“It can be. You know when Lady de Bourgh called me to tell me I won the prize, I cried.”
“Tears of joy!” Lizzie said.
“I don’t know. They felt like sad tears—like, I won, but did it matter? And then in a matter of hours, or days, I can’t remember, the sidewalk needed to be fixed or the city would come after us, and it was five thousand dollars.”
“We’ll help with that.”
“Don’t throw good money after bad, Lizzie. Your husband won’t allow it. It’s the first rule of banking.”
“And my husband is an excellent banker.”
“You need your savings for the kids. For your life.”
“Jane said she’d take Mama and Pa with her.”
“Jane isn’t cut out for it. They’ll drive her crazy.”
“She said she doesn’t mind.”
“We should send them to live with Lydia—that would teach them a lesson,” Mary joked. “They would learn that it’s imprudent to get old in the first place. You never want to need our sister Lydia for anything. She is incapable of putting other people first.”
Lizzie adjusted the sheers on the window and looked out onto Jane Street. “Maybe there’s a way to fix this place up and make it work.”
“An elevator costs half a million dollars, and I don’t think there’s enough space in the garden to install it.” Mary lay back on her pillow; the thought of all this exhausted her.
“Maybe we’ll get good news.” Lizzie lay back on her own pillow. “I believe when you do the right thing, and live a life of generosity and kindness, good things come to you,” Lizzie said.
“Elizabeth Bennet Darcy, you are out of your mind,” Mary said.
“I do believe it!”
“Well, something good actually happened to me.”
“Tell me.”
“I met a nice guy,” Mary said.
“You waited to tell me?”
“It’s so weird, Lizzie. I believed it would never happen. And maybe it won’t happen after all. But meeting him made me believe that maybe itcouldhappen?”
“Of course it could,” Lizzie said.
Mary felt strange confiding in Lizzie, as though she were intruding on the family order. Jane and Lizzie had always been the confidantes, and the truth was, Lydia and Kitty were close, too. Mary felt she was the outsider, the thin layer of jam in the middle of the bread and butter. Bread and butter satisfies, the jam is extra. You don’t need it to survive. Maybe that was Mary’s role, she thought to herself. Not essential. Not at all.
“Tell me about him,” Lizzie said.
“He looks like a lumberjack. An Italian lumberjack.”
“Is he an actor?”
“Oh no. A writer.”
“Have you read his work?”
“I hope I never do. I don’t want to know if he has talent, because if he doesn’t, it will ruin the idea of him,” Mary admitted. “And right now, I very much like the idea of him.”
“Is he supportive of you?”
