We were quiet for a second. Outside, the very last of the sunset, fading pink, was disappearing behind the trees.
“Still,” I said, putting another slice of bread on the one in front of me, “it is a big hole.”
“It’s a huge hole,” she conceded, reaching for the mayonnaise. “But that’s kind of the point. I mean, I don’t want to fix it because to me, it’s not broken. It’s just here, and I work around it. It’s the same reason I refuse to trade in my car, even though, for some reason, the A/C won’t work when I have the radio on. I just choose: music, or cold air. It’s not that big of a deal.”
“The A/C won’t work when the radio is on?” I asked. “That’s so weird.”
“I know.” She pulled out three more slices of bread, putting mayonnaise, then lettuce, on them assembly-line style. “On a bigger scale, it’s the reason that I won’t hire a partner to help me with the catering, even though it’s been chaos on wheels with Wish gone. Yes, things are sort of disorganized. And sure, it would be nice to not feel like we’re close to disaster every second.”
I started another sandwich, listening.
“But if everything was always smooth and perfect,” she continued, “you’d get too used to that, you know? You have to have a little bit of disorganization now and then. Otherwise, you’ll never really enjoy it when things go right. I know you think I’m a flake. Everyone does.”
“I don’t,” I assured her, but she shook her head, not believing me.
“It’s okay. I mean, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve caught Wes out there with someone from the gravel place, secretly trying to fill that hole.” She put another row of bread down. “And Pete, my husband, he’s tried twice to lure me to the car dealership to trade in my old thing for a new car. And as far as the business, well . . . I don’t know. They leave me alone on that. Because of Wish. Which is so funny, because if she was here, and saw how things are . . . she’d flip out. She was the most organized person in the world.”
“Wish,” I said, reaching for the mayonnaise. “That’s such a cool name.”
She looked up at me, smiling. “It is, isn’t it? Her real name was Melissa. But when I was little, I mispronounced it all the time, you know, Ma-wish-a. Eventually, it just got shortened to Wish, and everyone started calling her that. She never minded. I mean, it fit her.” She picked up the knife at her elbow, then carefully sliced the sandwiches into halves, then fourths, before stacking them onto the tray beside us. “This was her baby, this business. After she and the boys’ dad divorced, and he moved up North, it was like her new start, and she ran it like a well-oiled machine. But then she got sick. . . .breast cancer. She was only thirty-nine when she died.”
It felt so weird, to be on the other side, where you were the one expected to offer condolences, not receive them. I wanted my “sorry” to sound genuine, because it was. That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.
“I’m so sorry, Delia,” I told her. “Really.”
She looked up at me, a piece of bread in one hand. “Thank you,” she said, then placed it on the table in front of her. “I am, too.” Then she smiled at me sadly, and started to assemble another sandwich. I did the same, and neither of us said anything for a few minutes. The silence wasn’t like the ones I’d known lately, though: it wasn’t empty as much as chosen. There’s a entirely different feel to quiet when you’re with someone else, and at any moment it could be broken. Like the difference between a pause and an ending.
“You know what happens when someone dies?” Delia said suddenly, startling me a bit. I kept putting together my sandwich, though, not answering: I knew there was more. “It’s like, everything and everyone refracts, each person having a different reaction. Like me and Wes. After the divorce, he fell in with this bad crowd, got arrested, she hardly knew what to do with him. But then, when she got sick, he changed. Now he’s totally different, how he’s so protective of Bert and focused on his welding and the pieces he makes. It’s his way of handling it.”
“Wes does welding?” I asked, and then, suddenly, I thought of the sculpture. “Did he do—”
“The heart in hand,” she finished for me. “Yeah. He did. Pretty incredible, huh?”
“It is,” I said. “I had no idea. I was talking about it with him and he didn’t even tell me.”
“Well, he’ll never brag on it,” she said, pulling the mayonnaise over to her. “That’s how he is. His mom was the same way. Quiet and incredible. I really envy that.”
I watched her as she cut another two sandwiches down, the knife clapping against the cutting board. “I don’t know,” I said. “You seem to be pretty incredible. Running this business with a baby, and another on the way.”
“Nah.” She smiled. “I’m not. When Wish died, it just knocked the wind out of me. Truly. It’s like that stupid thing Bert and Wes do, the leaping out thing, trying to scare each other: it was the biggest gotcha in the world.” She looked down at the sandwiches. “I’d just assumed she’d be okay. It had never occurred to me she might actually just be . . . gone. You know?”
I nodded, just barely. I felt bad that I didn’t tell her about my dad, chime in with what I knew, how well I knew it. With Delia, though, I wasn’t that girl, the one whose dad had died. I wasn’t anybody. And I liked that. It was selfish but true.