Eddie looked at the menu for another beat, then looked at us. “Would you mind very much if I had a glass of wine? It really has been a morning.”
We didn’t mind at all. Neither of us offered to join him, but we agreed that it had been a morning. Looking around the Dining Room, it appeared that fully half of the customers were having a glass of wine to deal with their mornings as well. Eddie ordered Chardonnay.
Eddie Triplett, sitting across the table, smiled at me. I could remember how painfully I had missed him when he left, but howlong did that missing last? A year? Two years? Did Eddie Triplett ever cross my mind in high school? Did I wonder what had become of him after I left for college? “Tell me everything,” I said, because everything was what I wanted.
“I came to New York after Boston and got a job at Simon & Schuster, which turned out to be a better job than the one I had at Houghton. And I liked living in the city, so I thank your mother for that. I stayed at S&S for five years and then I moved to Random House, which proved to be the terminal stop.”
“When will you retire?” Jonathan asked, bringing the conversation back to his favorite topic. He didn’t like to see a man older than himself still working because then he had to question his choices.
“When I show up at my office one morning and find its contents packed into boxes. What do you do?” It was clear that Jonathan wanted him to ask.
“Health care. I was in hospital administration.” Jonathan then told him the name of the hospital.
“I had a stent there once, almost three years ago,” Eddie said, as if he were talking about a restaurant that served good fish. “In and out the same day. Excellent staff.”
Jonathan beamed. He thanked him. “I’ve always been proud of the work we did in cardiac care.”
“So you liked the job but you retired?”
Jonathan nodded. “It was a reorganization in advance of the hospital being sold. The senior staff got an excellent package.”
“Oh, the packages. They do their best to get the old guys out of there. What about you?” he said, turning. Each time he looked at me, he brightened. “Tell me you’re a writer.”
I had promised him the night of the accident, we had promised each other, we would both be writers. We would write booksand dedicate them to one another. Now I told him I was not, which was fine. I wasn’t bound by a promise my nine-year-old self had made. I told him I taught English at a girls’ prep school. He asked me which one and I told him.
“Never too late,” he said.
“It is, actually.”
“Daphne teaches creative writing, though,” Jonathan said. “Every girl in school wants to take Mrs. Fuller’s creative writing class.” I knew he was trying to tell Eddie that I was more than I appeared to be, but the explanation came across as thin and sad.
“Mrs. Fuller?”
“That’s me.” I refilled our teacups from the little white pot. “I took Jonathan’s name.”
It was Eddie’s name I’d wanted as a child—Daphne Triplett—a true and forgotten fact recovered from where? The teacup? Daphne Triplett would have been a vast improvement for one Daphne Zabriskie. My mother said my father, however uninvolved, would never stand for it, and I shouldn’t ask him because it would be hurtful. Of course she was right. Still, I printed this true name on the flyleaf of every book I owned, the Nancy Drews andCharlotte’s Web: “This book belongs to Daphne Triplett.” I planned to use it as my pen name. I told Eddie all of this while we were hanging sideways in the car, and he said, “Nom de plume.” He said everything was more convincing when you said it in French.
“Did you marry again?” I asked. Was there a Mrs. Triplett now? He wasn’t wearing a ring, which meant exactly nothing.
He took a long sip of Chardonnay, then slowly shook his head. “You have to know what you’re good at and what you’re notgood at. I wasn’t good at marriage.”
“Children?” I asked, because that’s what I wanted to know: Did Eddie have children? My mother had married again and had two sons with Lucas Ekker. “The Little Ekkers,” my sister and I called our half-brothers when we were alone in our room. Their names were Christopher and Matthew because by then my mother’s interest in mythology had waned. Christopher and Matthew were in their forties now.
Eddie looked at me with love. There was no other word for it. “Just you and your sister,” he said. “What’s Leda up to?”
We kept the table through lunch, ordering salads to follow the cake while Eddie had a slice of quiche and a second glass of wine. I told him about Leda, who was a clinical psychologist; about her children, the youngest of whom was still in high school; about her husband, Steve, who minted money for a hedge fund. They lived in a sprawling apartment on the Upper West Side, overlooking the park. Leda said she could limit her practice to a ten-block radius and be booked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and run a two-year wait list. Instead she’d cut her practice back to write a column for theNew York Timescalled “Your Therapist.”
“No!” Eddie put down his fork. “I read ‘Your Therapist.’ That’s our Leda?”
“Our Leda. She turned out to be the writer.”
He thought for a moment. “Dr. Ha.”
“Steve is Korean.”
“Fuller and Ha? I thought all the modern women kept their names these days.”
I shook my head. When given the choice between our father’s name or our husband’s name, we went with our husbands’.“What therapist wouldn’t want to be Dr. Ha?”
