French Braid(37)

They merged onto the Baltimore Beltway, where traffic was surprisingly heavy. Lily had assumed everybody would still be in church at this hour. “I hope we’re not going to be late,” she said. “Alice wants all of us to get there before David does. She wants a kind of, like, welcoming committee.”

“We’re fine,” Morris said. “David has to deal with traffic too, remember.”

Morris was her rock. She could always count on him to set her mind at rest.

“Does it have mushrooms?” Robby asked suddenly.

“Does what have mushrooms?” she said.

“Does your salad have mushrooms?”

“Do you not know me at all?” Lily asked, and she turned to send him a look of mock indignation. “Would I do such a thing?”

He didn’t laugh. He pushed his glasses higher on his nose—a sign of nervousness, with him. “Also,” he said, “I don’t like when the grown-ups say ‘Robby the Boy.’?”

“They have to say ‘Robby the Boy’ so as not to confuse you with Robby the Girl,” she told him. “You wouldn’t want to be mistaken for a girl, now, would you?”

“Why can’t Robby the Girl have her own name?”

“Well,” Lily said, “in actual fact, it is her own name. She had it before you did, even.”

“It should really belong to a boy, though, because Robin is Pop-Pop’s name.”

Exactly what Lily had pointed out, during her family’s first visit after she’d given birth. Alice had accused Lily of being a copycat; and Lily had said, “But my baby’s a boy, so he has a better right to the name.”

“Robin is not just a boy’s name,” Alice had said. “In fact, it’s more often a girl’s name.”

“In this case, though, our father’s a Robin!”

“And besides,” Alice said, “I’m older.”

“What has that got to do with it?”

“The oldest sibling is the one who gets dibs on the family names.”

“That’s news to me,” Lily told her, and then Mercy had broken in to say, “Goodness! Listen to you two! I’m the one who should feel hurt. Two different grandchildren named for your father and none for me.”

“Well, I can hardly be blamed for not naming my son Mercy,” Lily told her, but they did break off their argument.

Why hadn’t Alice used the name Mercy? Well, maybe she just didn’t like it. But now Lily wondered if their mother really had felt hurt. Although she’d sounded perfectly cheerful when she brought it up.

Morris took a left onto Garden Gate Garth, a curving street of long, low ranch houses on treeless lawns. At Alice’s driveway, halfway down the block, he started to turn in, but Lily said, “Wait, let’s park on the street. We don’t want people pulling up behind us.”

“Right; we may need to make a quick getaway,” Morris said with a chuckle, but he backed out again and parked alongside the curb. When he had cut the engine, he looked across at Lily. “Ready?” he asked her.

“I’m ready.”

She turned to give Robby an encouraging smile, but he was already climbing out of the car. He always looked forward to seeing his cousins.

It was Kevin who opened the door to them. “Happy Easter!” he said. He was a clean-cut blond man, suntanned even in April, wearing khakis and a pink polo shirt. “Hey there, bud,” he told Robby.

“Hi,” Robby said shyly.

“Much traffic on the Beltway?” Kevin asked Morris.

“Fair amount,” Morris said, and they followed Kevin into the living room. Robby the Girl and Eddie were kneeling beside the coffee table, working a giant jigsaw puzzle. Robby the Girl barely glanced up when Lily’s Robby came to stand beside them, but Eddie said, “Hi, Robby. Want to help with our puzzle?”

Robby said, “Okay.”

Eddie was only nine, but he was dressed in the same golfer style his father favored. Robby the Boy’s clothes, on the other hand, were as baggy as he could get them. (He claimed he was allergic to seams.)

At times like these, Lily loved her child so much that she felt it like a physical wound.

“Alice is out in the kitchen,” Kevin told her, and she said, “Thanks,” and headed toward the rear of the house with her salad.

The dining-room table, she saw, was extended to its fullest length, draped with Kevin’s mother’s heirloom tablecloth and displaying a row of pink and lavender hyacinths all down the center. “Pretty flowers,” she told Alice as she entered the kitchen.

Alice was bending over the open oven door, doing something to a large piece of meat. “Hmm? Oh, thanks,” she said, and she closed the oven and straightened up to shuck off her quilted mitts. She wore a formal tailored pantsuit, navy blue, and her hair had recently been “highlighted,” as Lily believed it was called. “You can just set the salad over there,” she said, gesturing with her chin. “Did you bring the dressing with you, or do you need to mix it here?”

“Oh, it’s dressed already,” Lily said.

“Dressed already!”

“I did it at home.”

Alice gave her a look.

“What,” Lily said.

“Nothing!” Alice said, in an airy tone. “We’re having lamb, I decided.”