Page 70 of Upstate

“Oh, they’re not staying that way. I ordered the cabinets unpainted. Actually, I was hoping you could help me with that.”

I show Wren the paint swatches I picked up from Home Depot. He doesn’t bother to look at them. “The work you’ve done here deserves better than that. I’ll drop off my Farrow & Ball color fan. What are you using on the walls?”

I point to a freshly painted patch next to the fireplace. “There was some Ammonite left over from the living room. Think that’ll work?”

“It’s a great neutral, yes. I’m thinking a greenish gray for the cabinets, to pick up that veining in the stone. I see you kept the stove?”

“For now, at least.” I hand him my AGA brochure. “I really wanted one of these ranges, but they’re too expensive. I can’t even afford the refrigerator that fits the panels I ordered.”

He shakes his head. “AGA ranges are for traditional English country houses. I prefer the stove you have, actually. The mix of eras keeps the room playful, and the white enamel’s refreshing. You just need a few accent pieces to make it seem intentional. I’ll look around my store. Oh, and I’ll ask Eric about the refrigerator. He knows every kitchen and bath supplier in the region. He might be able to find you a discount.”

Wren approves my idea to run dimmable spotlights along the ceiling beams instead of hanging pendants and advises me to choose a brass finish for the faucet and drawer pulls.

“I’m glad you got rid of that ratty wingback,” he says. “I’ve got a pair of midcentury chairs that would be perfect in front of the hearth.”

“I’m not in the market for furniture, Wren.”

He waves away my objection. “I’ll lend them to you until the store opens. Speaking of which, I better get going. First, though, I want you to promise me something.”

“What’s that?”

“That you’ll join us for New Year’s Eve, as long as we keep testing negative, of course. Eric would really love to see you.”

“New Year’s Eve?” I panic at the prospect of leaving my house.

“I wish we could have you for Christmas, but that’s a little too soon. According to the guidelines, we’ll be in the clear by the thirty-first.”

I scramble for an excuse. “I can’t, sorry. I have plans.”

“What plans?” The furrows in Wren’s brow deepen. “It’s not healthy for you to be so isolated here, you know that, right?”

“I won’t be alone,” I lie. “One of the professors from my college invited me to come stay at their family’s farm in Vermont.”

“That sounds nice, Audrey. Eric will be disappointed, but it’ll do you good to be with friends. Call me when you get back?”

“I promise.”

The farm in Vermont is a fiction, but I really do have plans for New Year’s Eve. In the meantime, I spend an entire paycheck on the perfect faucet and drawer pulls from a site that specializes in reproduction hardware. There’s a store near Cooperstown that sells the Farrow & Ball paint Wren recommended, so I drive out there on a winter day when bare tree branches are drawn in pencil against a watery blue sky. I come home with enough Ammonite in dead flat to finish the walls and a color called Mizzle in eggshell for the cabinets. The expense is miraculously covered by an online order for an 1897 edition of Edith Wharton’s The Decoration of Houses. When Eric comes through with a supplier willing to sell a floor-model French-door refrigerator for a discount too deep to pass up, I use most of the available credit I’ve managed to claw back from my card balance. I end the year skint, but the kitchen that kept me alive is glorious.

On December twenty-fifth, I nix the idea of hanging a single stocking from the mantel as too tragic to contemplate. Instead, I address a Hanukkah card to my grandparents in Florida, then play magi to the animals in the barn, gifting the goats a bucket of oats, the sheep fresh bales of hay sprinkled with powdered molasses, and the cat a can of tuna.

I spend the next five days painting cabinets while listening to true crime podcasts. Early in the morning on the last day of the worst year ever, I tramp across the frosty lawn, open the doors to the workshop wide, and drive the van inside, parking it out of sight to make it look like I really am visiting friends in another state.

When day gives way to darkness, I don’t cue up a rockin’ New Year’s Eve playlist. I don’t tune in to watch a ball drop over an empty Times Square. I don’t listen to news about the president who presided over the pandemic refusing, still, to concede the election he lost. I don’t think about the 340,000 Americans who have died of Covid this year, or the more than nine hundred who will die this day, or the forty who are dying every hour.

I only think of one.

Upstairs in my bedroom, I push aside the clothes hanging in my closet and reach for the plastic tote of David’s T-shirts. Sitting cross-legged on the bed with a thermos of tea and a box of tissues at the ready, I lift the lid and lean in.

David’s scent sparks memories that flash like fireworks. Sweat and smoke and violin rosin from late nights in bars. Dried leaves crunching beneath our feet during autumn walks through Central Park. Greasy breakfasts at that diner on Forty-Sixth Street where we’d order eggs over easy and dip our buttered toast in runny yolks. Takeout coffee in paper cups, his white and sweet, mine black and bitter. Shawarma from that vendor on Eighth Avenue, smoke wafting through the food truck’s window. Sandalwood beard oil and Castile soap and peppermint deodorant. The scented candle I’d light when he stank up the bathroom. Traces of my botanical shampoo from when I’d sleep with my head on his chest.

I let myself remember waking beside David in warm cotton sheets. The rumble of his empty stomach. His reliable morning erection. The tickle of his mustache when we kissed. Its rough stroke between my legs. Finding strands of ginger hair stuck to my clothes like love notes. How his blue eyes shone like cut stones when they found mine across a crowded room.

As a child, the enormity of my grief terrified me. The psychologist Dad took me to after Mom died asked me, once, how often I cried. I’d turned eleven by then, but I didn’t have the language to explain that crying was something that sabotaged me at night. During the day, I twisted the spigots of my tear ducts shut. It made my father too sad, my teachers too concerned, my friends too weirded out, to see me cry.

“It’s healthy to express your feelings,” the psychologist said in response to my mute shrug. “Sometimes it helps to read a really sad story. It kind of gives the tears permission to come out, if that makes sense?”

I sensed I was supposed to nod, so I did.