“In the car with Mr. Brunetti?” Mrs. Brikel said. “You were up here at the end of that big winter storm, then.”
“I was pretty surprised to find myself here,” he said. “Lou called me when Pia went in for surgery.”
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Brikel said, bowing her head. “That was an awful day.”
“Not as bad for us as for Pia,” he said. He looked at the plate covered in Saran Wrap. He wanted to say something else, but wasn’t sure what.
“But now she seems to be coming along well,” Mrs. Brikel said.
“My wife doesn’t know I was here,” he said. “I was quite surprised, to tell you the truth, that Lou asked me to come. I told my wife I was visiting my cousin in New Hampshire.”
“Well, you were good to do it,” Mrs. Brikel said. She ran her hand along the counter edge. She thumbed away an imaginary spot of dirt.
“My wife doesn’t know about the trip because Lou asked me not to tell her,” he said. “It’s a funny thing, but I guess there are some things women don’t want other women to know.”
Mrs. Brikel looked slightly perplexed, then dropped her eyes. If he was going to continue, he would have to think of what to say. The TV was changing from station to station in the other room.
“Lou thought Pia wasn’t only upset to be losing a breast, but worried that with her breast gone, she’d …” He let his voice drift, then started again. “She was worried, Lou thought, that she’d lose stature in my wife’s eyes. That’s not true, of course. My wife is a very kind woman. Pia apparently worshiped Fran, and she must have thought the operation would …” He faltered. “Would distance them,” he said.
He had never tried to articulate this before. He had tried, many times, to remember exactly what Lou had said, but even a second after he heard it, it had seemed confusing and puzzling. This was the best paraphrase he could manage: that Pia had taken some crazy notion into her head, in her anxiety. To this day, Pia did not know that he knew she had had a mastectomy. Lou had not wanted him to visit Pia, but to go to the bar with him at night and have a few drinks and shoot pool. On the way back to Fran, he had detoured to Marshall’s house in New Hampshire, taken him on errands, left him with a new jack for his car and with new washers on the faucets. He told Fran that he had spent four days there, when really he had spent only one. He had been at the Brunettis’ the other three days. Anthony had been sent to stay with a family friend. At night, Lou had ducked his head through Anthony’s bedroom door, though, before turning off the downstairs lights. Chap did not know whether Lou had any other close friends. Until Lou called, he had assumed that of course he did — but maybe they were just acquaintances. Couples in the community.
“It’s a strange reaction,” he said, pushing away from the counter. He had kept Mrs. Brikel too long, imposed on her by making her listen to a story that wasn’t even really a story. He looked at her. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Well, I don’t know,” Mrs. Brikel said. “I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of these matters. I think Pia’s doing much better though, now that the treatments she’s had have been successful.”
He followed Mrs. Brikel to the door. He had not intended to ask any more questions, and was surprised to hear himself asking one more.
“Do they seem happy here?” he said.
She dropped her eyes again. “Anthony loves it,” she said. “So much to do in the winter, and all. I don’t know Mr. Brunetti very well because we go to bed early around here, and he’s a late one coming home. But Pia, you mean? Pia I wouldn’t say likes it very much. Of course, she’s had a very bad year.”
“I’m sorry if I’ve upset you,” he said. “I think I’ve been upset about the past year myself, and Lou isn’t the most talkative man.”
“He isn’t,” Mrs. Brikel said.
“Where’s my pie?” a voice called from the dark front room. The TV went silent. There was a long pause, and then it started up again. Mrs. Brikel looked in her son’s direction. “Pie’s on the counter,” she said quietly to Chap, as if he had been the one who asked the question.
“Thank you for your kindness, Mrs. Brikel,” he said, holding out his hand. She shook it and smiled slightly. “Keeps me with something to do while the Wild West is won every day,” she said. “I’d relive all the wars and hear nothing but gunfire if I didn’t play the kitchen radio and make some pies and bread.”
“I sneak cigarettes,” he said. “Fran doesn’t know it, but after lunch, at work, I light up. One cigarette a day.”
This brought a bigger, more genuine smile from Mrs. Brikel.
“Okay, then,” she said, as he started down the walkway.
He would tell Fran, if she asked, that he had done some minor repair to help Mrs. Brikel. The coffee would still be hot; he would have some coffee with the apple pie.
3
What if they never came back? Fran thought. She wrote the question in her notebook. It was a notebook covered with lavender cloth Chap had given her for Valentine’s Day; since then, she had been keeping some notes, making a few sketches of things she had seen or done during the day. Like a teenager, she had sketched her face with and without bangs, to see if she should let the wisps continue to grow or have them trimmed. She decided, after looking at what she had drawn, to let the hair grow; soon she would have it all one length — the stark but simple way she liked to see herself.
She thought for a moment about people who had disappeared: Judge Crater; Amelia Earhart; Mrs. Ramsey. Though it was cheating to count Mrs. Ramsey among the missing: she had died — it was just that the reader found out about her death abruptly, and so reacted with great shock.
Fran drew parentheses in her notebook. She stared at the little curving lines for a while, then made quick motions with her pen, zigzagging a connection between the curves until they looked like the vertebrae she had sketched years before in her college anatomy class. She had fallen in love with the teaching assistant in that class. The summer she was twenty they had gone to Key West together, and he had given diving instructions while she waited tables at Pier House. They lived in a room in a guest house owned by one of his former girlfriends. The only other person living there that summer was a man named Ed Jakes, who wrote poetry they thought brilliant at the time, and who introduced them to good wine. She had kept in touch with him. He had become an interior decorator. Recently, she had shown Chap Ed’s name in Architectural Digest. It meant nothing to him, of course; no one ever really shared another person’s sentimental youthful attachments. He had collected canes with carved heads, she suddenly remembered: dog faces, tropical birds in profile. One night, in the courtyard of the guest house, Ed Jakes had held one of his canes higher and higher as she leapt over. When the cane rose to a certain height, her boyfriend had walked away, disgusted. Much later, meaning to hurt her, he had said that he and the woman who owned the guest house had gone to bed during the period they stayed there. It never occurred to her to question the truth of that until another boyfriend asked why she was so sure her previous lover hadn’t just been trying to make her jealous. She had learned a lot from that boyfriend, including skepticism. If she had stayed with him, and gone to his classes in method acting, she might have become quite a different person.
Since moving into the Brunettis’ house, she had begun to think about their lives. It was only natural. All houses had their owners’ personalities. In wandering through the rooms, though, she had not sensed much of Pia’s presence. She had even decided that the collections of things on the shelves must belong to Lou — or even that Anthony might have gotten into the act by collecting miniature versions of the Empire State Building. Anthony’s room was a shrine to athletes and rock stars. Instead of finding dust, Fran had found footballs — footballs had rolled into three corners. There were weird robots that fascinated Chap (they could be altered to become rockets), and he had chuckled over the violent comic books and the collection of movies: Schwarzenegger; Ghostbusters; Robocop. There had been so little evidence of Pia, though, that Fran had had to open the bedroom closet and run her hand along Pia’s dresses to conjure up a sense of her. She was puzzled that she could find no bottles of perfume, that the medicine cabinet shelves were almost empty, that the kitchen looked so well scrubbed, as if no one ever cooked there. Take-out menus were tucked in the phone book like bookmarks.