“No. She has no idea we’re watching.”
“Look what she’s doing. It’s like tossing coins in a fountain. She’s wishing for good luck, whatever that might mean to her. I don’t see why they didn’t try to find out at least what she was thinking, or if she was suffering in some way. They’ve left it to me, you’re right. Not the sort of parents I’d want to have. Where did she get all those stones?”
“She’s filled her pockets like Virginia Woolf. She probably scooped them up from the parking lot.”
He frowned into his empty coffee cup. They had not been offered refills. “Let’s hope she’s not that disturbed by anything,” he said.
“What time does the bus come in?”
“She hasn’t told me. There was some question about whether he could get here in time for dinner, or whether she and I should eat alone.”
“You could call her and ask if it’s been decided.”
“You wouldn’t mind? I find it so rude when—”
“Also, Terry, to put you at ease: I know my little stories aren’t anything that can help you. You won’t disappoint me if I read the book and they aren’t in it. There were interviews with Dem — interviewers who came, who asked questions for days, and we knew that the longer someone asks questions, the more likely it is that very little of what you say will appear in print. Dem and I both felt that.”
“That the sense of the person would be lost, rather than discovered, do you mean?”
“Exactly.”
“You know, I’m really going to try to work in the story about signing the money. Everyone likes to read about peculiar actions. Especially ones that aren’t hugely significant. Ones that don’t sum everything up, I mean. Things that just happened because they happened.”
A stone glinted in the sunlight before plunking into the water where boats bobbed on their moorings. Hannah’s hair was flaxen. It was wavy and thick and caught the light like a yellow, shot-silk curtain. Part of it was gathered back, but the rest was an unruly, gorgeous mess of blond hair. It overpowered everything, including her slim body.
“I won’t take offense if you call her before our lunch arrives.”
“All right, then,” he said, taking his phone out of his pocket.
He scrolled quickly to find her number, but when his thumb pressed the button, he used enough force to push it through the phone. The expression on his face as the phone rang and rang — turned off? Or was she willfully not answering? — was dolorous, filled with intense sorrow in the second before he remembered where he was and raised his eyes and shrugged his feigned dismissal. Then, almost instantly, he turned his head and narrowed his eyes, staring into the distance. Clair glanced quickly over her shoulder to see what he was seeing. It was the waiter, approaching with a huge circular tray. The young man had no more idea how to carry the tray aloft than a blind man would know how to proceed if handed an Olympic torch.
Behind Terry’s ear — at the spot where photographers told you to focus when they made your portrait so you wouldn’t gaze too intently into the lens (which paradoxically made your expression silly, rather than intense), the long-haired Hannah suddenly tossed what turned out to be her last few pebbles into the water, as if they’d been burning her palm. But she was young, and her dramatic moment was over. Next, she withdrew her phone from her pocket, though to Clair’s surprise that, too, was thrown in the air as if it were a hot coal. It flew in a steep arc across the water until it sank. She’d done it so impulsively. Or might she have sensed that she was being observed? It had been Dem’s opinion that you could always sense the photographer’s presence in a great photograph — though he also believed that sometimes what you were seeing was the moment the photographer actually turned his back on what he was seeing, so the image became a record of the photographer’s exit. Terry had a problem on his hands, as he must know. Hannah stood at water’s edge, her bowed head that of a penitent. If she had it to do over again, would she?
THE REPURPOSED BARN
“There are Elvis lamps at the auction,” Bettina said. “Also a collection of reptile purses. What do you suppose those are? I assume, alligator bags? There’s a parlor set, which you can bet is so out of fashion it won’t meet the minimum bid, which is fifty-five dollars. You couldn’t get two mani-pedis for that. Get this: there’s no minimum on ‘assorted kitchen implements from Italy,’ including brass measuring cups whose description is written out in Italian, so I can’t make any sense of it, and a chestnut-handle pizza cutter.”
Jocelyn’s mother and — beyond belief! — her boyfriend, Nick, were driving to Maine on Friday and would stay for the weekend at a motel (they had to have that much sex?) and take Jocelyn back with them to the house the bank hadn’t yet repossessed. He’d moved in. Her mother had been seeing this man for almost a year and had never once mentioned him? How was that possible, when her mother was home every night and hardly ever got a phone call? She was lying; she’d just met him. You just had to assume adults lied. Why not say she’d just met the guy? Nobody was going to faint if somebody old had a boyfriend. They were feeling each other up in nursing homes, steering their wheelchairs into each other’s to flirt! Ancient people who ran around the halls at night, jumping into each other’s beds. (She’d found this out during the summer from Zelda’s mother, who was a health aide and who would discuss really gross topics.) The one incentive to go to college was to get out of the house, which she still thought they might lose, because she’d overheard so many of her uncle’s phone calls and he never seemed reassured by them. It would even be better to continue living where she was — her uncle was a nice man now that he was no longer doing gross things for the government, and Bettina was definitely better after she was discharged from the hospital and stopped cramming food down her throat day and night. Jocelyn would have to go with her mother, but she’d be counting the days until she could be on her own. Angie had asked her mother if Jocelyn could live with them, and she’d said certainly not, she had a mother. If that was the kind of logic she was up against, then no: there was no one to save her. She wasn’t going to give the Nick person the satisfaction of banishing her.
Her uncle was shocked by the Big News; he’d phoned her mother way too many times since he found out about her changed situation. Maybe he was warming up to have a heart attack. Somehow he’d been arranging the refinancing of his sister’s house — then this! So where did Raleigh get the money, if neither of them had jobs? Though they tried to keep the information from her, she knew from overhearing Bettina talking to Raleigh at night that one of their credit cards had been canceled, which made Bettina even more haywire about money. Bettina said it would be fun to go to the auction because she’d limit herself to twenty dollars — he could keep it in his pocket; she wouldn’t even bring her purse — and anyway, it would be a pretty drive out into the country and they didn’t just want to sit around and be sad that Jocelyn was leaving. Bettina could be really smarmy when she decided to try to appear brave and heroic; actually, she was guilt-tripping you. They were sad that her mother had picked up some stupid guy and let him move into the refinanced house, that was what they were sad about. They never talked about their own daughter, never said the words Charlotte Octavia (who’d been named for E. B. White’s spider). Charlotte Octavia was living with her boyfriend L’il Co!MOTION in Seattle — and for that, she envied her.