Page 9 of Sister of the Bride

Because he distracted everyone with his terrible jokes and someone lost an arm in the packing machine?

Toby

That’s grim, Pip…

He kept throwing away the bent ones

Pippin

I like mine better

The Marino’s building hasn’t changed much in the almost one hundred years it’s been in my family. And while HGTV has tried to convince everyone that happiness is a new coat of paint or a sledgehammer to a wall, the continuity suits me just fine. There’s no shiplap to be found here. No stainless steel appliances except for the ones in the commercial kitchen of the restaurant. I like that the steps are covered in scuff marks from generations of Marinos. I like that just inside the front door there are pencil lines marking the heights of not just Polly and me, but Dad too, and even Nonna as far back as the 1940s. I don’t care that the furnace can’t keep up in January and the window air conditioners can’t keep up in July. I love that the dining room table came over from Sicily with Great-Grandpa and Great-Grandma Marino, a wedding present from her parents, and bears all the dents and scratches and stains of a hundred years of family dinners.

And while I know it’s probably a little pathetic to be twenty-six years old and still sleeping in your childhood twin bed, sharing an apartment with your mother, your grandmother living a floor below, I don’t care. Because I love the voices that greet me when I walk in the door.

Mom gives me a quick peck on the cheek before lunging to pull Polly into one of her famous of hugs.

“Get over here, you!” Mom says. For a tiny person, she hugs like a longshoreman, and Polly lets out a little grunt as Mom squeezes her. “Six months is too long to go without seeing one of my babies.”

“I wish you could have come to visit,” Polly says, her face still buried in Mom’s hair.

“Yes, well, you know how things go with the restaurant. It’s so hard to get away.” Mom sighs, her shoulders dropping several inches. She pulls back and gives Polly a sad smile that makes my heart constrict. Mom had planned to go visit in the spring, but Fernando broke his arm in a weekend pickup soccer game, and everyone had to pitch in for the five weeks he had a cast. I hated that she had to cancel her trip; lord knows she deserved it. I’ve been working so hard at the restaurant these last few years so Mom could workless, but so far it seems like we’ve all just been grinding harder than ever. Hell,Iwould have liked to go visit Polly, but that conversation never even started.

Mom was always happy to be a restaurant wife when Dad was alive, pitching in on busy weekends, pouring wine and running plates along with her pastry work. But it was never her plan to run a restaurant. Mom left Minnesota to be a Wellesley girl, studying studio art and education. She met Dad in the beer line at a Red Sox game, where he was double-fisting sweating cups of Sam Adams. She said it was love at first sight. He said he was the luckiest bastard in New England. They married right after she graduated, and she took a job teaching high school art just across the river in Cambridge. Mom left that job when Polly and I were born and taught community art classes part time while we were growing up. She was planning to go back to work full time when we left for college, but when Dad died of a heart attack that fall, everyone’s plans changed.

Mom used to have an easel set up in the corner of the living room and was always working on a painting. When she finished a few, she’d sign up for a booth at a craft fair and sell them off, then use the money to take us down to the Cape on the ferry for a day to eat lobster rolls and splash around at the public beach. But that easel has been empty ever since she and I had to take over the restaurant.

“Cuore mio!” Nonna screeches as she comes rushing in from the kitchen, a stained apron tied around her waist. Mom may be making dinner, but Nonna is in charge of dessert, and my stomach grumbles as I inhale the smell of fresh cannoli shells radiating off her in waves. Nonna grabs Polly and pulls her in like an aggressive dance partner. Never mind that Polly is a good head taller than our grandmother, who is small and round and warm in all the ways that make you feel loved with every hug. We always used to wonder how our father, all six feet three of him, could have come from such a tiny woman. But of course those were his father’s genes—the man who got Nonna pregnant when she was nineteen and spent exactly four seconds considering fatherhood before lighting out for Southern California in a shiny new VW Bug, never to be heard from again. Whenever he’s mentioned, Nonna mutters all the Italian swear words she knows under her breath.

“Nonna! I missed you!” Polly says, and Nonna immediately grabs her by the shoulders, pushing her back to make a long, narrow-eyed assessment.

“You look…” Her eyes roam up and down Polly’s figure before landing on her freckled face, and she breaks into a wide grin. “You lookhappy, my darling.”

If Polly’s grin were an electric current, she could power all of Fenway for a full nine innings.

“Iamhappy,” she replies, the words warming the entire room.

“I’m so glad, cuore mio,” Nonna replies. “Now, I have to go fry the last of the shells before the oil gets too hot, so settle yourself, because dinner,such as it is, will be done soon.”

“Hush, you,” Mom says, playfully snapping a dish towel at Nonna, who is giving Mom what can only be described as the most loving of stink eyes. “You ate seconds of last week’s casserole.”

“A broken clock is right twice a day,” Nonna says, flapping her hands in Mom’s direction. Nonna loves to tease Mom about her casseroles, but on more than one occasion I’ve caught her reheating leftovers in the middle of the night and eating them surreptitiously over the sink.

“Fifteen minutes, okay, girls?” Mom says. And then she lifts a hand to her chest, her eyes getting watery. “Oh, I’ve missed that.Girls. It’s so good to have you back, Polly.”

And then Mom scurries off to the kitchen before the sentimental tears begin flowing in earnest.

“Should we drag the bags upstairs?” I ask. The pile of suitcases is taking up basically the entire entryway. If a fire were to break out, we’d definitely have to go out a window, but the thought of dragging them up two more flights to the attic makes me want to take a ten-year nap.

“Nah, leave ’em. We’ll let dinner fortify us for the climb.” Polly drops her tote bag on the floor by the largest suitcase and wanders into the living room, gazing around like Tom Hanks after he finally got rescued from that island. Not a single thing has changed since she left six months ago. The house still smells like olive oil and the sharp tang of tomatoes. The back wall of the living room, all bookshelves, is still full to bursting with novels and art books and cookbooks, not to mention overstuffed photo albums and scrapbooks—though there may be one or two new murder mysteries, courtesy of Nonna. And perched along the edge of every shelf are framed photos, starting with one of Great-Grandpa and Great-Grandma Marino’s wedding in 1926, a stiff black-and-white portrait of two Italian teenagers looking more than a little terrified. Which was warranted, since they were about to board a ship to America, where they knew not one word of the language. There’s a photo of Nonna holding Dad as a baby in 1961 and a photo of him and Mom shoving cake into each other’s faces at their very eighties-errific wedding. But most of the photos are of Polly and me, first as chubby babies, then as awkward kids, tweens, and teens.

Polly picks up a gold frame. Inside is Dad in a brown suit, flanked by my sister and me in our caps and gowns at high school graduation. Dad has a beefy arm thrown around each of us, his grin a mile wide beneath his mustache. Dad always had a bushy, dark Tom Selleck–style mustache, even though those definitely weren’t fashionable in the mid-nineties, not even ironically. But Dad leaned hard into his burly-Italian-dude persona despite being an absolute cinnamon roll of a human being. He sang Rat Pack songs to wake us up, tripled the garlic in every recipe, and doled out bone-crushing bear hugs like they were free money.

“I can’t believe it’s been eight years,” Polly says, clutching the frame. Her eyes glisten, and I wonder if she’s having the same sense memory as me of Dad’s heavy arms pulling us close, the smell of cigars and Dial soap wafting off him.

“Sometimes it feels like it’s only been eight minutes,” I reply.

“I know, right? Like, I walked into the house and half expected him to body check me to take my suitcases,” Polly says, and because she’s always been a crier just like Mom, her eyes well up. “There’s just so much he’s missed. So much more he’sgoingto miss.”

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