Anne Korkeakivi - Shining Sea

“How are you, Aunt Barbara? Keeping out of trouble?”

She drinks the last of her margarita. “Why would I want to keep out of trouble?”

Molly laughs. “Have you been to visit Mike recently?”

“Hmm. You know, although Mike is staying on the base now, he’s still working some mighty long hours. And Holly has her ladies’ clubs, and Mike the third’s getting ready for his last year of high school. And the two younger kids — Bradley has football, and Melissa is very involved with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. They’re busy.”

“Aw, not too busy for you, I’m sure. They love when you visit.”

She sets her fork and knife down neatly on the right side of her plate and folds her napkin in her lap. “To tell the truth, Molly, I don’t really like Fort Bliss. I don’t like to be there.”

Kenny and Jennifer exchange glances, swiftly, but not so fast that she doesn’t see them. Apparently Kenny has told his girlfriend everything about everything in their family. Ronnie, Francis, and Luke. Well, never mind. From what she’s observed so far today, they’ll be married once Jennifer graduates.

Molly nods. “And Patty Ann? Do you visit her in LA often?”

“Sometimes.”

“And Sissy? Any plans for her to come home for a visit in the near future? God, I feel as though I haven’t seen her in ages. Maybe a decade! Not since…I don’t know when. What is she now? Thirty-five?”

“Thirty-four.” She’s going to ignore the temptation to say the obvious, the thing that’s on her mind more and more nowadays — if Sissy doesn’t find someone soon, it’ll be too late for her to have a family. By the time she was thirty-four she had four kids already. But Sissy doesn’t seem to have the slightest interest in settling down. Sissy doesn’t seem to have the slightest interest in coming home to live, either. “It’s a far way to travel from Africa, and her job there keeps her very busy. Lots of conflicts to resolve! I don’t see her much myself, either.”

“Well, it’s nice Kenny will be back in Arizona.”

Molly adjusts the shell on a chain around her freckled neck — it looks strikingly like one of those made by Patty Ann, and her diamond solitaire engagement ring and pavé-diamond wedding ring flash a little under the lights of the restaurant. Molly’s husband is also a lawyer, a tall man with a receding hairline and an unexpected sense of humor. Kenny and Jennifer are, she’s pretty sure, holding hands beneath the table. Maybe they’ve interlaced their fingers. Everyone so happily married or happily unmarried or happily soon to be married. Everyone so busy. Back in Scottsdale, two widowers are courting her. It’s nice to get the flowers, but neither of the men actually interests her.

“I’m planning to offer to head the library angels,” she announces. “You know, the volunteer staff at the library.” In fact she had no such plan until this very moment. But as soon as she says it, she knows that’s exactly what she’s going to do once she’s back in Scottsdale. “The woman doing it before has decided to go back to school and get a degree in library science.”

“Have you ever thought about that yourself? I mean, going back to school and getting a college degree? People do it at all ages. That’s what the School of General Studies is at Columbia,” Kenny says.

“Are you going to be a snob, Kenny, now that you have all these fancy degrees behind you?”

Molly nods. “I’d say your grandmother has gotten more than her share of education just by living through this last century.”

Kenny looks mortified. She pats his hand. “Jennifer,” she says. “I just want you to know that Kenny and I don’t usually argue this much.”

“I know,” Jennifer says. “Kenny has had too much cola.”

They all laugh. Jennifer will be a good addition to their family.

She motions to the waitress and pays the bill while Jennifer visits the restroom and Molly and Kenny discuss plans for tomorrow. Molly has invited them all to her house for lunch, with her husband and two little daughters.

“The girls are excited to see you!” Molly says once they are out on Broadway. The sidewalk swarms with other graduates and their families. A speck of dust flies onto her eyelid. She rubs it away, resting her hand against a makeshift table by the curb, piled high with paperbacks. Another table next to it has a selection of sunglasses and sun hats. The man and woman behind the tables are laughing about something. So much life teeming on the streets. New York really isn’t like Scottsdale.

“I packed some prickly-pear jam,” she tells Molly. “I’ll bring it tomorrow.”

“Great! Prickly-pear jam on bagels!” And then her niece has disappeared into a taxi and down the broad avenue.

“Should we find a taxi, too?” Kenny says, taking her arm. The private ceremony is at the Columbia University Medical Center, even farther uptown. “Or brave the subway? The subway is a little faster, and it goes straight there. And cheaper, of course. But it’ll be hot and noisy.”

She smiles up at him. “The subway, obviously.”

Hot, humid air slams them as they descend the subway steps. A piece of newspaper attaches itself to one of her kitten heels. She brushes it off and hurries to board the arriving train close behind Kenny, slipping into a seat across from him and Jennifer. With a screech, the subway sets off, propelling them uptown under the streets of New York City. Kenny and Jennifer touch hands just briefly. A very young woman next to them fusses with a baby girl in a stroller, all pink baubles in her hair and half-toothed smiles. One of those smiles lands in her direction, and she smiles in return. Her reward is a burble and an even bigger smile. The mother looks up and smiles at her also.

A strange sensation, like she’s hurtling through life itself, comes over her. She sees herself at about Kenny’s age back in Southern California many years ago, Michael alive and well by her side, all the kids asleep in their beds. Everything on earth just as it should be. She could never have imagined life would go so off course, become so complicated. Why can’t life just run like minnows through one’s fingers, moving fast but bright and tickling? Why does it have to be so full of darkness and shadows?

She shakes the thought away.

When she gets home, she will step up to take over the volunteer program at the library, just as she said she would. She’ll introduce some new events, too. Book groups — maybe two, one for adults and one for children. She could find a teenager, someone fun, for the kids and find someone lively for the older group also. She’s not suddenly going to pretend she herself is much of a reader. Luke was the reader in the family, and Sissy is. Patty Ann, when circumstances have allowed it. Michael liked to read, too, especially poetry. That’s how they met, after all — she offered him reading material. And Ronnie! He just tore through magazines: National Geographic, Scientific American. Life, when they still published it. Both Time and Newsweek. She still gets some of the magazines, with his name on the labels. Every two years, she finds herself writing a check to renew the subscriptions.

“Next stop,” Kenny mouths over the roar of the subway.

“Already?”

A cookbook book group, though — that’s something she could do. That would be fun, even. She could choose a different cookbook each month and, at the meeting, members of the group would all bring in something they’d made from it. It wouldn’t have to be just women, either. Lots of men like to cook. They’d probably think it a good way to meet the ladies. But would it be okay to have food in the library? She’d have to—