“I don’t even know if Wilson and Louise are coming up during the holidays.”
“Louise?”
“His fiancée. He proposed last week. They’re going to her parents’ for Christmas. In Pasadena. I don’t know when I’ll see them.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. I’ll miss seeing him, too. But I am happy to hear he’s engaged. What wonderful news.”
Celine shrugs. “I suppose I knew this would happen at some point. Children grow up. They leave home.” But then she seems to catch the irony of her words. She is fifty-two years old and still living in the house she grew up in. Celine starts down the hallway with my suitcases. “So I have you in Wilson’s old room. It’s a guest room now,” she says over her shoulder.
I follow her.
A moment later, Celine is setting the luggage down in the spacious bedroom.
“Do you want to unpack or do you want to lie down or do you want something to eat?” Celine asks in a rush. I am getting the impression that it’s been a while since she has had company.
“I don’t need to unpack right now, and I had breakfast on the train. Maybe we can just sit on the patio and have some coffee?”
Celine nods casually, as though it does not matter to her what we do next.
I follow her back through the house and to the kitchen, whereshe begins to get a percolator going. I notice the door to the room that was the maid’s is open, and that there is no longer a bed inside it, but a desk and shelves and filing cabinets. Celine is moving about the kitchen as if she knows exactly where everything is and is quite at home in it.
“You don’t have a maid anymore?” I nod toward the little room.
Celine glances over her shoulder at the room and then brings her attention back to getting cups and saucers out of the cupboard. “No. That room is my office now. I decided I didn’t like having people who weren’t family in the house, living in it as if they were. The last maid was an utter disappointment. I should have guessed she would be.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“And there I was trying to help her out by giving her a home here and a job, and because her parents had just died. I should’ve known better.”
I feel my mouth drop open a little. I know whom Celine is talking about.
“You mean Rosie?”
Celine tips her head to look at me curiously. She is frowning. “You remember her?”
“Of course I remember her. You and Truman took her in after her family died. She was a pretty little thing.”
Celine is staring at me like I don’t know what I’m talking about.
“You and Truman started giving her my letters after they’d been read so that she could have the stamps. I wrote to her a few times so that she could have her own envelopes.”
And still she is staring at me as though I’m recalling it all wrong.
“Celine, I sent Rosie the amaryllis that first Christmas after she lost her family. Remember?”
“I remember the amaryllis you sent,” she says evenly, but her gaze on me is hard and strange.
“You told me the county found a different place for her not long after that. I had written her a couple more times in the New Year, and you told me to stop.”
“That’s right,” she says, but not as if we are finally talking about the same girl.
“I didn’t know Rosie was your maid, too,” I say. “Wasn’t that kind of...” I search for the right word.Cruelis too harsh.Oddis too vague.
“Kind of what?” A slight note of irritation creeps into Celine’s voice.
“I don’t know. Unkind? Shouldn’t she have been in school?”
“How was it unkind to give her the work experience she’d need as an adult? Her parents left her nothing.”
