instead, letting it tighten against my nostrils and mouth, and letting them lay me in the same dark hole with Joe. It was the thought of the kids that helped me push my feet into the black slings my best friend, Lucy, bought me –’You cannot wear Birkenstocks to a funeral, my dear, even in Northern California’ – and find both of the silver and aquamarine drop earrings Joe gave me our first Christmas together.
At the church, thirty-six people spoke. We cried, but we laughed too. Most of the stories went back to the time before I knew Joe. It seemed odd that almost everyone in the church had known him much longer than I had. I was the newcomer among them, but I found a certain comfort in telling myself that they didn’t know Joe the way I did.
Afterwards, I remembered having conversations I couldn’t quite hear and receiving hugs I couldn’t quite feel – as if I’d wrapped myself in plastic after all. The only thing I could feel was Annie’s and Zach’s hands slipping into mine, the solidity of their palms, the pressings of their small fingers, as we walked out of the church, as we stood at the grave site on the hill, as we walked down towards the car. And then Annie’s hand pulled out of mine. She walked up to a striking blonde woman I didn’t know, standing at the edge of the cemetery. Perhaps one of Joe’s old classmates, I thought. The woman bent down and Annie reached out, lightly touched her shoulder.
‘Annie?’ I called. I smiled at the woman. ‘She doesn’t have a shy bone in her body.’
The woman took Annie’s other hand in both of hers, whispered in her ear, and then spoke to me over her shoulder. ‘Believe me, I know that. But Annie knows who I am, don’t you, sweet pea?’
Annie nodded without pulling her hand away or looking up. She said, ‘Mama?’
Annie had called her Mama. She and Zach called me Mom and Mommy. But not Mama. Never Mama. I’d never questioned it, or really even thought of it, but the distinction rang out in that cemetery: Mama is the first-word-ever-uttered variety of mother. The murmur of a satisfied baby at the breast.
I recognized Paige then. I’d once found a picture of her, gloriously pregnant, that had been stuck in a book on photography entitled Capturing the Light – it was the one photo Joe had forgotten, or maybe had intended to keep, when he purged the house of her. I was astounded at her beauty and said so. He’d shrugged and said, ‘It’s a good picture.’
Now I could see that Joe liked his wives tall. She was taller than I, maybe five-eleven, and I wasn’t used to being shorter than other women. I had what some people referred to as great hair, those who happened to like wild, red and unmanageable. But Paige had universally great hair. Long, blonde, straight, silky, shampoo-commercial hair. Computer-enhanced hair. Women comfort themselves when they look at magazines, saying, ‘That photo’s been all touched up. No one really has hair like that, or skin like that, or a body like that.’ Paige had all that, along with Jackie O sunglasses, the single accessory our culture associates with style, mystery and a strong, grieving widow and mother . . . or in her case, mama.
Annie called her Mama.
These thoughts bungee jumped through my mind in the eight seconds it took her to rise gracefully on her heels, holding Annie in her arms, and walk towards me, extending her hand. ‘Hi. I’m Paige Capozzi. Zach and Annie’s mother.’
Mother? Define mother. And her name was still Capozzi. Capozzi? Joe Capozzi. Annie Capozzi. Zach Capozzi. Paige Capozzi. And Ella Beene. One of these things is not like the others; one of these things doesn’t belong.
Zach hid behind me, still holding on to my hand.
‘Hey, Zach. You’ve grown so big.’
I heard Marcella mutter next to me, ‘Yeah. Children grow quite a bit in three years, lady.’
Joe Sr said, ‘What’s she – Oh, for Christ’s sake.’ He reached his arm over Marcella’s shoulders as they turned and walked away.
I thought about telling Paige my name. Hi, I’m Ella, Zach and Annie’s mother. Like we were contestants on What’s My Line? I said nothing. People gathered. Joe’s relatives, excluding his parents, all took their turns saying reserved, polite hellos to her, but you’d think it was a family of Brits, not Italians. David stood next to me and said, ‘Why, nice to finally see you, Paige. You’re looking quite radiant . . . ,’ and then under his breath, he whispered to me, ‘for a funeral.’
Aunt Kat, who always acted like an entire welcoming committee bound up in one tiny woman, did manage to say, ‘Come to the house. We’re all going to the house.’ Everyone turned to me.
David said, ‘How hospitable of you, Aunt Kat, to invite Paige to Ella’s home for her.’
I felt my mouth turn up in a smile; I heard myself say to Paige, ‘Yes, of course, please do.’ By then she’d set down Annie, who stood between us looking back and forth, like a net judge in a tennis match. My heels sank into the grass.
Paige said, ‘That would be lovely. My flight doesn’t leave until tomorrow. Thank you.’
I didn’t want to know anything about Paige – not where her flight was returning her to, not what she did for a living, not if she had more children, and if so, not if she would hang around this time to help raise them. But okay. She was leaving. She would stop by the house for an hour at most to pay her respects to a man she had clearly not respected while he was alive, and then she would drive off, and by tomorrow she would fly far, far away, back to the Land of Mothers Who Left.
Gil and David drove the kids and me home. David turned around to say something, then looked at Annie and Zach leaning into my sides and evidently decided to shut up and face front. I stared at the oval scar on the back of Gil’s domed head, wondering how long it had been hiding under his hair before he’d shaved it all off. Was the scar from a childhood wound, from a bike accident in his teens, or had it happened more recently? A quarrel with a crazy lover, before he’d found David?
Annie sighed and said, ‘She’s pretty!’
Annie was three when Paige left. How much could she possibly remember? I asked her, ‘Do you remember her, Banannie?’
Annie nodded. ‘She still smells good too.’
She remembered her scent. Of course. I’d inhaled every one of Joe’s recently worn T-shirts, grateful now for my tendency to let laundry pile up. I sunk my face into his robe every time I walked by where it hung in the bathroom, dabbed his aftershave on my wrists. Of course Annie remembered.
At the house I kept my distance from Paige. It was easy to tell where she went, because the floor seemed to tilt in her direction, as if we were on a raft and I was made of feathers and she was made of gold. Annie came up and leaned against me, and I smoothed back her hair, ran my fingers through her ponytail. Then she was off, taking Paige by the hand, leading her into the kids’ room. My fiercest ally, Lucy, whispered in my ear, ‘That woman’s got nerve,’ but no one else broached the subject. At funerals, it seems most people leave old grudges at home.
And yet. I certainly didn’t want to chat it up with Joe’s ex-wife on the day of his funeral, or any other day. What did she want? Why was she here? Annie kept dividing her time between the two of us, as if she felt some sort of obligation when she should have been thinking of no one other than her six-year-old self and her daddy. Zach wore his path between Marcella, my mom, and me.
Once
