any of us saw my grandmother alive.
    I want to ask a hundred questions now—all the ones I held back in the car and in the yard, still pinned beneath my tongue by a waning sympathy for my mother’s pain. But we lose our words easily here. I don’t ask, she doesn’t offer, and through our mutual silence we set about our work efficiently, all the kitchen windows opened, me bringing in boxes and Mom sorting their contents into stacks and rows.
    On my last trip to the car, Aunt Rachel’s rickety black pickup bleats and bumps its way up the driveway, late as Mom predicted. As my aunt approaches, the sadness of the house reflects in her face, just as it did in her sister’s.
    “Aunt Rachel!” I wrap myself around her and my heart unsticks, just a little. She rubs my back and kisses the top of my head, squeezing me tight as a line of jingle-jangle silver bracelets slides down her arm, a small hiccup catching in the back of her throat.
    We all look alike, the three remaining Hannaford women. Same hazel eyes with various brown flecks. Same small ears. Same unruly eyebrows. Same long, wavy, chocolate-brown hair. And we all have those parentheses around our mouths—the ones that betray everything we feel and say all the things we don’t. I haven’t seen her since my solo trip to D.C. last Christmas, but feeling her warm against me with her cinnamon ginger breath and homemade lavender soap–scented skin erases all the time and distance between us. Her light blue vintage T-shirt ( Annapurna—a woman’s place is on top ) is soon covered in our mixed-up tears.
    “I have no idea how to handle this,” I say, kicking the driveway with my flip-flop as we break our hug. “Mom’s in total denial, as usual.”
    Aunt Rachel blots her eyes with her shirtsleeve. “I think we all are, hon.” She tries to laugh, but it’s as sad and faraway as the seagull songs, and I know she doesn’t mean it. She and Mom haven’t seen each other in two years—not since my aunt’s last Thanksgiving visit. She only stayed two of the planned five days. And Mom—well, the closest she gets to Rachel’s apartment is dropping me off at Philadelphia International Airport for the Philly to D.C. nonstop.
    When we reach the porch, Mom opens the side door and leans forward like she’s going to envelop her sister in a hug but stops just short, her shoulders tightening from the effort of holding back. “Rachel?” she whispers.
    The maples near the porch shake their rustling green heads in the breeze, but Mom and Aunt Rachel don’t notice. They just stare at each other, standing here in the middle of things with their arms dangling and the screen door half-open, the same blood flowing through their veins and a thousand pounds of unspoken words keeping them apart.

Chapter four

    “Come on in,” Mom says, holding the door. “I haven’t looked at the rest of the place, but the kitchen’s dreadfully the same.” Her laugh is forced and uncomfortable—an olive sucked through a straw.
    Inside, my aunt glides along the perimeter of the kitchen, one hand running over the countertops and curtains and one in her pocket. Behind her, two ants march out from under the stove to investigate a sticky-looking stain, completely unaffected by us and my grandmother’s death and everything that happened before.
    “Oh, sis,” Rachel says. “How did we get—”
    Bzzzz.
    “That’s mine,” Mom says, digging through her purse.
    “But I—”
    “Hang on, Rach.”
    “Claire?”
    Mom nods but holds up an