Page 61 of Seven Summer Weekends

“Something so awful that they never told me.”

She held the picture up in the air. “It’s heavier than the others were.”

“Are you gonna open it?”

“They’re supposed to come next weekend. It can wait.”

“All right.” He waited for her to put it down before moving on to the next thing, but she didn’t.

“Maybe take a peek,” he suggested. A mischievous smile spread across his lips.

“I can’t. I mean, I’m beyond curious. Even so, it feels wrong to open it.”

Ben climbed off the ladder. “I’ll do it.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t,” she said, following up with an exaggerated wink.

She leaned the picture against the wall, and Ben carefully untied the string that held the brown paper in place, and took a peek inside.

“Well?”

“It looks like one of those mosaics. You know what I mean?”

“I think so. But there must be more to it. Show me the corner.”

Ben pulled down one corner, and Addison saw that it was a collage made of broken china. Not just any broken china, but her mother’s pattern, famously passed down to her by a wealthy aunt on Addison’s father’s side. Her mother loved to say the only thing they ever got from Morty’s side of the family was indigestion and a pristine fifty-two-piece set of fine Ginori china.

Addison ripped off the paper with a vengeance. The china—which was broken into a hundred tiny pieces—was set in cement in the form of a broken heart.

She was mad with a rage she’d never remembered feeling before. If she were an emoji, she would be the one where a head explodes. Could the Big Terrible Thing be about a broken plate? She picked up her cell phone to call her parents, taking a small beat to get rid of Ben. Yes, they had sex multiple times, and yes, she was feeling all kinds of feelings that she had not felt in a long, long time, if ever, but there was no way she was blowing this by turning into a raving lunatic in front of him. The Irwin family’s particular brand of insanity should not be revealed in the honeymoon phase. She told it like it was.

“You don’t want to be around for this discussion.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Well, I kind of do. I’ll catch up with you later.”

He wrapped his arms around her, engulfing her in a big eye-to-eye, rib-squeezing, belly-bumping hug. It made her even more annoyed with her parents—for tainting the perfect day.

As soon as he was out of earshot, she dialed.

“Hello, darling,” her mother said, picking up on the first ring.

“Mom. I need you to tell me that the whole Big Terrible Thing between you and Aunt Gicky wasn’t over a plate.”

Her mother laughed, “Of course it wasn’t over a plate.”

Relief exuded from every inch of her body, every inch. Between the meditating and ocean swimming and the sex and the freedom of being unemployed, she had been feeling, well, blissfully unaware. She knew it couldn’t last forever, but the Summer of Addison was still in session, and she was not interested in cutting it short with family drama. She took a deep meditative breath to seal in the relief and then…

“It was a soup terrine,” her mother said, with zero emotion.

The words brought her right back to the spring of 1998.

The scene from the last time she saw her aunt flashed before her eyes. It was a Jewish holiday—Passover, the second night, with only the immediate family plus Aunt Gicky. The evening before, at the first Passover Seder, they had had a full house. Given her mother’s tendency to behave like a Stepford Wife in front of company, the whole thing may have turned out very differently had there been a bigger crowd present on day two. Addison’s mother had “the help,” a lovely Polish woman named Anya, serve the matzah ball soup directly from the pot in the kitchen. Once everyone had a bowl, her mother took her seat, while quietly lamenting, “If I had the soup terrine that went with this beautiful set, I could have served right from the table.”

It was a statement that Addison and her dad and sister had heard before, one that didn’t need a response. Even at that young age, Addison knew all about the missing piece in the set. She knew that her mother had flown to New York to retrieve the blessed china when said aunt passed and how the fifty-two-piece set was inexplicably missing the pièce de résistance: the soupterrine. Beverly had famously ransacked Morty’s aunt’s apartment before it was sold, searching every corner for it. She referred to the china from that day forward as the fifty-two-piece set of china minus one.

Beverly brought a spoonful of soup to her lips and gently blew on it as Aunt Gicky casually announced, “Oh, when you come to my house for a holiday, I will serve you from it.”

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