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For the first time in her life, she wasn’t going to take the safe road. Or be nervous that she didn’t even know what the safe road was. She wasn’t going to settle for something subpar because she was afraid of falling off a cliff. She was on the hunt for perfect, whatever that might be.
* * *
VIVIAN SPENT THE next week learning about Polish Easter traditions. When they weren’t working, she and Susan cooked food for Sunday. There were the foods Vivian had expected—hard-boiled eggs, bread and ham—and the foods that surprised her, including making a cake in a lamb mold. Susan told Vivian to frost the cake, “so that you can learn and help my grandbaby when he’s old enough.”
At Vivian’s apologies for the alien-looking monstrosity of a dessert, Susan showed her pictures of the last cake Karl had decorated. Vivian protested that Karl had frosted that cake as a teenager and she was thirty-four, but Susan waved her off. “He might have been younger than you when he frosted that cake, but he’d been frosting them for years. This is your first one.” Then her mother-in-law took a picture of Vivian’s creation, to add to her collection.
Everything they did to prepare for Easter seemed to involve lambs. Vivian helped Susan shape softened butter into a lamb mold. The greeting cards Susan had mailed out on Monday had lambs on them and many of the linens were embroidered with lambs. Susan even brought home sugar formed into lamb shapes.
Saturday morning and after a couple times practicing the word in front of a mirror, Vivian helped Susan pack a Sweiconka basket. Into the basket went bits and pieces of each of the foods they would eat tomorrow, including enough hard-boiled eggs for each family member to have a good-size wedge of egg. Susan was going to take the entire basket to church so the food could be blessed.
As they packed the basket, Susan explained the symbolism of each item. “This is for joy and abundance,” she said, as Vivian handed her the small ham Susan had purchased especially for the blessing. Susan tucked the ham next to the ball of cheese (though it wasn’t a cheese ball as Vivian recognized the term)—abundance (the ham) and moderation (the cheese) bundled together.
Before Vivian handed over the bacon—the last of the three pork products that went into the basket, all related to generosity and abundance of some kind, which Vivian found amusing though pigs probably found it less so—she asked her mother-in-law the question that had been on her mind since seeing Susan get into her car on Palm Sunday. “Does it bother you that I’m not Catholic?”
Vivian hadn’t gone to any church services in the month she’d lived here. Since most of that month had been Lent, and Easter clearly meant more to the Mileks than an Easter egg hunt in the city park, Vivian felt as though her lack of religiosity was a bit of a scarlet letter on her chest. But, despite all the time they’d spent in the kitchen preparing food and now sitting around the table preparing a basket to take to church, Susan hadn’t mentioned Vivian’s lack of church attendance once.
Honestly, Vivian had felt more pressure to go to a church service on a Sunday during a very brief stay in Provo, Utah, before her father had decided that he wasn’t cut out for fleecing people by preying on their religious beliefs. “It’s easy money, but a man’s got to have some standards,” he’d muttered to himself as they packed one night—quickly, so they could leave before dawn.
Susan gestured, and Vivian handed over the bacon. Her mother-in-law packed it in silence, her brows furrowed. Vivian had given up expecting a response and was passing the little container of salt when Susan sat back in her chair. As soon as she started talking, Vivian put down the salt and listened.
“Karl’s ex-wife, Jessica, was everything I wanted in a daughter-in-law. And she was everything I thought Karl wanted in a wife. She was Polish—from Milwaukee—and Catholic and as smart as he is.”
Vivian ignored the unconscious insult; she wanted to hear what Susan had to say.
“But they couldn’t make each other happy. They just expected too much out of each other. Karl doesn’t expect anything from you.” Vivian didn’t have to say anything about that insult because Susan realized what she’d just said and looked up in horror. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I meant Karl doesn’t know what to expect out of you, so he’s taking the time to get to know you, rather than his ideal of you. And it’s the flesh and blood person that’s going to make him happy, not the woman he thinks his wife should be like.”
