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woman who changed my sheets and did my laundry, the woman who sat with me in the kitchen so often and listened while I worried about my children and their futures, the woman who knew almost every intimate detail of my household, did she know the truth about Addison and his many indiscretions? But I didn’t ask her to tell me what she knew and I knew then that for all the rugged terrain we had traveled in the past, this was one topic I would never discuss. Dignity had to be restored between us. It was enough that when she heard my hysterical screaming, she burst through the door of the family room and saw Addison’s lifeless body hanging there as well. She started yelling in Portuguese and literally almost dragged me away and into the kitchen where she called 911. She also called a piano repair company to come right away and collect my old piano to be completely cleaned and sanitized as Addison had left behind some, well, bodily fluids in the lower register of ivory and ebony keys along with a note that said, “I’m sorry.”
    Instead of offering her my big SUV for the night, I just said, “Absolutely. Please stay.” I was thinking, We’ve had enough tragedy. Please don’t take a risk.
    She nodded and said something about going to make herself useful by checking the fireplaces, to see if they were still burning, to add a log if it was needed, to throw some more salt on the walkway, and to check the powder room for hand towels, to be sure any arriving guests didn’t track that salt into my rugs. It was unusual for Albertina to babble to me about her intentions, but it made me think she must have been very rattled by the whole catastrophe. I couldn’t even remember if she had been at the cemetery, but assumed then that she had to have been, because of the way she was dressed. I wasn’t thinking straight. Obviously.
    My fingertips were numb and I rubbed my hands together to get the blood circulating and searched Russ and Sara’s faces. And Alice’s.
    “Okay, are we ready to see who’s here?”
    “I just want to get this nightmare over with,” Sara said.
    “Understandable,” I said and took a deep breath. “Me too.”
    “It’s much healthier to let yourself grieve,” said Alice, my shrink daughter-in-law, who is the world’s authority on what there is to know about any kind of emotional malady and what to do to fix it. “Just let it all go !”
    I heard Sara groan. “And just what makes you think we’re not grieving?” Sara said, ready to take her on. Sara kept her jalapeño-tempered inner pit bull on a short leash, but when it came to Alice, she showed some tooth.
    “All right, girls,” I said. “That’s enough. Let’s go see our guests.”
    “Look, excuse me but this is my area of expertise and as a professional . . .”
    “Alice? Stop, okay?” Russ said and Alice’s furious mouth slammed shut but her face was in flames. She squinted with her unfortunately beady eyes in my son’s direction and I thought it would not bother me a bit to reach over and give the sanctimonious inside of her upper arm a good and solid twisting pinch. I took a deep breath instead. After all, who was I to have an opinion about whom my son should love and marry? I only carried him for nine long months, brought him into this world after twenty hours of horrific labor, and took care of his every single solitary need for more than twenty years. What did I know?
    Finally, we walked out together, swinging the door that led to the long butler’s pantry, across the dining room and across our large foyer, our heels clicking like the tiny hammers of a silversmith plinking against the cream-colored marble. The long distance from the kitchen to the living room was not lost on me. All those shelves stacked with dishes, goblets, serving pieces, vases, and every kind of serving accessory down to six different sets of knife rests and forty-eight old Sheffield fish forks and knives, all made of silver with mother-of-pearl handles.