And the rest of us awkwardly joined in while my family members eyeballed me. I would shrug it off as an Italian thing. They wouldn't know the difference.
“To friends and lovers,” Cortland said, the one among them who might know the difference.
Zoe piped up, “To friends and lovers.”
My boys glanced over and I gave a quick shake, a silent signal for them to stay out of the toast.
My father added, “Hear, hear,” and we clinked glasses and began an otherwise normal meal except for the question mark hanging above us like a chandelier: “Who exactly among us are friends, and who are lovers?”
“No problem,” Rachel said as she stuffed my family videos into her oversized bag after dinner with the promise she would have her editing team transfer the outdated formats onto DVDs, as well as host them on a server.
“I'll give you the photo discs as soon as I print them out,” I told her, hesitant to hand over so many pieces of my and Joel's life together at once. After all, Rachel wasn't known for her organizational skills, and she had lost too many of my things over the years to keep track.
“Ooh, I know!” Rachel said, snapping her fingers together. Her bright ideas always arrived with a thunderclap. “Why don't you, me, and Mom have a scrapbooking party?”
I shrugged, internally cringing at the thought of a) spending the day cutting out construction paper with my sister who would be filling her book with more pageant pictures while I laid out my soul with the last pictures of Joel, and b) ever finding the time to do something so crafty and creative.
“You know you can do scrapbooks online now,” Cortland said, and Rachel beamed at him as if he were a brilliant anesthesiologist, which I'm sure he was.
“What do you mean?” I asked, intrigued.
“Well, since you already have your digital photos on your computer, you can go to a web site where they have design templates, and you just drag and drop your photos onto the pages and order it and they'll ship it to you.”
“Are you serious?” Rachel gasped. “And here I've been spending all that money on glitter and fancy stickers for Zoe's books.”
“I'm not very technically inclined,” I told him, embarrassed to admit I barely knew how to use e-mail, let alone do something important on the web.
“If you have time, I could show you now.”
Rachel shrugged. “Oh, she has oodles of time. I'm going to go out back and talk to the birthday boy. When you two are done, I'll bring out the cake. Think Daddy will mind I had the baker put sixty-nine candles on the cake?”
“Better than the numeral kind,” I said, recalling one of my mother's most embarrassing moments; it was when Rachel was in junior high and I was in sixth grade and Rachel asked Mom and Dad at the dinner table what it meant to “69” someone. Besides choking on her chicken, Mother did nothing to satisfy Rachel's curiosity, so Rachel did what most junior high girls would do and went to her girlfriends, who had asked older siblings what it meant.
“God, Mom's such a prude,” Rachel said. “And speaking of, I want to hear more about the whole ‘friends and lovers‘ thing when we're not in mixed company.”
Cortland raised a brow, but before he could excuse himself, she turned on her heels, leaving us in the kitchen alone, her last statement still hanging in the air, but I was unwilling to respond to it.
“It's really none of my business,” Cortland said, and I swatted the air where she'd left it.
“Nor hers,” I added, and we went into Joel's office, which I couldn't stop referring to as Joel's office, probably because I only used it when trying and failing to e-mail his ex-girlfriend. He hadn't spent much time there, as he preferred his garage studio with the drafting table.
I pulled up the pictures, willing myself not to cry, then let Cortland pull up the web site memorybook.com, where I selected a simple design with photo edges and creamy backgrounds.
“Nice choice,” Cortland said. “Now you just have to decide what cover shot you want to use.”
I sifted through hundreds of photos, amazed that I didn't mind Cortland sharing the moment, but I couldn't decide which was cover-worthy because every one featuring Joel felt cover-worthy to me, even the ones where he had devil-red eyes or where his head had been lopped off due to a bad camera operator (me).
“Here, we can fix those red eyes,” Cortland said, taking over the mouse, blowing up Joel's picture until it filled the frame to life-size. How had I forgotten about that tiny mole on his left cheek or the way his five o'clock shadow grew in faster on his chin than the rest of his face or how the corner of his eyelids rose when he smiled?
And his eyes! Flecked with gold and brown and green, and even the blue of the ocean was in there. When Cortland removed the red eye, Joel looked nearly perfect, lopsided grin and all. I had to look away. I swallowed hard, then realized with surprise that what I felt right then was not grief, but love. For the first time when I viewed Joel's picture, I didn't feel sad at all, but simply happy to see him. Greetings-in-an-airport sort of happy.
“You okay?” Cortland asked, putting his arm lightly around my shoulder, and I nodded.
“I want the picture of the four of us at the beach in Galveston for the cover,” I said. “Then I'll just go from there in chronological order. They all have to go in. This might take me weeks.”
“Well, in that case,” Cortland said, pressing a button that zipped all the photos, the green bar steadily beeping across the screen.
“What did you just do?” I said, starting to panic that he'd messed up my album.
Then the screen blinked: Done. Your Griffen Family Album is complete and ready for viewing.
I flipped through the pages, one click at a time, my heart nearly lifting me right out of my seat, and when I was finished, I clicked “Order” for three hardback books, one for each of us. “The boys will love it,” I said, beginning to tear up.
Cortland rubbed the back of my neck with his hand, and when I looked up at him, tears in my eyes, I saw that he had tears in his eyes, too. Whatever I was feeling I had passed along to him, but I also saw something else, something that a woman never wants to see in the eyes of her sister's boyfriend, and yet I liked it all the same.
Chapter 12
Two days until Joel's DD (Death Date)
MONICA BLEVINS WAS TALLER than I remembered. Of course, the only times I had seen her in person were among children at the school and standing at the back of the crowd at the funeral, and through my tears, she had looked like the blurriest, yet most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
As I watched her walk to her car, a sleek red Mercedes, I breathed through the pangs of envy I felt in my chest. Before I arrived, I had stopped by the archdiocese to throw two pennies into the fountain. One penny was for resolution. I wished to get rid of that rock of uncertainty and doubt inside my heart, etched with Monica's name. The other penny was for courage.
I didn't have a plan. As I drove up to the pricey new offices that Joel had designed for her law firm, I imagined his hands all over the glass and metal and rock he had picked out personally and thought how happy he would be if, as Deacon Friar thought, he could look down on earth and see the city, and even the state, marked with the buildings of his creation.
No prep. No heads up. No warning. I hadn't called or e-mailed her, deciding just two days from Joel's death date that I wanted it over and done with, and the best way to achieve it would just be to go find her. She wasn't hard to find, and even now, as she fumbled for the keys to unlock her car, I wondered why it had taken me so long to get to this moment. I could've called her when Joel was alive, but I was too afraid my suspicions were true and I'd have to make a decision to forgive Joel and stay with him or… what? Leave him? Go to counseling? It had all seemed too nightmarish to deal with in his life, and it was only when my motive was pure, when I had dropped that penny in the fountain, that I knew what I really wanted.