I smiled. “That must have been it.”
Jonathan refilled my mother’s glass of champagne, then handed the bottle to Eddie.
“Please tell me that’s the end of it,” my mother said. She looked as though she would not have survived another word.
“Yes,” I said. “Ten minutes later we were at the hospital. You met us in the emergency room and that was that.”
“That was that,” my mother said sadly.
They took Eddie off to surgery. They sewed my face back together. There was nothing left to talk about. A plum torte sat in the middle of the table, but none of us had the will to push ahead to dessert.
“Someone think of a better ending to lunch,” I said. “I’ve ruined it.”
My mother, who was a great one for handkerchiefs, took hers out of her pocket. “You lived,” she said, “both of you. What sort of better ending are you looking for?”
When it was time for us to leave, Leda admitted she still had work to do on her column, which was about how to deal with the anger that came up around the uneven distribution of inheritance.
“Goodness,” Eddie said. “Go, go.”
Steve said he would take her home.
My mother wanted to go to the Met. “That’s where she found you, isn’t it?” she said to Eddie.
“In Contemporary Art.”
“What do you think?” I asked Eddie. “Are you up for it?”
“It’s perfect. By the time I come home, the wonderful Marta will have set the whole place right again.”
And so we went, Jonathan, Eddie, my mother, and I, into the taxi and out again, up the stairs and through the ticket line. Half of the tourists on the island of Manhattan had decided to see the Met that day. Eddie had forgotten his cane and I had forgotten to remind him. He held my arm. When finally we had made it through Medieval, he stopped. “The two of you,” he said to Jonathan and my mother, “are going to have to go ahead. Daphne and I are going to sit on that bench right there.” He nodded hishead to the far corner, past the choir screen from the Cathedral of Valladolid. “You take all the time you need, and if we get tired of waiting, Daphne will send a text to say she’s taken me home.”
As Jonathan readied himself to present an alternate plan, my mother interceded. “That was my favorite thing about you,” she said to Eddie. “One of my many favorite things about you. You always knew what to do.”
“Always,” Eddie said.
“We won’t be long,” she said. Then she folded her hand into my husband’s arm, and off they went, the two of them, while we laid claim to the bench.
“Such a nice man, Jonathan,” Eddie said.
“He is.”
“Your mother will have a better time with him anyway.”
“And we’ll have a better time.”
“People are art,” he said. “It’s enough to just watch the people.”
“Are you all right?” I asked him.
He nodded. “A little too much activity, that’s all. Nothing like trudging through the snow.”
“The past will take it out of you.”
He held my hand. “My brave girl.”
I looked out at the paintings of dragons and saints. “When I was walking through the field, I kept thinking about Mary Carter and her little dog, and how great it would be to have a dog come bounding through the snow to see me through. I’d never had a dog, and certainly not a horse, and at that point I didn’t know a single person who had died. That’s what it means to be nine. You can’t come up with any dead people who would show up to help you die in the snow. I kept wishing I’d asked you if you knew any dead people.”
“Plenty,” Eddie said.
