Page 15 of Seven Summer Weekends

“The weaver realized he had been so focused on the technical aspects of his work that he had forgotten the love that he had for his craft. He returned to his loom and wove a new tapestry with love in his heart, pouring his passion into the task. He thought of his adoring mother and his beautiful wife. Of his young daughter who clung to his hand when walking through town. He thought of his grandmother who had raised him. The patterns he created were dense with the energy of his love, and his work came to life. When the princess saw the completed tapestry, she was amazed at its beauty and wept with joy.

“The weaver realized that the sage was right, love truly was the thread of creativity. In order to create beauty, you need to have a warm heart.”

The story sank in and left her with a palpable feeling of loneliness that she didn’t quite understand. It felt hard to breathe. Addison blinked her eyes, surprised to feel tears coming on. One escaped, and Paresh noticed it.

“I’m sorry,” he said. But Addison knew he wasn’t truly sorry.Had Gicky sent him there to crack open her heart? She wiped her eyes and stood up. She felt naked and vulnerable in a way that made her very uncomfortable. She badly wanted it to stop.

“I’m going to head to the market to pick up lunch before the afternoon rush.”

“Isn’t the afternoon rush the best part?”

“Not for me.”

At the market, she decided to err on the side of caution, and filled her basket with ingredients for a salad, operating on the assumption that Paresh was a vegetarian.

On the bike ride home, Addison thought of Paresh’s words—in order to create beauty, you need to have a warm heart. With her grandfather still top of mind, she thought of the day her heart turned cold. Thoughcoldmay be too harsh—more liketemperate. Her heart was temperate. Welcoming of warmth, but wary of heat. Never willing to risk what it would take to get carried away by someone else’s love.

Addison had adored her maternal grandfather with all of her heart. His warm smile, his hearty belly laugh, the way she and her sister took turns dancing on his feet. His hugs when he greeted her, wrapping his arms around her little frame in a layer of love and strength that Addison carried with her long after his visits ended. At twelve, when he passed, she promised herself she would carry the feeling of his hugs with her always. But always didn’t last more than a day.

The cousins were bored at the shiva and decided to play a silent game of hide-and-go-seek. With dozens of people coming in and out of their grandparents’ house, no one would know they were missing except for the kid who was seeking (at that point, her cousin Astrid). Addison slipped into her grandparents’ room.She lifted the lid on her grandpa’s mahogany humidor and breathed in the scent of Cuban cigars that had always engulfed him. She slipped one out, waved it under her nose, and placed it in the pocket of her dress for safekeeping before taking her favorite hiding spot under her grandparents’—now only her grandmother’s—bed.

Within minutes, she heard the door crack open and squeezed her eyes tight, waiting for Astrid to call her out. But the stockinged feet that approached the bed were not Astrid’s. They were her grandmother’s. Her grandmother lay down above her, her slight frame barely indenting the mattress over Addison’s head. Addison thought of wiggling out and climbing up on the bed to comfort her. Surely it was more important than winning hide-and-go-seek, but her grandmother began to cry and, feeling as if she were invading her privacy, Addison chickened out. Soon her mother entered and sat on the bed, causing a slightly bigger indentation. Addison inched away from it.

“Hey, Mom,” her mother said to her own mother.

The bed moved, and Addison imagined her mother rubbing her grandmother’s back, as she had thought of doing a few minutes earlier.

“We all miss him,” she said sweetly.

She could feel her grandmother roll over—presumably to face her mom.

“Beverly,” she said, “when I die, I want you to make me a promise.”

“You’re not dying, Mother,” she said, in her all-too-familiar sarcastic tone.

“Just make me a promise.”

“OK,” her mother agreed, “anything you want.”

“I want you to bury me with my back facing your father.”

“Mom. That was a long time ago.”

“Your father was unfaithful to me from the day I married him till the day he died. Promise me you will bury me with my back to him, the way I was forced to sleep through most of my marriage. I will never rest in peace if you don’t promise me this.”

Her grandmother let out a painful wail, and Addison felt it pierce her young heart.

It never fully recovered. She had rolled under that bed a child and had rolled out a cynic.

“New rider on your right!” a guy yelled now as his wobbly child approached on a two-wheeler.

Addison, deep in thought, overcompensated and veered left, swerving off the sidewalk and toppling off her bike. Radishes and cucumbers rolled in all directions.

“Sorry,” the dad yelled, still running behind his wayward son.

Addison collected her produce, sat down on the grass, and cried. She wasn’t really sure why she was crying, but there was no controlling it. She cried for the aunt she never really knew and the grandpa that broke her heart. She cried for the career that she had put everything into that hadn’t returned the favor. She cried because she knew she hadn’t properly nurtured the thread of love in her heart. And of course, as fate would dictate, at the exact moment she sat crying in the dirt, up walked the man from the ferry.

“Hey. You Again!” he called out from a few feet away.

---