French Braid(40)

She herself was assigned a seat next to Robby. She could press her upper arm very lightly against his sweatshirt sleeve, unbeknownst to him. He was chuckling at a story Robby the Girl was telling. The children were grouped together at the foot of the table, and the three cousins had begun to chatter among themselves while Emily looked on silently. Robby the Girl was talking about her very fat music teacher. Why did children find obesity so funny?

Or most children, at least. Not Emily.

Lily’s father was shaking out his napkin, which had been folded into a sort of winglike shape. “What’s that she’s made? Roast beef?” he asked Lily in a low voice.

“Lamb,” she told him.

“Hmm.”

To Robin, even lamb was exotic.

Because Lily and Greta were on the same side of the table, Lily couldn’t study Greta further during the meal. She did have a good view of David, though, diagonally across from her. She saw how he kept sending glances in Greta’s direction, even while he was listening to Morris’s assessment of the current housing market. And she saw how his expression eased when Greta laughed at something Kevin said. Clearly he was anxious for her to feel comfortable here.

There wasn’t a chance, Lily realized, that Greta was only a friend.

On the other hand, neither were any announcements made that required a champagne toast. Most of the conversation amounted to a general catching up: Kevin reporting a proposal he’d made to develop a shopping center near Towson; Mercy announcing that Koffee Kafé had agreed to show four of her paintings. “Mom paints house portraits,” David told Greta, because much of the catching up was for Greta’s benefit, really. A “Here’s who we are” exhibit, so to speak. At regular intervals, though, some form of “And who are you?” would pop up. “Tell me, Greta,” Alice said, putting on an alert expression, “have you always been a school nurse?” and Greta responded in kind—equally alert, graciously forthcoming. “No, I worked in an emergency room until the time Emily was born.”

“Oh, yes, I imagine emergency-room hours would be difficult with a young child,” Alice said.

“Very difficult,” Greta said.

There was a pause. Then Alice said, “And is her father—?”

“We are divorced,” Greta said.

“Ah.”

Another pause.

“So!” Morris said loudly. “You still driving that VW, David?”

“Absolutely,” David said. “Going to keep it running forever, if I can.”

“I have to say I envy you,” Morris told him. “If it weren’t for company policy I’d buy a Beetle myself, first thing tomorrow. I’m in real estate,” he added in an aside to Greta. “We have to have big cars for driving clients around.” And so they were back once again to “Here’s who we are.”

David, for his part, said that his drama students were putting on a play he’d written for Graduation Day. And Robin (in answer to a question from David) said no, he wasn’t thinking of retirement any time soon. “I barely work as it is,” he said, “now that I have Lily. Lily is my manager,” he told Greta.

“That must be very nice,” Greta said.

Lily felt that this meal was going to last forever.



* * *



—

Mercy’s ice cream was chocolate. A half-gallon carton of house-brand chocolate ice cream. It seemed she’d deliberately chosen the most humdrum dessert she could think of. In fact, she came right out and said so. “I know how you all hate fancy food,” she told them while Alice was dishing it out.

Alice gave one of her nonlaughs. “Ma-ha-hahm! We don’t hate it; we just have fairly…standard tastes, in this family.”

“Exactly,” Mercy said, and then, to Greta, “I once took a course in French confectionery, back before I was married.”

“Really!” Greta said politely.

“It turned out to be all for nothing, though.”

“Oh, surely not.”

Meanwhile, the children were digging happily into their ice cream—except for Emily, who had barely touched her meal and sat listening now to the other children’s banter, gazing first into one face and then another with a faint hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth. She made Lily’s Robby seem positively outgoing by comparison.

When Alice suggested they have their coffee in the living room, Lily rose and started clearing the dishes, but Alice said, “Oh, never mind those!” Greta, on the other hand, simply stood up and limped out without the slightest move toward clearing. This was noticed. Or Lily and Alice noticed, at least, and exchanged a brief glance, deadpan.

In the living room, Robin sank onto the couch and said, “Don’t know whether to sit down or lie down, after all that food,” but David and Greta remained standing. “We should probably hit the road,” David told Alice.

“What! Now?” she said. “You haven’t had coffee!”

“We’ve got a long drive ahead of us, and if we want to swing by Harborplace…”

The others had been seating themselves also—returning to the same spots they’d occupied earlier, as they tended to do—but now they stood up again, and there was a general air of uncertainty and some milling about. “Emily,” Greta said. “Time to go.” Emily, who had settled again beside the jigsaw puzzle, rose immediately and went to stand close to her mother. “Can you say thank you?” Greta asked her.