Chapter three

The next morning, when I went in to the bathroom to brush my teeth, I noticed the index card over the sink.

RIGHT FAUCET DRIPS EASILY, it said. TIGHTEN WITH WRENCH AFTER USING. And then there was an arrow, pointing down to where a small wrench was tied with bright red yarn to one of the pipes.

This is crazy, I thought.

But that wasn’t all. In the shower, HOT WATER IS VERY HOT! USE WITH CARE was posted over the soap dish. And on the toilet: HANDLE LOOSE. DON’T YANK. (As if I had some desire to do that.) The overhead fan was clearly BROKEN, the tiles by the door were LOOSE so I had to WALK CAREFULLY. And I was informed, cryptically, that the light over medicine cabinet WORKS, BUT ONLY SOMETIMES.

They were all over the house. I came across them like dropped bread crumbs, leading me from one thing to another. Windows were PAINTED SHUT, banisters LOOSE, chairs had ONE LEG TOO SHORT. It was like a strange game, and it made me feel unsteady and weird, wishing that even one thing was new enough to work perfectly. I wondered how anyone could live like this, but it was obvious that Mira wasn’t just anyone.

Before I got to Colby, all I knew was that she was two years older than my mother, unmarried, and had inherited all of my grandparents’ money. I also knew that, like us, she was overweight. Mira had lived in Chicago during the first few years we’d crisscrossed the country in our Volaré, and the one thing I clearly remembered about visiting her were the doughnuts she’d made out of Pillsbury biscuit dough, fried and rolled in cinnamon and sugar. She always seemed to be cooking or eating.

When my mother got thin, it was like she’d found religion. She wanted to share it with everyone: me first, followed by the legions of women who flocked to her aerobics classes, and then the rest of the free world. She was like an evangelist of weight loss. But it was clear Mira hadn’t converted: the closet in my room contained every bit of Kiki merchandise ever manufactured, all of it stacked and neat in its original packaging. (I’d added mine to the pile.) And that morning Mira made doughnuts. I sat and watched her eat five of them, pop pop pop pop pop, one right after another, licking her fingers and laughing that giggly laugh all the way.

Mira had been my grandparents’ favorite: art school educated, full of promise, the good daughter. My mother, on the other hand, with her wild clothes and lifestyle, had fallen entirely out of favor when she’d gotten pregnant at twenty, dropped out of college, and had me. We spent so much time moving around that her family hardly ever knew where we lived, much less who we were. Our few visits to Mira’s had ended with big blowouts, usually sparked by some childhood memory she and my mother recalled differently. The last time I’d seen her was at my grandmother’s funeral, in Cincinnati, when I was about ten. We’d stuck around just long enough to find out Mira was inheriting everything; not too long after, she’d moved to Colby.

After I ate two doughnuts, I realized those forty-five-and-a-half pounds could creep back easily over a whole summer of what my mother termed “Stuffin’ for Nothin’.” I ran on the beach for an hour, Walkman on, music pounding in my ears.

When I got back I found Mira in her studio, a big messy room off the kitchen. She wore yellow overalls and her slippers, and her hair was piled up on top of her head, with about seven pens, capped and uncapped, sticking out in various places.

“Do you want to see my new death card?” she asked me cheerfully. “I’ve been working on it all week.”

“Death card?”

“Well, technically it’s called a condolence card,” she said, shifting in her office chair, which was jacked up as high as it could go. “But it is what it is, you know?”

I took the two pieces of thick sketch paper she handed me. On the first was a pastel drawing of some flowers, over which was written:

I am so sorry . . .

And on the second, which was to be the inside of the card:

All losses are so hard to bear, but the loss of former love can be the hardest. Regardless of the reasons, there was love. And my heart and thoughts are with you at this difficult time.

“Too much?” she said as I looked down at the bottom of the page, where Mira’s Miracles was written in small print, with tiny red hearts topping both i ’s.

“Um, no,” I said. “I just never saw a card that specific before.”

“It’s the new wave,” she said simply, pulling a pen out of her hair. “Specialized condolence cards for new occasions. Dead ex-husbands, dead bosses, dead mailmen . . .”

I looked at her.

“I’m serious!” she said, spinning around in her chair and reaching for a box behind her. “Here it is!” She produced a card and cleared her throat. “The outside says, I considered him a friend. . . . And when you open it up, it reads, Sometimes a service can become more than just routine, when it is delivered with heart and humor and personal care. I considered him to be my friend and I will miss so much our daily contact.” She looked at me, grinning. “See what I mean?”

“You give that to your mailman?” I said.

“To your mailman’s widow,” she corrected me, chucking the card back into the box. “I have them for everything, every profession. You have to. People’s lives are very specialized now. Their cards need to be, too.”

“I don’t know if I’d buy a card for my mailman’s widow.”

“You might not,” she said seriously. “But you are probably not a card person. Some people just need to give cards. And they’re the ones that keep me in business.”