Theirs to Keep

Kasia Wrobel had been gone from Federal Hill for nine years, and the hill had not been waiting for her.

The train got in at ten to four, and Kasia walked up from the station because she had one bag and because the taxi would have taken her the long way around and talked to her the whole time about the Red Sox. It was June and warmer than Philadelphia had been that morning. She crossed the river, crossed the highway on the footbridge with the traffic going under her like a held breath let out, and came up under the arch onto Atwells Avenue with her shirt sticking to the small of her back and the bag's strap wearing a line into her shoulder.

Nothing on the avenue looked up. That was the first thing, and it was a relief. The bakery that was not Ettore's had a new awning. The pharmacy had become a wine bar with a chalkboard outside that said Rosé all day in a hand that had tried hard. Two old men she almost recognized were sitting on folding chairs outside the social club exactly where two old men had always sat, and neither of them looked up at her, which was fair, because at twenty-one she had been a girl in a Temple sweatshirt with her hair in a ponytail and at thirty she was a woman in a Temple sweatshirt with her hair not long enough to put in one, and there was nothing in either version for an old man on a folding chair to look at.

She had meant to walk straight past the laundry. She had decided that on the train, somewhere around New London, with the sea going by on the right-hand side flat and silver and nobody in the seat beside her. She would walk past it on the other side of the street and look at it the way you look at a patient's chart before you go in, so that you know what you are walking into, and then she would go on up to the corner house and be a maid of honor.

She stopped outside it instead.

It was a phone-repair shop now. The window where her mother had kept the fern, and the card that said ALTERATIONS in her father's careful capitals, had a poster of a cracked screen in it and a list of prices, and behind the glass a boy of about nineteen was sitting at a bench with a magnifying lamp pulled down over a handset, doing something with a pair of tweezers that required all of him. The counter was in the same place. Of course it was; the building decided where the counter went, not the people. The pipe for the old steam press came out of the back wall where it always had, painted over now in the same gray as everything else, and she could see from the sidewalk that nobody had worked out what it was for.

The door to the apartment was to the left of the shop, a narrow door with its own step, and somebody had painted it black. It had been green. She had come in and out of that green door every day of her life until she was twenty-one, and the step in front of it still had the chip on the corner where her father had dropped the gas cylinder the winter the boiler went, and she was standing on the chip, she realized, with her weight on the ball of one foot, as if she were about to go up.

She had her keys in her hand. She did not remember getting them out.

There were five on the ring. The front door of the building in Fishtown and the door of her apartment. The locker at work, which she had been told three times to hand back when she changed units and had not. Her car, which was in a garage in Philadelphia with a flat tire she had been meaning to deal with for a month. And the one on the end, a brass Yale gone brown at the shoulders and bright at the teeth, which opened the green door that was now black. The apartment had been sold six years ago, when her parents went back to Poland, to the village outside Kraków they had spent thirty years talking about as if it were a place you could return to. Her father had given her the key at the airport, because he had forgotten to hand it over at the closing and felt that it was now her problem. She had meant to mail it to the buyer's lawyer. She had carried it instead to three apartments and two hospitals and the bottom of every bag she owned, and it had never once occurred to her to take it off, and it would not occur to her now.

It would not fit. They would have changed the lock. She knew that the way she knew that a line was out before she looked at the site, and she stood there on the chipped step anyway, with the brass key between her finger and thumb, and did not try it, because not trying it was a thing she could still do and trying it was not.

"You're going to get arrested," said Lidia, behind her. "Casing a phone shop. On my wedding weekend."

Kasia turned around.

Lidia Falcone was standing on the sidewalk with a garment bag over one arm and a paper coffee cup in the other hand and her sunglasses pushed up into her hair, and she looked exactly like herself, which was to say she looked finished. The lashes were on. The nails were a pale pink with a white edge, done that week and not chipped anywhere, which meant she had not so much as opened a jar since. The hair was black and heavy and fell past her shoulders in the blow-dry she had been having every Tuesday since she was sixteen, and it had not moved since Tuesday, and it would not move until somebody paid a professional to move it. She had on a sleeveless dress in a green that Kasia could not have worn for a bet, and wedge sandals, and a thin gold chain with a small gold cross, and she was the most beautiful person Kasia knew and had been since they were five, and she was also, very slightly, crying.

"Don't," said Kasia.

"I'm not. It's the lashes. They're new." Lidia put the coffee down on the step of the phone shop, which the boy under the lamp did not notice, and put her free arm around Kasia's neck and held on, garment bag and all, so that the plastic crackled against Kasia's ear. She smelled of hairspray and the vanilla lotion she had used since high school and, underneath both, very faintly, of the bakery, because everybody on that block smelled of the bakery underneath. "You're here," she said into Kasia's shoulder. "You actually came. Eamon had money on it."

"Which way?"

"That's between him and God." Lidia let go and stood back and looked at her, all of her, the sweatshirt and the jeans and the hair tucked behind her ears and the face that had not had anything on it since a tinted moisturizer at half past five that morning, and Kasia watched her look and saw the two of them side by side as clearly as if there were a mirror in the phone shop window instead of a poster. It was not new. It had been true since the eighth grade. It had simply never been so obvious, and neither of them found it funny, and both of them could see the other not finding it funny. "You cut your hair."

"Two years ago."

"You didn't send a picture."

"It's hair, Lid."

"It's two years of hair." Lidia picked up her coffee again, and Kasia saw her decide not to say the next thing, and then saw her say it anyway, lightly, with the cup in front of her mouth. "I stopped counting the Christmases. Just so you know. I counted up to about four and then I thought, this is a sad thing for a grown woman to be doing, and I stopped."

"I sent cards."

"You sent beautiful cards. Ma has them on the fridge." She said it without any edge at all, and that was worse than the edge would have been. Then she shifted the garment bag on her arm and dug in the pocket of the green dress and came out with a folded sheet of paper, printed and then written on in three colors of pen, and held it out. "Here. You're mine from tomorrow morning. Fitting at ten, the florist calls about the boutonnieres, rehearsal at five, supper at Dario's at seven. Saturday, hair at seven, Renzo's driving you. Church at noon. Don't make that face."

"I'm not making a face."

"You're making the face you make when a doctor tells you something you already know." Lidia tapped the list. "Sunday's lunch at Nonna's. Everybody. She's decided."

Kasia unfolded it. It was a good list. Lidia had always made good lists; she had made a list in the third grade of which boys in their class were likely to go to prison, and she had been right about two of them. There were times on it down to the quarter hour, and a column headed Kasia in purple, and at the bottom of Sunday, in the same purple, 4:00 train with a small, careful frown drawn beside it.

"You wrote my train on it."

"You told me your train. You told me your train before you told me you'd come." Lidia drank some coffee and looked up the avenue, toward the corner, where the awning of the bakery was just visible and a woman was going in with a stroller. "Would you ever come back? Not for a weekend. I mean come back."

She asked it the way you ask whether somebody wants milk. Kasia had known Lidia since kindergarten and knew that meant it was the only question she had been wanting to ask since the train got in.

"I've got a Tuesday shift," Kasia said.

It was true. It was the truest thing she could have said, and she heard exactly how it sounded as it came out, and so did Lidia, who nodded as if she had been given the answer she expected on a test she had set herself.

"Tuesday," Lidia said. "Okay." She put her sunglasses down over her eyes. "Well, you're here now. And you're mine until Sunday, and I'm going to be a nightmare. Ma's been cooking since noon. Come on. Give me that." She reached for Kasia's bag and Kasia did not give it to her, and they had the same small tussle over it on the sidewalk that they had had over every school bag and every sleeping bag and one suitcase at the station nine years before, and Lidia lost it, as she always had, and took Kasia's arm instead.

Kasia put the keys back in her pocket. The brass one was warm from her hand.

The corner house was the corner house. It stood where Atwells met the side street at the top of the block, three stories of pale gray clapboard with a bay window on the ground floor and a porch that somebody had painted since she left, and the side gate still stuck at the bottom and still had to be lifted and pushed at the same time. Lidia did it without looking. They went around the side, past the trash cans and the hose coiled on its bracket and the tomato plants in their buckets along the fence, because nobody who belonged to that house had ever used its front door, and up the three back steps into the kitchen.

It was hot in the kitchen. It had always been hot in the kitchen. There was a pot on every burner of the stove and something in the oven, and the window over the sink was open onto the yard and did nothing whatever about any of it. The table in the middle of the room was the same table, oilcloth over it, a different oilcloth, lemons now instead of cherries. The radio on top of the fridge was on low, a man talking about the weather in the voice men on that station had always used. On the fridge door, among the parish calendar and the school photographs of children Kasia did not know and a magnet from Wildwood, there was a row of Christmas cards held on with clips, and she saw two of her own before she had gotten the door shut behind her.

Graziella Falcone was at the stove. She was shorter than Kasia remembered and broader through the hips, in a housecoat over her good blouse to keep the blouse clean, with her glasses on their chain against her chest and her hair set and dyed the same dark brown it had been the last time, and the time before that, and at every Sunday lunch of Kasia's childhood. She turned around with a wooden spoon in her hand and looked at Kasia over the top of the glasses she was not wearing.

"Mrs. Falcone," said Kasia.

Graziella put the spoon down on the rest. She came across the kitchen, took Kasia's face in both her hands, which were hot from the stove and smelled of garlic and the bay leaf she had just fished out of something, and looked at it for a moment as if she were checking it for damage. Then she let go, and turned, and took a plate down from the rack over the sink.

"Ma, supper's at seven," said Lidia. "The whole point is supper's at seven."

Graziella did not answer. She took the lid off one of the pots and served from it, and took the lid off another, and cut a piece of bread from the loaf on the board against her own chest, the knife coming toward her the way it had always come and always made Kasia flinch, and put the bread on the side of the plate. Then she brought the plate over and put it down on the lemons at the place nearest the back door, which was the place Kasia had sat in from the time she could see over the table until she left, and which nobody had ever said was hers.

Kasia still had her bag on her shoulder. She had not gotten her jacket off; she was halfway out of one sleeve of it, standing in the kitchen with one arm free and the bag strap caught in the other, and the plate was already there in front of the chair with steam coming off it. Meatballs, and escarole with white beans, and a spoon of the sauce over the bread so it would go soft the way she had liked it at eight.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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