The chapel smelled like lilies and regret. I sat in the front row of St. Helena’s staring at my mother’s casket, draped in white roses the way she had always wanted, while the priest’s voice moved through the room and my chest felt like something had been scooped out of it.
I had worn black twice in less than a year. Eight months earlier I had buried David, my first husband, after a head-on collision on Highway 29. The police told me he hadn’t suffered.
I never fully believed them. And now my mother, Margaret Sullivan, seventy years old, three months from the diagnosis to this exact pew. Garrett squeezed my hand.
My second husband. We had married ten months after David died, a courthouse ceremony at the end of six months that had felt, at the time, like being caught by someone just as you were falling. He was a financial adviser, or so he said.
Tall, clean-cut, with the kind of smile that persuaded you to believe in it. I had needed to believe in it. That is the only explanation I have for myself now.
“You’re doing great,” he whispered. I nodded and looked at the casket and thought about how “great” was not anywhere close to the right word. The reception was at the estate in Napa Valley, one hundred forty-two acres of rolling vineyards and the Mediterranean-style house my mother had built from nothing.
Sullivan Vineyards. Twenty-five million dollars a year in revenue. The place smelled like crushed grapes and earth, and she had walked every row of it like a woman who understood that she had made something real.
People filled the living room that afternoon with their little plates of cheese and their rehearsed condolences, and I smiled and thanked them until my face ached from it. My younger sister Sienna stood near the fireplace with a glass of white wine. She was thinner than the last time I had seen her, collarbones sharp, eyes doing that moving thing they did when she was using.
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