Page 64 of Meet Me in the Garden

I start the Sarah Vaughan record again and assemble myself a still life. A bright-blue tin of sardines. A vase with some flowers from the yard. Nothing inspired, just a place to train my focus. I draw first with pencil, spend some time mixing the right shade of blue. I add color, keep adding for hours, painting until my mind is finally tired and I’m able to sleep.

TWENTY-TWO

IHAVE THE CREAM CALLINGCARDtucked into my purse, still unsure of whether I’ll use it. By lunchtime on Monday, I’ve decided not to. Wisest, I know, to pretend I have no special interest in the book. But then I’m sitting with some of the girls in the cafeteria, and Ginny’s across the room, and Janine is talking about her latest date. He took her to a show at the Chinese Theater and for a drink after, and then they went back to his place. She lowers her voice at this last part, and all the girls lean in, and I know that I need to give myselfsomething, even if it’s only a conversation about a novel. Even if it’s just talking aloud about two fictional women in love.

So I excuse myself a few minutes before the lunch hour’s over and head to the break room, careful not to look at Ginny as I leave.

The cream cardstock is thick between my fingers. Who are you, Elise Eriksen? I dial her number, tell her I hope I’m not disturbing her lunch.

“Not at all,” she says. “But I’d almost given up on hearing from you. I thought I’d scared you off.”

“It just took me a while to get to reading it, is all,” I say. “I read it the whole way through over the weekend. Couldn’t put it down.”

“Can you meet now?”

“I’m at work. But I could meet right after.” I suggest a bar, a place the more stylish of the girls at the plant go to sometimes.

“Fun,” she says. “Five thirty?”

“On the dot.”

When I get there, Elise is at the bar with a man, waving me over. She’s dressed just as smartly as before in a wide-necked blouse and a full skirt, her hair styled in a bun. “Odette, this is my husband, Espen. He’s just leaving.”

Espen shakes my hand. He’s very tall, broad and handsome as a movie star. “Are you going to let me finish my drink before you kick me out?” he asks Elise, and I notice a slight accent.

“I told you that you could join me only until five thirty. Odette and I have a novel to discuss and we don’t need a man hanging around for it.”

“Do you see how poorly she treats me?” Espen says. He lifts his glass and gulps the rest of his drink. “All right then, I’ll see you for dinner?”

“Maybe,” she says.

“See?” he says to me again, and I like them. Both of them.

Elise waves him away and he’s gone, and we move to a booth, order old-fashioneds, sit back and regard each other across the table.

“You look a little like her,” I say. “Like Carol.”

“My eyes are blue, not gray. But thank you. Does that make you Therese?”

I laugh. Therese, working in a Manhattan department store, her tiny apartment, nights out at bars and plays, entirely free and alone at nineteen but for the boyfriend who’s dying to take her sailing to Europe. “Hardly.”

“So tell me all your thoughts. Isn’t it wonderful? A happy ending!”

I stare at her. She means it. “You must not have children,” I say.

She leans back against the booth, considers me. “You’re a mother. I hadn’t guessed. You look so young. So you found the ending, what? Tragic?”

“Well,yes,” I say. “She loses Rindy. It’s what Carol’s been dreading ever since the start, but she’s reckless because she’s so lonely and then it all goes wrong.”

“I don’tdisagree,” she says. “But the women end up together. That’s no small thing. When Therese was abandoned, it was more than I could bear. And I thought I knew where it was going but then the book surprised me. I’m not easily surprised by novels. I tend to see the ending coming. But this one—I didn’t. And it was much happier than I expected.” She taps her cigarette on the ashtray. Peers at the ceiling. “There’s that line, when Carol is telling Therese that she’d almost prefer not to see Rindy at all, over the brief visitations:One gets over things.Isn’t that what she says?”

“Sounds right.”

“But you don’t believe her?”

“I interpreted it as wishful thinking. Some things we never get over. Don’t you agree? Idolove picturing Carol and Therese’s lives together. It’s just hard to shake the cost of it.”

We order another round of drinks. My attention is caught by a cheer from the table in the corner, and when I look back at her she’s observing me.