The portfolio had been forty-one Polaroids in a three-ring binder. Joey as a zombie for Halloween, his cheek peeled back to the teeth with tissue and latex and corn syrup blood. Joey as a werewolf, with a nose she had built from mortician's wax. Theresa as an old woman, eighty-five if she was a day, the liver spots stippled on with a sponge, so convincing that Paul had come home from work and stood in the doorway for a full minute before he laughed. Her own face as a burn victim, which had made her mother leave the room. Her own face aged, her own face scarred, her own face turned into something with scales. She had done them all at the kitchen table in her apartment in Lakewood over two years of weekends, while the radio played and the radiator knocked, and she had sent the binder to California in a fit of something that was not quite courage on the night of what would have been her father's fifty-sixth birthday, after a bottle of wine and a long look at herself in the bathroom mirror. She had not expected an answer. People did not get answers from places like that. People from Larkfield, Ohio, did not get answers from anywhere.
The only people who knew about the letter were Theresa, who had found it on her kitchen counter at Thanksgiving and screamed, and the clerk at the post office, who had handed it to her.
She had not told her mother. She did not know how to tell her mother. She had a very clear picture of how that conversation would go, in this kitchen, on this linoleum, under the clock shaped like a teapot, and in the picture her mother did not shout or cry. In the picture her mother just nodded and said, of course, honey, you should go, and then sat in the den alone every night for the rest of her life with the television on and the drapes still smelling of pipe smoke.
So Lena had decided, sometime between Thanksgiving and that morning, that she would write to Mr. Walter Hollis after the holiday and thank him very much for his consideration.
She folded the letter back into thirds and put it in her purse.
* * *
There were seven fishes, because there were always seven fishes. Rosemary Marchetti had grown up in a family that did nine and had married into one that did twelve and had negotiated the matter down to seven in 1959 on the grounds that she was the one doing the cooking. There was baccalà soaked for three days in a dishpan in the basement, simmered now with tomatoes and olives. There were fried smelts, small and crisp and silver, which Joey would eat only if no one told him they had faces. There was calamari, and shrimp in garlic, and linguine with white clam sauce, and a cold salad of octopus and celery and lemon that no one under forty would touch, and a whole baked flounder that Paul had been dispatched to the fish market on Lorain Road for at seven that morning, in the snow, at the risk of his life, as he had mentioned several times.
Rosemary moved through the kitchen among the steaming pots in a red apron over a cream blouse, her hair set and sprayed into a smooth gray-blonde helmet that would survive anything short of a direct hit from a fire hose. She was sixty and small and very straight in the back, and since January she had become, in some way that Lena could feel but not describe, slightly more solid, as if she had been packed tighter. She did not look at Lena when Lena came into the kitchen. She handed her a bowl of lemon wedges and said, "Table," and went back to the smelts.