“Mama, it’s so nice down here. The winters are mild—you don’t have to yell at the plow guy to be careful around your boxwoods, because there is no plow guy.”
Annabella had given a little snort of disinterest and said, “If I move down there, I’m gonna bring the plow guy with me, just for spite.”
Eventually she acquiesced, the little house on Kisco Avenue was sold, and most of the well-worn furniture was dropped off at the local Goodwill. Luigi’s garage full of tools, carefully dusted of cobwebs every month or so, were donated to a vocational school. Annabella’s near century of life was reduced to a couple of boxes of mementos that immediately went up into Helen’s attic and were never looked at again and one enormous suitcase of clothes. (“No rollers,” Jim muttered as he hauled it to the car. “Hernia city.”)
By the time the pandemic picked up speed in the end of March 2020, Annabella had been living in North Carolina with them for almost two years, wits still fully present and accounted for as she held court from her comfy chair in the kitchen. She resumed her cooking lessons with Helen, offering tips, correcting missteps, alerting Helen when the eggplant had baked a little too long. “The cheese is getting crusty. I can smell it.”
She had strong feelings about things being burned. “Do not cremate me,” she’d told Helen any number of times over the years. “How will your father know it’s me if I’m scorched?”
But Covid had everyone terrified that spring. The funeral home would not agree to transport Annabella’s body all the way to Hestia, New York, a twenty-hour round-trip journey. With no one sure exactly how the virus was passed—how long did it stay on surfaces, how long in the air?—the driver’s safety could not be assured.
They cremated her. Helen cried for days about that decision.
“I’m sorry, Mama.” She whispered her atonement into the possibly infected air. “I’m so sorry.”
“We had to,” Jim kept telling her. “It would have been unhygienic.”
“Grandpa will know her,” Sam assured Helen from the solitude of his apartment in Seattle. “Trust me, Mom. Grandma is recognizable in any form.” This had made Helen laugh, then cry even harder.
In the end, Helen drove to Hestia alone with Annabella’s urn tucked behind the seat belt in the front seat. Jim was feeling “off.”
“Will you please take your goddamned medicine!” Helen screamed at him the day before she left. Bereft, already exhausted and stressed at the idea of the long trip, Helen was in no mood for Jim’s fantasy that his arteries would magically unclog themselves if he just got some fresh air. That is to say, more fresh air. He was in the backyard practicing his putts every day as it was.
“Okay, fine,” he muttered petulantly. But she was fairly certain he wouldn’t.
On the drive, she played Annabella’s favorite Frank Sinatra CDs and sang along to keep herself alert, surprised at how many of the words she still knew. She spoke out loud to her mother all the stories she could remember. All the good times. “Remember when we went to Niagara Falls, and Papa made us do that Maid of the Mist boat, and you said, ‘Why you want to pay to get wet? Let’s go home and I’ll spray you with the hose for free.’ But then you loved it. You laughed and said, ‘Next I’m gonna do the barrel!’”
And the not-so-good times. “I’m sorry we moved away. I’m sorry you were alone so long. I’m sorry we couldn’t keep the house. I’m so sorry, Mama.”
The funeral home had made all the arrangements. At Precious Blood cemetery, by the double plot where Luigi was waiting, there was a graveside service, albeit brief. An elderly priest Helen didn’t recognize had been sent over to say the prayers. The hole seemed far too deep.
You’re together now, right? Helen wondered as the priest tucked his Bible under his arm and headed for his aging sedan. You found each other?
When she turned around, there was a woman standing some distance away, the wind putting knots in her long salt-and-pepper hair. Her mask was a batik print of blue and green. Helen was still wiping a tear out of her eye and wondering who it was when the woman said, “I always wished she was my real mother, not just Mama A.”
It was all Helen could do not to rush into Francie’s arms and hug her breathless.
“How did you know?” was all she could think to say.
“The obit was in the Hestia paper. My brother told me about it. I’m in Vermont now.”
“You came all this way!”
“It’s not that far,” said Francie. “Not for her.”
They spoke for a few moments more, trading the standard information that seemed strangely beside the point. Helen was still married to Jim (Francie’s face remained diplomatically blank), three kids, North Carolina. Francie finally got her farm. She only had a few minutes, had to get back to help with evening chores. Several of her workers had stopped showing up for fear of infection.
“If it’s too fresh,” Francie said, “don’t answer, but . . . how did she go? Covid?”
“No. I quarantined us so hard we were practically on the Space Station. She just wouldn’t get out of bed one day.”
“Wow.” Francie shook her head. “Annabella Iannucci not getting out of bed.”
“I know. So unlike her.”
“What did you do?”
“Well, she . . . um.” Helen could feel the prickle of more tears behind her eyes. “She wanted me to get in with her. She wanted . . . she wanted a snuggle.” Snuggle was one of those Americanisms Annabella had learned and hung on to.
Francie’s eyes filled. “She was the best snuggler.”
“Yeah, um, so I did. And we talked.”
“What did she say?”
“She said . . .” The tears fell now. “She said she was a . . . a satisfied customer of life. And she said I was a good daughter. She was so happy to be my mother, and I had made her proud. Vita mia, she called me.”
“She spoke Italian? Oh, Helen.”
Helen looked at her old friend, and even through a Niagara Falls of tears, she could see that familiar face, so kind, so honest. A little too honest at times, but that was Helen’s problem, not Francie’s.
From six feet apart, the two women looked at each other and wept.
Then Francie inhaled a sniffle and reached across the distance to hand Helen a card. “Please call, Hellie. Really. It’s time.”
When she got home, Jim said his arm hurt. But maybe it was more of a shoulder thing. Or his chest. Helen took him to the emergency room. She wasn’t allowed in because the world was up in flames with Covid, of course, and she was too anxious to sit in the car, so she walked around the vast parking lot, and got hot and tore off her coat, dropping it on the curb somewhere.
Then the triage nurse called.
Helen never went back for that coat, the one with Francie’s card in the pocket.
In the year and a half since, Helen thinks of that coat at strange times. When she buried Jim. When Barb and Cormac adopted Lana. When Sam went back to Seattle. When Danny fell off that damn cliff he was climbing and busted his wrist, and he called her from the hospital and said, “I’m fine, Mom. Don’t worry so much,” and she wanted to scream, I didn’t used to be like this before you three came along! You are my child! You are a worry pill I take every day!