Simone came into the sitting room in her running clothes, hair pulled back and damp at the temples, color high in her cheeks. She was fifty-six, and she had been running in some form since her twenties. The Serpentine route was the one she had used when she lived in London the first time. She still ran it the same way. She stopped at the chair, bent down, andkissed the top of Alexandra's head without saying anything, then disappeared toward the kitchen. Alexandra heard the kettle boiling.
“I was thinking we could walk,” Simone called out.
“Where?”
“Kensington Gardens. The long way.”
“All right.”
Alexandra refolded the paper and set it on the table. The long way meant the Serpentine, the bridge, the Albert Memorial, the Round Pond, and a coffee at a café Simone had been going to since the nineties—a route that took close to two hours and that Simone reserved for days when she wanted to talk about something. Alexandra had stopped questioning her methods.
The park at midday was crowded. Not American crowded, with bodies pressed into corners, but distributed, with families spread on rugs, runners along the path, and the long, even green of the lawns absorbing everyone without protest. The sun was high and warm but not hot. Alexandra had taken off her cardigan and folded it over her arm. Simone walked beside her with her hands in her pockets.
They hadn’t said anything for a stretch of perhaps four minutes when Simone said, "I keep forgetting what date it is."
“The twelfth.”
“I know what date it is. I mean what it is tous.”
Alexandra looked at her. Simone was looking ahead, biting the inside of her lower lip.
“Our wedding was the eighteenth,” Alexandra said.
“I know that too. I keep forgetting the run-up: the weather, the dress fitting, my mother on the phone all hours of the day. It comes back to me in disjointed pieces.”
“That’s because we did everything in three days.”
“Four, if you include the flight.”
They had been married in Montreal on a Saturday afternoon in May, two years ago. The decision had taken longer than the planning. Alexandra had brought it up over dinner on a Tuesday in January as a question about whether they had been avoiding the conversation, and Simone had saidMontrealbefore Alexandra had finished the sentence. Nadine's apartment in Villeray. A civil ceremony at thepalais de justicein the morning with a small officiant who spoke French and English and had not made a fuss. Lunch at a place on Saint-Laurent that Nadine had been going to for forty years and where the owner had cried at the table without explaining herself. Dinner back at Nadine's apartment that night, with Meg and Ruth flown in, Audrey down from her sister's house in Outremont, and Tess having driven from Boston.
Alexandra had worn pale gray, and Simone had worn dark green. Neither of them had carried anything. Nadine had cooked the dinner herself, refusing all help, and the apartment had smelled like cardamom and lamb and the orange-peel sweetness of the cake she had made the night before. There had been thirteen people at the table including both brides. Nadine had said something during the toast in French that Alexandra had not quite caught the meaning of, and Simone, sitting beside her, had reached for her hand under the tablecloth and squeezed it three times.
“What did she say?” Alexandra had asked later in the cab back to the hotel. “Your mother, at the table.”
“She saidI waited a long time for this one.”
“For which one?”
Simone had smiled. “For you.”
Alexandra hadn’t known what to say in the moment, so she had moved her hand across the cab seat and put it in Simone’s. They had ridden back to the hotel without saying anything else.
She thought about that exchange now, walking past the Serpentine in the London sun, and she said, "Your mother is coming next month."
“To London?”
“To us, wherever she finds us first.”
She smiled. “She’ll fly to Phoenix Ridge, and then you’ll fly her here.”
“I’ll offer.”
“She’ll let you. She likes the way you ask.”
Alexandra felt the corner of her mouth lift. The truth was that Nadine liked the way Alexandra did most things, and Alexandra knew it. She didn’t need Nadine’s approval and she hadn’t expected it, but she received it anyway. They walked over the bridge. The water was dark under it and bright on either side, and a pair of swans was moving without urgency.
“What are you smiling at?” Simone asked.
“My mother. She would have wanted the spare key.”
Simone laughed, a short and real laugh, and reached over and took Alexandra's hand. Their rings touched briefly when their fingers laced. Alexandra felt the small click of metal on metal, two bands that matched perfectly, and she kept walking.
