Justine had way too many scarves. They hung on hooks inside and outside the front closet. They draped the backs of chairs. The black wool scarf knitted by her almost-mother-in-law. It was dense and lovely, but itchy. The batik silk scarf she bought from a street vendor in San Francisco before the engagement that death broke later like a dropped mirror. Turquoise, cobalt, aquamarine—a stream of silky ocean around her neck. She loved the green and black paisley one that reminded her of her high school math teacher, a gay man who told his students teaching geometry made him so hungry, those pie wedges. She couldn’t get rid of the red one with its glittering silver threads, a scarf big enough to wear as a shawl when she sat in the overstuffed reading chair beside the window where she had sometimes sat on her fiancé’s lap. They would watch the people on the sidewalk below, holding umbrellas on rainy days, like dark and bright flowers opened over their heads. And the scarves he brought back for her from his work trips to China and Japan—cornflower yellow silk, magenta silk with tassels, the cerulean blue seascape scarf with batik dolphins and starfish. The pale pink satin one with tiny white embroidered moons on the edge. The black lace scarf she wore as a veil at his rain-drenched funeral, a deep purple umbrella above her head like an impossible flower.
