Diana had admittedly rolled an ankle more than once on its cobblestone streets.
“How about a race?” Diana said out loud, her brain catching up a second later. “A 5K through Old Town?”
Sam laughed, raised a hand up. “Only the hardest thing to plan. And I don’t know when you’d get a chance to do all of that with your work schedule.” A grin appeared on her lips.
“Wait a minute, I thought I was just brainstorming ideas, not spearheading the project.”
“C’mon, I can’t do everything. And you’re an official center volunteer. Besides, hanging out here these next couple of weeks might do you some good. Serving—”
“Serving is healing,” Diana finished the sentence, already feeling better at the idea of it. Her best friend was right. A thread of an idea began. “Okay, so the race could have a low buy-in—twenty dollars a participant. We can involve one of the running stores. Get corporate sponsorships, like Rings and Roses, the wedding shop down the street. I’ll think about a race proposal.” She started to jog in place; she craved the rush of endorphins. “But c’mon, let’s head out before your first patient arrives.”
Sam half laughed and shook her head. They both knew it was a matter of time before Diana planned something for the center. When her mind was set on something, nothing would deter it.
If anything, the project would at least distract her from everything she didn’t want to deal with.
Chapter Five
As a photographer in her twenties, Margo had managed to coordinate a roomful of indignant theater actors who hated each other and refused to stand within two feet of one another. Later on, she’d taken on the challenge of photographing ten babies lined up in peapod costumes for the rededication of Alexandria Specialty’s labor and delivery ward. And in one of her workshops, she’d camped out in a deer stand in the mountains of Shenandoah National Park for hours to snap the perfect shot of a bald eagle. She was a patient woman.
But Margo’s patience now was as thin as the tape of the box in front of her, which she popped easily with one of Diana’s fancy butter knives. Everything was taking so long. So far, she’d unpacked only one box, though she couldn’t get herself to throw anything away. Each item she encountered had a specific event or occasion tied to it, and with every attempt at decluttering, Margo felt a part of herself torn away.
She really didn’t want to be a burden to Diana; she’d wanted to surprise her daughter by showing her how much she could accomplish this morning. But unpacking was proving to be painful.
When Margo lifted the box flaps, the scent of old wafted from the box. Yes, Margo was old herself—how could she deny it—and she had the right to call a spade a spade. Her friends and her mother had carried those scents, in their cars, their homes, their clothing and sheets. It was the sum total of nose-numbing floral perfume, creams to ease the joints, and lotions to ease dry, papery skin. Margo, to this day, was insistent on updating her perfumes to whatever her Ulta ad had advertised, and avoided baby-powder-scented anything because of these smells.
Not that she wasn’t proud of the dozens of candles on her cake every year. The stigma of age and the feeling of erasure, on the other hand? That was another thing.
The box was labeled Leora’s closet in a stranger’s left-leaning penmanship. Margo had paid for two movers to pack up her mother’s things and seal up boxes, then splurged on a cleaning team to wash away the years of her mother’s memories from their home before the Realtor put it up for sale.
Guilt ran up her spine. Margo, in her eagerness for some freedom from caregiving—it was as if she had walked out into the sun after a year of being underground—had rushed the movers. She didn’t take the time to go through her mother’s things after she died, and Margo had no idea what she would encounter in this box. Would it make her laugh? Or bring her to tears?
She tossed the rumpled packing paper to the side. Inside was a folded stack of threadbare linens: a yellowed cotton tablecloth with four napkins, a handkerchief edged in blue thread with a delicately embroidered letter A in one corner.
She gulped in a breath. A, for Antonio Cruz—her father. All at once, a memory flashed in her head of sitting at her mother’s round kitchen table, lit dimly from above. They had just finished a breakfast of oatmeal with raisins. Her mother, wearing her standard maid’s uniform, stood at their narrow countertop making Margo’s school lunch. It would be the last time Margo would see her for the day. Later on, after school, she would let herself into the apartment, park herself in front of the television, and do her homework until her mother returned, late in the evening.
It had always been the two of them, for as long as she could remember. Margo had had a series of aunties—all passed on now—who took up her mother’s free time with bridge and bingo. Leora never married, her heart tied to Antonio until the day she died.
But this—Margo had never seen this handkerchief.
She pulled her phone from her pocket and clicked the Instagram app. She squared the handkerchief in the screen’s view, tilting it slightly for an artistic effect, and pressed the button to capture it. She typed out a post: The things you find when you move … and uploaded it to her feed. Almost immediately, a notification window dropped down from the top of the screen: someone “hearted” it. And then another, and another …
Her cheeks warmed and she reveled in the moment. She couldn’t explain it to her daughter, but those tiny beeps sometimes reassured her. They reminded her that she was still alive, still seen. Even during a short hiatus after her mother’s death, which she’d shared with her followers, she had received private messages from absolute strangers. It would have been a lonely time otherwise. The social media experience had been so fulfilling that she even brought her best friends, Roberta and Cameron, into the fray, and they, too created second careers for themselves.
Deep into her thoughts, Margo pulled out another set of linens, wool this time, and unwrapped it to find a picture frame, flipped upside down. When she turned the frame over and saw the picture, she leaned into the kitchen counter for support.
It was a picture she didn’t recognize, but the woman was undoubtedly Leora, with her strawberry-blond hair—part pinned upward in a roll—grazing the tops of her shoulders, and Antonio, dark-skinned, slim but formidable, wearing a soldier’s brown uniform.
Her father.
Margo touched the hesitant smiles on her parents’ faces. Noticed her mother’s faraway look, not quite at the camera. Margo knew about the time when this was taken—that part of the story she’d been privy to—the 1940s, when Antonio joined the United States Army to serve with the First Filipino Infantry Regiment in World War II. His story was a hero’s, one that she had heard time and again, though it was as threadbare as the embroidered handkerchief, with just enough information that Margo had been satisfied with the story until adulthood.
“God, you were just babies,” she said aloud. “Babies and brave.”
Leora had repeated this same statement in the past, when Margo had questions about their romance, about her father. It was the kind of statement that cast magic in her imagination but also invariably ended the conversation. What child didn’t want their parents to be brave, to be superheroes in their own right, to have some kind of a happily-ever-after?