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“No,” she said. “The road goes on, on the other side. We just can’t get there.”
We meandered back the way we came, passing over our own footprints in the patches of snow. Mimi paused again as we came through the garden and pointed back at the stone wall, where the entrance was framed by two finials mottled with greenish lichen.
“There was a fox there,” she said. She sounded unhappy.
“When?”
“Before.” She glanced at me, then up at the house, which looked from this angle as though it might tumble over and crush us. “I think... I think it might have been a very long time ago.”
The gray sky began to get darker by degrees shortly after three o’clock, while Richard got drunker by degrees as soon as it was past five. He was three whiskeys deep when my aunt Diana and her husband William arrived in their rental car and Diana came whirling through theroom like a tornado, bustling around, shedding coats and scarves, kissing everyone, exclaiming over changes in hair and height—and hadn’t it been so long? And wasn’t it nice that we could all be together at Christmas, even if it was under sad circumstances, even if it was only this once? My mother went wide-eyed at that and shushed her, glancing nervously at Mimi, who was planted in front of the television, watching an episode ofThe Great British Bake Off.
“Doesn’t she know she’s”—Diana dropped her voice to a theatrical whisper—“dying?”
“Diana, please, we’ll talk about this later,” Mom said, and Richard tossed back the last of his whiskey and said, “I’m telling you both now, I will not be sober for this conversation.” Then he poured himself another. By the time Diana and William took themselves up to bed, pleading exhaustion from all the traveling, he was what my grandmother would have called “pickled”—and probably to his face, too, if she hadn’t begun nodding off in her chair.
My mother looked at the time and frowned. “I thought Adam would be here by now,” she said. “I hope nothing went wrong. Delphine, do you have his phone number?”
I stared. “Why would I have his phone number?”
“Shit,” she said. “Well, that’s all right. But I guess I’ll help Mother to bed myself, before she completely falls asleep.”
Richard shot me a sidelong look, a lock of his white hair drooping limply over his eye. “I hope you’re not expecting me to volunteer.”
“You can both stay here,” Mom said, rolling her eyes.
Richard waited until she’d walked Mimi off to bed before he spoke again. “So, Delphine,” he said. “How’s life?”
I got up to pour myself a fresh glass of wine. “Lately?” I said, cracking the seal on a ten-dollar screw-top bottle of Cabernet. Richard winced at the sound like I’d scratched my nails across a chalkboard; for all his complaints about my name, he was a huge snob about corks. “Lately, pretty uneventful.”
“I surmised.” He sipped his whiskey. “Want to guess how I knew?”
“I’d rather not.”
Another sip. “You stopped posting.”
“What?”
“On Instagram. Man, you were prolific. And then six months ago,poof. One picture out on the pier and then nothing. Zip. Like you died.”
I blinked, so horrified by the first two words in Richard’s monologue that I couldn’t even begin to process the rest. “You follow me on Instagram,” I said slowly. “I... did not know that.”
He laughed. “Didn’t think an old fart could figure out social media, huh.”
“No, but I don’t understand. I mean, why?”
“You popped up as a suggestion. Honestly, it took me a minute to realize who you were. The last photograph Dora sent of you was from your high school graduation, and that ridiculous name... Delphine Lockwood. I’m sorry, it is ridiculous. I thought you were some heiress, like that blond one, you know.”
“Tinsley Mortimer?” I said automatically.
“The other one.”
“Paris Hilton?”
“No, the one with the, you know, um...” He frowned, then snapped his fingers. “Kim Kardashian.”
“She’s not blond.” I paused. Thought for a moment. “Okay, she’s not blond right now.”
“Uh-huh. So like I said, it took me a minute. Just a minute—then it clicked. So I followed you. I mean, not just you. I only got on it in the first place because that’s where my daughter-in-law puts all the pics of the grandkids, and then I followed a bunch of dogs, too, just for the hell of it. But I’ll tell you, your pictures were kind of a blast. You’d look at them and think, that kid’s got a fun life. Always going places and doing things. And then, you know, poof.”
