Last Night at the Telegraph Club(48)

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It was a slow night at the Eastern Pearl when Lily arrived. Shirley made room for Lily to pull up a stool beside her at the cash register, and she offered her tea and wa mooi. It all seemed so normal that Lily felt as if she had entered an alternate dimension—one where she and Shirley had never had a falling-out.

It felt nice, Lily reluctantly realized. She had missed the comforting, familiar scent of fried noodles and the sound of Shirley’s mother barking orders in the restaurant kitchen. Maybe she had missed Shirley too.

“Look at that woman over there in the corner booth,” Shirley said in a low voice as Lily settled onto her stool. “I think she’s got to be a nun on the run.”

Lily glanced at the woman in question. She was dressed all in black with a tiny netted hat on her head, and she was seated alone in front of her plate of chow mein. “Not a nun,” Lily objected. “She’s a widow.”

“She’s too young to be a widow. She probably fell in love with her priest and had to flee her nunnery to avoid scandal.”

“If she only had feelings for the priest, she didn’t need to flee,” Lily pointed out. “She could just keep them to herself. If she fled, she must have had an affair with him.”

Shirley looked delighted. “Yes! He’s probably quite handsome, this priest. He’s the Clark Gable of priests. No, he’s too old for our nun—what about Rock Hudson? The Rock Hudson of priests. Don’t you think he’s handsome?”

“Of course,” Lily said. “But isn’t he a little too handsome to be a priest?”

Shirley’s eyebrows arched. “There’s no such thing. Why? Who do you think is the right amount of handsome to be a priest?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think she’s a nun.”

“Come on, play along. Who would be your handsome-but-not-too-handsome priest?”

Lily had the sudden sensation she was being tested. “Maybe . . . I don’t know, Jimmy Stewart?”

“Too old,” Shirley said decisively. “Do you really think he’s handsome?”

“I suppose.”

Shirley gave her a skeptical look. “Clearly you don’t. Who, then?”

There was an edge to Shirley’s tone that made Lily a bit defensive. “What does it matter? I think she’s a widow. Her husband—he was probably ugly. Maybe she killed him and is running away to avoid the law.”

“All right,” Shirley relented. “Why did she kill him? Too ugly?”

Lily ignored Shirley’s smirk. “He was horrible to her.”

“This is becoming tragic.”

“Sorry,” Lily said. “I’m out of practice.”

Shirley popped a wa mooi into her mouth, going quiet while she chewed it, and Lily wondered if she was going to bring up the reason Lily was out of practice with their game. But after Shirley spit out the pit, she said, “We’ve been friends for so long, Lily. Let’s not forget that during our senior year.”

Lily couldn’t decide if this was an apology or an underhanded way for Shirley to blame Lily for what had happened between them. She took a sip of tea to avoid responding immediately.

“Truce?” Shirley said.

It wasn’t an apology, then. But if Shirley was offering a truce, she was also admitting it wasn’t all Lily’s fault.

“Truce,” Lily agreed, and she was rewarded with one of Shirley’s most charming smiles.

“Good.” Shirley reached for her hand and squeezed it. “Now, let’s make this more interesting. I’ll allow that she’s a widow, but she has to have killed her husband for a more interesting reason. Maybe he was a Soviet spy!”

The woman in the corner booth lifted a forkful of wide rice noodles to her mouth with a gloomy expression. A woman alone in a restaurant was unusual. She must have gone through something traumatic, something that had separated her from everyone she loved. What if she had fallen in love with someone she shouldn’t? Another woman, perhaps, like the girls in that movie, Olivia. Paula or Claire had said one of those teachers had committed suicide at the end of that movie. The woman in the restaurant needn’t have killed anyone at all to be part of a tragic love story.

“Lily, what do you think? Are you listening?”

Lily blinked and took a sip of tea. “Yes, he must have been a spy,” she said. But the game felt wrong now. She was relieved when the woman in black paid her bill and left.





24





Thanksgiving brought lowered skies and cold, drenching rain. Lily normally enjoyed Thanksgiving—it was the one day of the year that her mother cooked American food, which always seemed like a novelty—but this year she felt trapped by the gloomy weather. As she helped her mother peel chestnuts and chop onions and laap ch’eung* for the glutinous rice stuffing, her thoughts returned over and over again to the Telegraph Club.

She and Kath had decided to go again on Friday night. Jean was coming home for the holiday weekend, and Kath wanted Lily to meet her. Lily couldn’t remember much about Jean from school, and she was curious about what she was like. Kath often spoke of her in such admiring tones, as if Jean had been a heroic explorer of new worlds, but Lily remembered Shirley’s disgust at Jean and what she’d done in the band room. Lily knew it was ungenerous of her, but she couldn’t help thinking that Jean must have been stupid, to let herself be discovered like that. She should have known better.