“Left where?” he asked.
I had forgotten to tell him. “My mother’s. I’ve just come back from Winchester.”
“Oh, my,” Eddie said. “I suppose that’s why I’ve been thinking about you all day.”
As we got up to leave, I saw the small framed picture of a horse. “Whistler?” I said, though who else could it be?
He picked it up off his desk and handed it to me. “I was going to wrap it up,” he said, “but here you are.”
“What?”
“It’s your present. Leda got my mother’s vase and you get the horse.”
“I can’t take this.” The photograph was faded, four by six. All these years later you could still see what a beautiful horse she was.
“Put it in your bag and we’ll argue about it later.” He took the frame back from me and slipped it into the top of my overnight bag. “There. Done. We have to leave immediately. There’s so much to say.”
Café Luxembourg was a twenty-minute walk but we flew there. All the crossing lights lit in our favor, all the tourists, walking three abreast, arms linked, caught sight of something in a store window that intrigued them and stepped aside. Eddie and I, determined not to start any real conversation until we were properly seated, talked about books. “Tell me what you’re working on now,” I asked. “Tell me what you’re reading,” he replied, though neither of us listened to the answers. We existed in a stateof mutual distraction.
The lunch rush had ended before we arrived, and Eddie knew the hostess, so we got an excellent table alone in the corner. “This is where the soprano sits after the opera,” he said to me. “They have to have a quiet table to avoid vocal strain. After a full night of Bellini, their voices are tender.”
I nodded. Those sensible sopranos.
“I’m going to have a glass of wine,” Eddie said. “You can tally them all up in your head if you want, but I’m nervous now.”
“I’m not keeping count,” I said, though maybe I was.
The waitress came to the table, and Eddie ordered two glasses of Chardonnay.
I shook my head. “Only one,” I said. I was too tired for drinking.
“Two,” Eddie said. “Her glass will keep my glass company.”
Then we each ordered an omelet, and the waitress nodded and left us to our lives.
“So,” he said, beginning the conversation for me.
How thrilled my mother would have been to join us for a late lunch, to sit at the soprano’s table with a glass of wine, telling Eddie the story herself. “She was perfectly lovely,” I said. “I was surprised. I would have thought she’d be angry, but she wasn’t at all. If anything, she took responsibility. She knew she’d asked you to do something impossible.”
“Giving up Skip? Well, she was probably right about Skip. Life would have been easier for all of us if I’d kept my word on that one.”
“Do you still—” I stopped there, remembering that I didn’t care what they did. My mother cared.
“Skip Hotalling does my taxes,” Eddie said flatly. “The formersenior partner of Mergers and Acquisitions does my taxes. And in return I shave the two small corns he has on his left foot because he doesn’t trust the podiatrist not to go down to the bone. Sometimes we watch a movie—we share a strong preference for movies with tap dancing—or we work the crossword puzzle together. That’s pleasant. I bring him presidential biographies and World War II spy novels. Getting the advance reader’s copies still makes him feel special. Sometimes it’s nice to be with someone you’ve known for a long time, and other times, not so much.”
“And what does he tell Polly?”
“He tells Polly he’s going to see good old Ed Triplett. Best friend from Yale, best man at the wedding. She cuts a piece of last night’s cake and wraps it up, sticks it in his pocket for him to bring me.”
“Which means she doesn’t know or doesn’t care?”
At that moment the wine made a perfect entrance, and while I left my glass on the table, Eddie raised his drink to me all the same. “Polly Hotalling is not your mother.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning Polly was never one to ask a lot of questions. She has her children, her grandchildren. She’s got the house in Darien, the place in Sag Harbor. She and Skip take the grandchildren on trips now, one at a time, anyplace they want to go. One of them wanted to go to Mongolia last year, so that’s where they went.”
I looked at him steadily. “Meaning what?”
