At some point during the week it had occurred to her that there was a very good chance that the Fetters didn't know that Parsifal was gay, that they thought they were coming to Los Angeles to meet his wife, as in his partner, the woman he loved. And why shouldn't they? For an afternoon she would be a daughter-in-law. It came with the territory of being a widow. But it was Phan who should have been the widow. He would have cleaned the house himself, washed the windows with vinegar. He didn't know the meaning of catering. He would have spent the day at the market buying fresh mussels and rosemary. Phan should have lived to see this through. His gentleness put people at ease. He would not have been angry. He would have had these people in his home out of some genuine warmth, a common bond of loss, not a twisted need to prove who had loved Parsifal best. Sabine took off the dress she was wearing. It looked like she was trying too hard. She put on some black linen pants and a heavy blue shirt. She wore the necklace Parsifal had given her for her fortieth birthday, a tiny enameled portrait of the Virgin Mary to whom, in this particular rendering, she bore an unnerving resemblance.
At the airport, limousine drivers with dark mustaches and darker glasses held up pieces of paper with names. Sabine wondered if she should have brought a sign that said FETTERS, but she imagined they would be easy to spot. They would look confused. They would look like Parsifal. Sabine blotted off her lipstick on the side of her hand and rubbed it into her skin. People poured off the plane. Some were embraced warmly, some passionately; some strode towards the main terminal with great purpose; some consulted the overhead monitors for connecting flights. There seemed to be no end to the number of people coming down the ramp.
"My lord," a woman said to her. "You're the assistant."
She was short, maybe five-foot-two, with a corn-fed roundness. Her gray hair had been recently permed and Sabine could see the shape of the rollers on the top of her head.
"Mrs. Fetters?"
The woman took Sabine's arm and squeezed hard. There were tears puddling behind her glasses. "On the plane I said to Bertie, 'How are we going to know it's her?' But of course it's you. I'd know you anywhere. Look, Bertie, it's the assistant."
In Bertie Sabine could see the slightest trace of Parsifal, but it had been very nearly scrubbed out of her. She was almost thirty but did not look twenty-five. Her face was pretty but blank. Her hair had also been recently permed and was a tangle of brown curls highlighted in yellow that came halfway down her back. "Nice to meet you," Bertie said, and shook Sabine's hand hard.
Mrs. Fetters put her hand up to Sabine's face as if to touch it but then pulled it back again. "Oh, you're so pretty. His life must have turned out okay if he had such a pretty wife." The tears had dammed at the bottom of her glasses but suddenly found free passage out the sides. "I wish I'd known that you were the one he'd married. Did you meet him on Johnny Carson?"
"You know me from Johnny Carson?" Sabine said. People were knocking against them in the race down to baggage claim. A family of Indians walked by and Bertie turned to stare at a woman in a gold-flecked sari.
"Well, sure. I didn't know you were together, though. We thought maybe they gave people assistants at the show. Everybody we knew said you looked like one of those girls who hand out the Academy Awards."
"No," Sabine said, feeling confused. She was trying to take it all in… Parsifal's mother. She had on a green wool coat with a line of wooden toggles up the front. She held a rectangular overnight bag in one hand, the kind of tiny suitcase Sabine had taken to slumber parties as a girl. "I'm surprised that you saw that show, that you remember me."
"Saw it?" Mrs. Fetters said.
"She watches it almost every night," Bertie said.
"My daughter Kitty got it for me on video. It took forever to track it down, but they found it for her. All you say is one line at the end, you say, 'Thank you, Mr. Carson.'"
"Do I? I don't remember."
"Don't you watch it?" Mrs. Fetters asked. Sabine tried to guide them out of the path of an electric cart coming down the concourse.
"No, we don't have a copy," she said, taking the overnight bag from her mother-in-law's hand. Of all the urgent things there were to talk about, The Tonight Show didn't even make the list. "We should go downstairs."
"Were you on television all the time?" Bertie asked.
Sabine shook her head and took a few steps towards baggage claim in hopes of getting them to move. "Just that once."
"Well, I'll make a copy for you," Mrs. Fetters said. "You won't believe how pretty you are."
The airport engaged the Fetters. They could barely make it three steps without stopping to look at something and usually someone. Every race and nation was fairly represented in the domestic terminal. They stopped and whispered to one another, "Do you think they're from-?" "Mother, did you see-?" But when they reached the escalator they were silent. They stretched their arms to grip the moving rails on both sides and would not let go when a man in a black suit and a. cellular phone wanted to get past them. It was a long ride down, past the finalists of the junior high school "California in the Future" art contest, tempera paintings of orange trees encased in plastic space bubbles. Sabine did not look back. She was trying to sort through the information. Had Parsifal broken with his family out of boredom? Could this really be his family? She couldn't make a picture in her head. She saw Bertie's hand beside her, a pinpoint diamond on her ring finger. She was engaged. Sabine had worn her own ridiculous engagement ring, a four-carat D, flawless, that Parsifal had bought in Africa ten years ago as an investment when someone had told him that diamonds were the way to go. She kept meaning to put it back in the safety deposit box. It looked like a flashlight on her hand.
"I didn't know they made escalators that long," Mrs. Fetters said to no one in particular when they got to the bottom. Her face was damp. A man dressed as a priest held a can that said BOYS' TOWN on it, and Bertie stopped and fumbled with the clasp on her purse. Sabine slid a hand under her arm and steered her away.
"He's not really a priest," Sabine whispered.
Bertie looked horrified. "What?" She glanced back over her shoulder. In Los Angeles there were no laws against pretending to be something you weren't. Behind them, twenty Japanese men in dark suits compared their luggage claims. Clearly there had been some mistake.
The wait at the luggage carousel seemed endless. Bags flipped down the silver chute as the crowd pressed forward, everyone ready to be the next winner. No one ever knew what to say while they waited for their bags. "How was your flight?" Sabine asked.
"I couldn't believe it, mountains and deserts and mountains. It all looked so dead you'd have thought we were flying over the moon. Then all of a sudden we go over one last set of mountains and everything's green and there are about ten million little houses. Everything's laid out so neat." Mrs. Fetters looked at Sabine as if perhaps she had answered the question incorrectly and so tried again. "My ears got a little stopped up, but the stewardess said that was normal. I wasn't half as scared as I thought I'd be. Do you fly much?"
"Some," Sabine said.
Mrs. Fetters patted her arm. "Then you know how it is."
"Here we go," Bertie said as a red Samsonite hardside made its way towards them. Together they walked out of the terminal and into the rush of traffic and light. Mrs. Fetters made a visor with her hand and looked in one direction and then the other, as if there were someone else she was looking for.
"It's so warm," Bertie said, pulling down the zipper of her coat with her free hand.
"It was awfully nice of you to pick us up," Mrs. Fetters said. "I can tell now it would be pretty confusing coming in by yourself. Have you lived here your whole life?"
Sabine said yes. She didn't see that there was any point in getting into her family history.