Anne Korkeakivi - Shining Sea

Francis is sitting in the living room when they arrive at the house, already dressed in the dark blue jacket and white button-down shirt she bought for him, bent over that beloved guitar he bought working on the pier with Eugene.

“You should have come to your father’s grave,” she tells him, setting Kenny down on the floor beside him.

In his typical maddening way, Francis stares up at her and says nothing. He doesn’t apologize or try to explain his behavior. But with his grown-up clothes on, his dark gold hair washed and slicked back, he looks so much like Michael and yet so much himself, such a startlingly handsome young man, it’s hard to scold him.

She sighs. “I’m going to go get ready. Watch your nephew.”

“What time do we need to leave for the church?” Jeanne asks, fussing with her handbag, averting her eyes as though approaching a delicate subject. “I mean, just to be sure Molly and I are ready in time. Well, you know what I mean.”

He’s a nice man, her sister-in-law told her last night, after Ronnie had said good night. And then, faltering just a little, I’m happy for you .

What does a sister-in-law become when the person who unites them is no longer living? Is Jeanne still her in-law, even? And you? she asked cheerfully, skipping right past the unspoken words, the thought that Michael would in some way be replaced this evening. Because he won’t. Michael will never be replaced. Just because he died doesn’t mean he stopped being her husband. She’ll just have two husbands. Barbara the bigamist. Are there any nice men in Poughkeepsie?

Jeanne looked embarrassed. Oh, Barbara. You know I am still married. I tell Molly I’m like Penelope from The Odyssey . When Paul gets back, I’ll be waiting .

Paul — ten years without sending so much as a postcard — is, for all intents and purposes, as gone as Michael is. The nuns taught The Odyssey in high school, and she remembers the story; Paul isn’t coming back and she’s willing to bet there are no suitors banging on Jeanne’s door like they were on Penelope’s, either. Poor Jeanne! Stuck with a husband who isn’t a husband. Probably everyone but Jeanne realized that Paul married her to get a green card — when they came out together to visit that one time, before Paul took off, he as much as told Michael so. He even made eyes at her, his own sister-in-law, when no one was looking.

You think he’s gone back to Canada? Although, of course, Paul didn’t go back to Canada. Why would he have married Jeanne for a green card and then gone back to Canada?

But Jeanne didn’t answer, and she understood suddenly: the way Jeanne deals with the failure of her marriage is not to think about Paul as flesh and blood, walking on earth, his wife and child forgotten. It’s easier to make a constellation out of her lost husband, a Greek myth, something abstract.

If that makes it easier for Jeanne, then fine. She’s certainly not one to argue with that. It’s hard, this life.

“We have an hour before we need to leave,” she says. “When Molly gets back, let her help herself in the kitchen. The ceremony won’t take long, but your inner clocks must be out of whack, what with the time difference.”

In the quiet of her bedroom, she gets Sissy’s stiff green dress from the closet.

“Don’t want to,” Sissy says, sitting on the bed, kicking the bed skirt.

“Oh, come on. You’re my flower girl. I want you to look pretty.”

Sissy folds her chubby arms over her chest. “I’ll look like Jell-O.”

“Green is lovely with red hair.”

It’s the wrong thing to say. Sissy, whose brothers — and probably the kids in the playground, too — have teased her more than once about her ginger crop, scowls. But then her spunky little daughter suddenly relents, lifting her arms up, as though somehow intuiting this is not the moment to give her added trouble. Because it is true — now that the time is getting so near, now that she’s back in this bedroom, knowing she’ll soon be again sharing it with a husband — her nerves are getting a little raw. She runs her free hand over her stomach, not big but not as flat as it was before giving birth to five children. What will it be like with Ronnie? She’s into her forties now, long past being the girl she was when she and Michael married.

She won’t find out tonight. With Jeanne and Molly occupying the girls’ room, Sissy has been sleeping with her. We could go spend the night in a hotel, she told Ronnie, laughing, as they made their plans. The honeymoon suite.

Ronnie laughed, too: Don’t worry about it. I’ll wait until after Jeanne and Molly have gone to move in. Maybe that’s better. It will be easier for Jeanne.

She was laughing, but in fact she wasn’t joking about checking into a hotel. The idea of exploring another man’s body for the first time with the kids down the hall — she would have liked to do that someplace private, anonymous. Didn’t he want that also? Wasn’t he eager to be alone with her?

But Ronnie is always so thoughtful. There can’t be many men who would be so considerate — she should be thanking her lucky stars is what she should be doing. Of course, it will be easier for Jeanne not to see her going off for the night with a man other than Michael. One thing at a time; the wedding is already enough.

“Help me, Mommy?” Sissy says, her voice muffled by cloth.

“You need to take the dress you are wearing off first,” she says to Sissy, smiling.

While Sissy wriggles out of her cemetery dress, she slides out of her own clothes. She ordered a light blue suit with a matching pillbox hat for the wedding; with five kids, she wasn’t going to act the fool and dress in white, like a virgin. She removes its wrapper now and runs her fingers down the front of it. She’ll slip it on in a few minutes, once she’s rolled hose up her legs and put on her makeup.

With him in the room or not, when she takes the suit off again tonight, she will no longer be Mrs. Michael Gannon. She’ll be Mrs. Ronald McCloskey. That’s what is going to happen.

YOU AREN’T REALLY GOING to leave Los Angeles?” Patty Ann says, staring over the kitchen sink into the backyard, where Ronnie is talking with Mike and Mike’s girlfriend by the grill.

Ronnie is switching the focus of his company from individual air-conditioning units to central air, and he says it means he needs to switch his office location as well: People in Southern California are too reliant on the sea breeze. The desert is where to get a foothold.

As far as she can tell there’s not much sea breeze to be had in LA, certainly not east of the new 405 highway. But she did tell Ronnie before they married, I’m not moving to a new house in LA. And I’m not going to have the exterior repainted. It’s the last thing Michael did, and I like it . If Ronnie simply doesn’t like living in another man’s home and this is a way to get her to move, who is to blame him?

“If Ronnie’s loan comes through,” she says, “and he decides to go, we’re going. And soon, before school starts back up. He’s paying the bills, Patty Ann. It’s not for me to argue.”

“Just up and leave your home like that?”

“I up and left my home twenty years ago to follow your father.”

“Twenty-three.” Patty Ann points to the hammock draped with Luke’s lanky seventeen-year-old body, seemingly asleep despite all the cap rockets going off and the loud music from the neighbors. “Why’d Ronnie put that up in our backyard if he’s just planning to make you sell the house?”