39. Zelda
ZELDA
Suri brings the lunch list to my apartment on Thursday. I have said she can come for half an hour. Since July we have mostly spoken by message, and she puts her bag on the floor without taking off her coat until I ask if she wants tea.
“I’ve reminded Candace she isn’t invited,” she says. “To this or the wedding. She replied in writing that she understood.”
She shows me the message. I read it twice, although there is very little to read.
I understood you the first time.
“The manager has the current guest list,” Suri says. “And Dax knows what she threatened.”
“Candace has arranged parties there.”
“I told the manager. The front desk has the guest list, and the kitchen staff have been told she isn’t working the lunch. She isn’t to be admitted through either entrance.”
I put the phone down. I remember Candace going through a restaurant kitchen with a roll of ribbon under one arm, calling hello to people I did not know. She always looked as if she belonged.
“If she gets in?”
“We ask her to leave. Immediately. We don’t let her make a speech first.”
Suri looks at the list, then back at me.
“I should have called you before the garden afternoon. I wanted everyone to behave and make it easy for me.”
I wait. Her mouth trembles, but this time she doesn’t ask me to tell her she meant well.
“You can still change your mind,” she says.
The lunch is on Saturday. I have already asked Hedy to have Otto. I have a dress hanging on the wardrobe door.
None of that makes me obliged to go, but I am tired of thinking about Candace every time I picture the table.
These people were my friends, too. This was my life.
I want it back.
“What are we eating?” I ask.
Suri blinks. Then she tells me.
There are the little roasted vegetables we used to order between us, and the cake she has spent weeks pretending she has not chosen yet. I ask whether Dax knows she ignored his opinion on the filling. Her laugh comes out uncertainly, and I find myself smiling.
When her half hour is nearly over, she stands up. She does not stretch the visit into supper or ask whether we are all right now.
Hedy is at the apartment later, building a tower of soft blocks beside Otto. Each time it falls, he looks personally deceived.
“If you stay home on Saturday, I can still take him,” she says. “You could have the afternoon to yourself. Have a break.”
I picture it so clearly that I stop folding the little vest in my hands.
A bath while the water is still hot. A book opened at the first page instead of the same paragraph I have been trying to finish for three nights. No eyes turning toward me when a door opens.
“That sounds lovely.”
“You’re allowed lovely.”
I sit beside her on the floor. Otto catches the edge of the vest and pulls it toward his mouth.
“I want the lunch too.”
“Then go to lunch.”
“I wish it felt that simple.”
“I know.” She helps me free the vest. “You don’t have to get dressed until Saturday.”
That night I call Jeremiah. We talk about Otto first, and about the paperback I found in the kitchen cupboard while looking for a clean bowl. He says at least I know nobody has borrowed it.
Then I tell him I am going.
“If she gets in anyway and says something, I may answer her. I may not.”
“All right.”
“If you speak, tell them what you did. Don’t explain that I was tired, or lonely, or didn’t really mean it.”
“I won’t.”
I rub my thumb along the book’s bent cover.
“And I still want to see you next week.”
“I’m glad.”
He sounds so plainly glad that I stop rehearsing Saturday for a moment. We arrange an evening, then agree to take separate cars to the lunch. When we hang up, I manage to read six pages before Otto wakes.
On Saturday I put on the blue dress with the sleeves I liked. Hedy calls from the other room to ask where I have hidden the spare socks, although they are in the same place as always. I am fastening an earring, and the voice I hear in my head is Candace’s: Those ones. Turn your head. See?
I lower my hand.
She was right. They catch the light when I move. I wore them out of the shop that day because she said I looked too pretty to put them back in the box.
For a minute I want to take them off. Then Hedy calls again, and I fasten the second one before going to find the socks.
Downstairs, the September air catches the loose hair at my neck. I get into my car. I want the food Suri chose, and the story she always tells badly about meeting Dax, and an afternoon in which I am more than a woman waiting to be hurt. My hands are damp on the steering wheel. I go anyway.