The Canterbury Sisters Read online

  Outstanding praise for Kim Wright

  THE UNEXPECTED WALTZ

  “Captures our fear of the unknown and the tender joys of coming into one’s own.”

  —Booklist

  “The novel has everything I look for in a good read: intrigue, interesting characters at a crossroads and a comfortable authority that allows me to surrender to whatever happens next.”

  —Charlotte Observer

  “A moving tale of a middle-aged widow learning to spread her wings and live again. . . . It feels genuine, as new beginnings and second chances aren’t always perfect and fairy-tale like, even if outward appearances suggest otherwise. With strong characterization and a cast of intriguing secondary characters, the story dances its way through all the right steps.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “It is an all-too-rare experience for me to browse the first page of a new book and become instantly hooked, as I was with The Unexpected Waltz. Happily my obsession with reading this delightful story never waned. Readers at all stages of their lives will identify with smart, funny, self-deprecating Kelly. We find ourselves urgently needing to join her, by turning yet another page, as she examines her life with painful honesty and then takes steps to change, mapping out a better future.”

  —Bookreporter

  “Wright sketches the ballroom world with a wry and knowing eye. . . . It would have been easy to camp up the world of ballroom competition, but Wright takes it seriously, seeing the sequined silliness but also the longing and striving behind it.”

  —Wilmington Star News

  “Kim Wright’s charming novel chronicles one woman’s second chance at happiness and an opportunity to find her authentic self. The writing is pitch perfect—this is a winner!”

  —Elin Hilderbrand, New York Times bestselling author of The Matchmaker

  “An insightful novel about the unexpected places where we stumble upon second chances. Kim Wright writes with wisdom and grace.”

  —Sarah Pekkanen, internationally bestselling author of The Best of Us

  LOVE IN MID AIR

  “Wright hits it out of the park in her debut, an engaging account of a woman contemplating divorce. . . . Delivers fresh perspective and sympathetic characters few writers can match.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Astute and engrossing. . . . This debut is a treat!”

  —People

  “An intense, thoughtful novel about love and friendship, or the lack thereof, in a marriage.”

  —Booklist

  “A home run of a first novel. . . . Here is a very wise writer, seeing [her heroine’s] reach for happiness with deadly clarity.”

  —Bookreporter

  “A breath of fresh air. It’s a candid, often painfully funny look at modern love and friendship, with some surprising twists and turns along the way. A book to savor—and then share with your best friend.”

  —Susan Wiggs, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Summer Hideaway

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  To my mother, Doris Mitchell,

  who made so many journeys possible

  It is better to travel well than to arrive.

  —Buddha

  One

  You know that old Chinese curse that goes “May you live in interesting times”? I’ve always thought the modern-day corollary was “May you have an interesting mother.” Because I was cursed the minute I was born to the impetuous, talented, politically radical, and sexually experimental Diana de Milan.

  The “de” was her idea. “Diana Milan” wasn’t big enough to hold her. She needed to stretch her name with that small but exotic middle syllable—the chance to make her life roomier and looser, a way to give her something to grow into.

  As for me, my name is Che.

  I know. It’s utterly ridiculous and it’s not even a nickname. I was named in honor of the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara on the day after he was executed by a Bolivian firing squad. My mother always claimed it was the shock of his murder that sent her into labor, but that’s just one more piece of her intricate personal mythology. According to my father, I was two weeks overdue and labor was induced.

  My birth marked the first and last time in my life that I was late for anything. If I had been born on September 24 as predicted, I would have entered the world as the somewhat sugary, but ultimately tolerable, “Leticia,” in honor of the maiden aunt who’d left my parents the apple orchard on which they built their first commune. But by lingering in the womb too long, I was branded Che de Milan, a name better suited to a revolutionary than a wine critic, and ever since then I’ve made it a point to arrive places twenty minutes early.

  MY MOTHER became religious late in life, after she had already lost one lung to cancer and my father to a sudden stroke. And I don’t mean religious in the drum-beating, breast-baring, goddess-channeling manner of her youth. Oh no. Diana de Milan never did anything halfway. When my mother turned to God, she twirled several times en pointe and leapt in the air like a ballerina. She went back all the way to her spiritual roots—which in itself is ironic, for she had always proclaimed Catholicism to be her own curse, one she’d spent a lifetime trying to outrun. But now there were spots in her last remaining lung and she’d begun to crave a very specific deity, the one she called “the God of my childhood.” Diana spent the last seven months of her life in a nursing home run by the local parish, a gloomy Gothic building that looked like the establishing shot of a horror movie. I don’t think I ever went there when it wasn’t raining.

  For the nuns and priest running the place, she was a true prodigal daughter. They didn’t seem to mind that she’d marched for every liberal cause known to mankind or that in her youth she’d written a briefly infamous memoir on the joys of bisexuality. In fact, I think all that made them like her better. The bedfuls of sweet old ladies at the nursing home, women who had spent their entire lives working bake sales and bingo halls, were mostly ignored, while the more sinful patients were treated like celebrities. The priest would come and get my mother each morning for mass, as if it were a date. He would roll her wheelchair down the chapel aisle himself.

  As the cancer continued its slow but relentless march through her body, Diana began to entertain fantasies about a miraculous cure. She was especially obsessed with the idea of going to Canterbury. She wished to kneel at the shrine of Thomas Becket, a place reputed to be the site of all sorts of spontaneous healings, offering hope to the blind, the lame, the infertile. Even lepers. She never asked if I wanted to go, just as she’d never asked if I wanted to come along on any of her half-cocked adventures, but I suppose that at some point in those agonizing last few months I must have agreed to take her there. Anything to keep her spirits up, and besides, on some level I think we both knew she’d never make that trip. She barely had the strength to walk me to the elevator after my visits, much less to hike the rutted trail that stretches from London to Canterbury Cathedral.

  “Sixty miles, more or less,” I’d told her once. “So it might be out of reach. At least for now. Maybe someday, when you’re stronger. Definitely someday.”

  Yeah. It was a lie of the rawest sort, but it’s hard to be honest in the presence of the dying and it’s hard to be honest with your mother under any circumsta
nces. So when your mother is dying, the effect is squared and you enter into the most bizarre netherworld of bullshit. Words just start coming out of your mouth at random, because you’re willing to say anything you think might get you through a particular moment. I once found myself reciting the capitals of the fifty states to her, in alphabetical order.

  And when I did that, somewhere between Denver and Dover, she’d turned in her hospital bed and looked at me. Looked at me like she had so many times before. Like I was a surprise, some sort of eternal mystery, and she couldn’t figure out how I’d happened to show up here in the middle of her life.

  YOU’D THINK that Diana’s death would have marked the end of the Canterbury guilt trip. But three weeks after the memorial service, when I received the urn filled with her ashes, there was a note attached.

  If you are reading this, she had written, then I am at last and truly dead. Per our agreement, you must now take me to Canterbury. Do it, Che. Take me there. Even if you’re busy. Especially if you’re busy. It is never too late for healing.

  Now that was strange, even by Diana standards. Not just the funny lawyerish language of “per our agreement,” but that bit about “never too late for healing.” By the time your body has been incinerated and swept into an urn—which was surprisingly heavy, by the way—it would seem that any opportunity to rally was pretty much kaput. My mother had spent most of her life mildly stoned—first on the cannabis that she cultivated among the apple trees and later on the morphine that the nuns doled out along with steady drips of Jesus. But I didn’t think even Diana believed it was possible to be recalled from the grave.

  The urn had been shipped to my office. Delivered UPS, along with a case of twelve new Syrahs that a fledgling vineyard had sent for me to sample and possibly review. My newsletter, Women Who Wine, goes out monthly to thousands of restaurants and wine shops and a mention from me can mean sales for a new label, especially if the review is positive. Few of them are. I am known across the industry for my discriminating tastes. I do not approve of many things, so when I do give a wine the nod, it counts.

  I took the twelve bottles from their shipping crate and then unpacked the urn, struggling more than I would have guessed to free it from the well-padded crematorium box. In the bottom I found the book about Canterbury that I’d given Diana for her last birthday gift. It was one of those big square coffee-table kinds and she’d had trouble even holding it. I’d sat beside her in the hospital bed, the book open across both our laps, and read it aloud to her like a child. The routes you could walk, how a priest—Anglican this time—would give you a blessing when you entered the Cathedral, how he would even kneel to wipe the dust of the trail from your shoes. She’d loved that part. The book listed quite a few medical miracles that had allegedly been confirmed at the shrine and explained how those clever medieval monks had begun mopping up Becket’s blood seconds after he was murdered, certain that each drop contained potential magic. Or at least potential profit.

  Magic born of murder. Money born of both. It had struck me as odd, even sinister, but Diana had nodded in satisfaction, the way you do when the last piece of a puzzle finally drops into place.

  SO HERE I am. Blinking, as if I’ve just awakened from some sort of trance. I sit back in my office’s one chair and consider the lineup of items on the table. The wine, the urn, the book, the note. The handwriting is thin and shaky, hardly recognizable as my mother’s, and like it or not, I know I’m stuck in my promise. I’ve always been an only child, and now I’m an orphan as well, and the time has pretty much passed for having children of my own. Not that I ever particularly wanted such a thing. The bumper sticker on my Fiat reads, I’M NOT CHILDLESS, I’M CHILD-FREE, but still, to find myself utterly alone in the world, at least in terms of blood relations, has hit me harder than I would have guessed.

  Diana died so slowly that somehow I thought I would skip this part, that I had finished all my grieving in advance. But I hadn’t counted on there being so much difference between going and gone. Going is busy. Going has tasks involved with it—meeting with doctors and social workers, snaking your way through the system to find an empty bed in a decent place, cashing out mutual funds and putting furniture in storage. Going demands many visits, and at times, during them, you begin to think these Judas thoughts. You think that it would be better for everyone if she weren’t still here, so trapped and suffering, and you imagine that when you get that final call, it will be a relief.

  And it is, at least at first. But after a week or so, life goes back to what people call normal, and only then do you start to realize that going was easier than gone. It’s only then that you face the final silent emptiness that’s at the heart of every human death, and it’s not just a matter of the extra hours that suddenly appear in the day, strangely difficult to fill, it’s also that there’s nowhere to put the mental energy that circles around the space your mother once occupied.

  And Diana occupied a lot of space.

  I stare at the urn. We want our mothers to see us for who we really are—or at least that’s what adult daughters always say. Why doesn’t she understand me? we agonize. Why does she never even ask what I think? But when our mothers try . . . when you get that occasional weak, tentative question, that unexpected “And how are you?” always uttered at the end of a conversation that was largely about her, inserted after the hanging-up ritual has begun—you realize that understanding wasn’t what you wanted after all. You shut this pallid attempt at real conversation right down, you say a quick “Great, Mom,” and tell her you’ll be there on Sunday as always. But then comes the day when your mother is finally dead, not dying but dead, not fading but invisible, and you know that she is absolutely not, never will, flat-out is not going to ever get you . . .

  So here we have it. Twelve bottles of Syrah, none of which I’m likely to enjoy, a book about a cathedral I don’t want to visit, a shaky command, and an urn of my mother’s ashes. I pick up my phone and press the button at the bottom.

  “Siri,” I say. “What is the meaning of life?” The little purple microphone flickers as I speak.

  And then she answers, I don’t know, but I believe there’s an app for that.

  Great. I’ve reached a point in my life where my own phone greets me with sarcasm.

  EVEN AFTER the arrival of the ashes and my mother’s strange note, I’m not sure I would have made the decision to go to Canterbury. Not if something else hadn’t happened the same day.

  It came in the form of another letter, this one delivered not by UPS but by general mail, sent not to my office, but to my condo. I had arrived home from work and dropped the six untasted bottles of wine and my mother in the foyer, then snapped a leash on my Yorkie, Freddy, so I could take him straight out for a walk. Since my keys were still in my hand, I circled by the mail station to see if there was anything in my box.

  I don’t check my mail every day. I bank online and no one writes letters anymore, so I doubt I drop by the mail station more than once a week. And even then there’s usually nothing more than ads and pleas for charity. I’m saying something to Freddy, who’s a jumper and a barker, as I slide the key into the box and swing the little silver door open and . . .

  Suddenly I’m engulfed in bees.

  It takes me a minute to realize what’s happening. One stings my hand, just in the fleshy part of the palm between the thumb and first finger, and four or five more swarm out behind him, swirling around my head. Freddy is going nuts. The mail has dropped at my feet, the heavy thud of newsprint circulars and some flyer informing me that I can provide Thanksgiving dinner for a homeless man for just ninety-two cents. And then the strangest of all possible things falls to the ground beside them—a personal letter. I look down at the envelope in a kind of frozen shock and recognize the handwriting on the front as my boyfriend Ned’s. Why is he writing me? We Skype every other night at eight, right on schedule, and of course we text throughout the day. He sometimes
sends a card, but this is clearly a letter. The envelope is long and businesslike, with the address of his law firm in the corner.

  I swat at the bees and another catches my shoulder, reaches me through my shirt, while a third is trapped in my bangs. It doesn’t occur to me to run, but it occurs to Freddy, and his leash pulls from my hand. I am screaming, batting at the bee in my hair. I’m ordinarily not much of a screamer—this may be the first time since childhood that I’ve let go with a total shriek—and then I hear the blast of a car horn, the echoing squeal of tires.

  Our lives can sometimes turn in a moment, just like this. A stab to the palm, the slide of a leash, a letter that falls at our feet.

  Don’t worry. Freddy wasn’t hit by the car. There’s darkness in this story, but that isn’t it. The car was driven by one of my neighbors, a woman with dogs of her own, and she has managed to stop in time. She jumps from the driver’s seat, shaken and crying at the close call, and grabs the leash. Freddy is happily leaping, and this woman and I are both babbling. The bees, I say, they came from nowhere. They were in my fucking mailbox. The dog, she says. I almost didn’t see him. He came from nowhere, just like the bees.

  My hand is throbbing as I take the leash from her. I’m so sorry, I say, as I bend to pick up the mail. I tell the dog I’m sorry too. He strains against his collar, unperturbed, only wanting to finish his walk.

  Put ice on it, the woman tells me. Scrape a credit card against your skin to make sure the stingers are out. And take a Benadryl, just in case. Thank God, she says. Things could have been so much worse. She says this over and over.

  NO DOUBT you’re way ahead of me on all of this. No doubt you’ve seen what was coming from the minute you learned that the letter was sent from an office. Maybe it was his name, Ned, so minimal and careful, or the fact that he’s a lawyer, or maybe you even picked up on the bit about Skype as evidence that we live in different cities, which everyone knows is the relationship kiss of death. But I was still preoccupied with the stings and the dog and the fact that I looked like an irresponsible fool in front of my neighbor. I crammed the letter in my jacket, threw the rest of the mail in the trash, and took Freddy on the long loop, the one that goes around the man-made lake and through the landscaped woods.