“Then why on earth would she tell you before she told her own husband? Before she told me?”
Helen looked at the scratched-out face on the wall. And she said, “Because I was her best friend.”
I almost laughed a second time, because that couldn’t be right either. My mother had a lot of friends. She was that kind of woman, the kind who knew her mailman’s kids’ names. And I had never, not one single time in my entire life, heard her mention a Helen.
Neither had my father. Not once.
“Best friends,” I said, “don’t scratch each other’s faces out of photographs.”
“No,” Helen agreed. “Usually they don’t.”
I stood up, crossed to the wall, and pulled the photograph down before she could say anything to stop me. The frame was genuinely old, the cardboard backing soft and yellowed. But the scratches across Helen’s face—those weren’t old at all. They cut clean and pale and deep, right through to the white beneath the image.
I flipped the frame over.
On the backing board, in my mother’s handwriting, were five words.
Take her off the list.
I turned around. “What list?”
Helen closed her eyes like she’d been dreading exactly this question.
“The list of women,” she said, “that your mother thought your father should marry after she was gone.”
I sat back down. I had to.
“Mom made Dad a dating list,” I said. It came out flat. I needed to hear it out loud to believe I’d heard it at all.
“Seven names.”
“And he actually used it?”
“Eventually. Yes.”
Six women in eighteen months. Every one of them here, at this table, in that chair. My laughter died in my throat.
“Why here?” I asked. “Why does he insist on this restaurant every single time?”
“Because this is where your parents met.”
“I know that part. He’s told that story a hundred times.” Young Tom, young Maggie, a spilled glass of wine, an apology that turned into a three-hour conversation. It was practically family scripture.
“It’s also,” Helen said, “where your mother made the list.” She finally lifted her hand from the letter on the table. “She made me help her write it.”
I snatched the page up.
It wasn’t a love letter. That’s the thing that got me. It wasn’t romantic or weepy or any of what I would have expected from a dying woman’s last words. It was instructions. Names, and phone numbers, and little notes beside each one, practical as a grocery list.
Anna likes old movies.
Beth hates seafood, don’t take her anywhere with a fish tank.
Lydia talks when she’s nervous, so give her time before you decide anything.
Six of the names had small check marks beside them.
And the seventh line had been crossed out. Not neatly. Violently. Scored through again and again with the same fury as the face in the photograph.
Helen.
I looked up at her.
“You were on it.”
“At first.”
“Why would she put her own best friend on a list of women for her husband to marry?”
Helen looked toward the empty chair where my father always sat. “Because Maggie thought I understood him. Better than anyone she could think of. She wanted him with someone who wouldn’t need him to explain his grief.”
I hadn’t heard anyone outside our own family call my mother Maggie in eight years. It went straight through me, that name in a stranger’s mouth. It made the hair on my arms stand up.
“And then,” I said, “she changed her mind. She crossed you out.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Helen didn’t answer.
So I took out my phone and started dialing my father.
“Rachel,” Helen said.
He picked up on the fourth ring, warm as ever. “Hey, sweetheart.”
“I’m at the restaurant, Dad.”
Silence. A long one.
I watched Helen’s face across the table.
And then my father said, quietly, “Is she there?”
That hurt more than I was prepared for. He knew. Of course he knew. He’d known exactly who I meant the moment I said where I was.
“You knew she’d be here,” I said.
