Flying Solo(2)

“Right now it’s goldfish.”

“Goldfish? Like orange?”

Laurie nodded. “I really love it. My mother says it makes her think of macaroni and cheese.”

Dot nodded. “Well, let’s paint it goldfish, then.”

Laurie’s eyes opened wider. “Really?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Just like that?”

“Why are you scandalized, love? It’s just paint.”

“I don’t know. You just…paint your walls however, whenever you want? You don’t…talk to anybody?”

“I’m talking to you,” she said. “Who else would I talk to? It’s my house. They’re my walls. I can cover the entire place in zebra-stripe wallpaper if I want to. I can fill it up with sand and make a beach. Compared to that, a few goldfish walls are pretty tame.”

Laurie looked all around. Her parents owned their house too, but somehow she felt certain they didn’t think of it this way. She imagined zebra-stripe wallpaper. She imagined herself lying on this bed, in a zebra-stripe room, with sand on the floor, with no one around, no one yelling, no one deciding when breakfast was or when was too late for hot cocoa.

A week later, Laurie went over to Dot’s and they repainted the bedroom she had slept in. They did the whole thing in a bright orange with a few red swirls Dot painted with a fat brush to make it more “goldfishy.” At the end of the day, Laurie had orange specks in her hair and on her jeans, and she told Dot it was the greatest room she’d ever seen. And while Dot lived almost thirty more years, and she repainted rooms and refinished floors and put in new countertops and renovated the bathroom two more times, that room stayed the goldfish room, always.





Chapter One


She could have missed the duck entirely. It was at the very bottom of the cedar chest, and in the manner of the princess and the pea and the stack of mattresses, Laurie might have ignored it if she hadn’t pulled all the blankets out to see whether any of them seemed special.

The duck was about a foot long, made of wood, and lighter than she expected when she picked it up. She couldn’t even guess how old it was, since it looked pristine, like it had barely been touched. It was without a single visible scratch, and it was worked to a finish so smooth she could make out the thinnest brushstrokes in the paint with the tips of her fingers. The colors were bright: a green head and a reddish-brown chest, a gold flush along the sides with blues and greens along the wings. Laurie stepped into the hall. “Now, why,” she said, standing with one hand on her hip and the duck in the other, “would a ninety-three-year-old woman have had a wooden duck in a chest under three afghans and a quilt?”

“To get to the other side?” June called back from the living room.

“It’s not that kind of riddle.”

Laurie walked with it out into the living room, where June was working through the books. Or some of the books. Aunt Dot had them in practically every corner, stuffed into floor-to-ceiling built-in shelves or sitting in stacks on the floor, in danger of tipping over. “I guess she had it for the same reason she has four feather boas and a signed picture of Steve McQueen.”

“Which is what?”

“She was ninety-three. Why wouldn’t there be a duck?”

Laurie took out her phone and snapped a couple of pictures of the duck from different angles to show her mother. “It’s pretty, actually. I don’t know why it wouldn’t be out somewhere you could look at it. Everything else is.”

Dot’s whole house was an extravagant display case for the fruits of her adventures. There were postcards in patterned fabric boxes, home-movie reels in bins with labels marked in ballpoint pen, and travel souvenirs that suggested impulsive shifts in Dot’s collecting philosophy. There were egg cups, spoons, and little dessert plates with scenes painted on them. She’d been to Rome, to Bangkok, to Buenos Aires and Mexico City. She’d camped in a trailer with two girlfriends in Yellowstone in the summer of 1952, and she’d wandered around China on her own in 1994, when she was in her sixties. In a photo from that trip that she must have convinced a stranger to take for her, she was next to the Great Wall, her gray hair gathered in a loose ponytail at the back of her neck. She wore a light denim jacket with a patch of Elton John’s face on the arm.

Dot had tried just about everything they taught at the community college—and kept every course catalog—and her work and supplies were stacked and stored in one of the bedrooms. Ceramics, cross-stitch, knitting, scrapbooks with stenciled titles like “Christmas 2003: Cold as Hell.” Painting, sketching, calligraphy, beaded bracelets strung on fishing line. There was a big blue plastic bin at the bottom, under all the boxes of crafts, that said IN PROGRESS/UNFINISHED. Those were destined to remain so now.

There was a small stash of love letters from some of Dot’s known boyfriends: Paul, the teacher; John, the chemist; Andrew, the journalist. There was also one without an envelope that was signed “M,” which Laurie suspected might have been from a woman, based on the handwriting. (Again: She was ninety-three. Why wouldn’t there be a woman?) Laurie set aside but did not read these, for the simple reason that she wouldn’t want anyone to read her letters after she was dead. It seemed wrong, though, to throw them away, so she’d just left them in their shoebox labeled CORRESPONDENCE, SPECIAL and set it on the bed.