“Is that okay?”
“Dad!”
“Sorry—”
“No, it’s wonderful?”
“Really?”
“I’m so proud of you!”
She touches her hand to his shoulder and he thinks of all of the hours and years he has put into this person, all of the car rides to orchestra practices, all of the balanced and unbalanced meals, the phone call from the nurse when Viola got her period and he had to buy her tampons and wasn’t sure which ones were correct, and she was so mortified she didn’t speak to him for a week—all of that was worth it for this moment of permission, this grace.
“So what was the favor?”
“Can you talk to your brother?”
Viola bites her upper lip. “Mm.”
“Is that a yes?”
“You haven’t given me much time.”
“We’ll be home in an hour.”
But as they hit the city, traffic swells, hundreds of cars hitting the tunnels as Saturday night emits a gravitational pull. Al complains with increasing agitation about the endless construction, the tactical error in taking this highway rather than the other. By the time they arrive home, they are both exhausted and thirsty and desperate for a shower. And a sleek black car squats in the driveway.
“It’s really nice to meet you,” Tillie says. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
Hanging from the antique mirror opposite the front door is Sebastian’s masterpiece: the image from the forum enlarged over thirty sheets of paper, taped together, augmented with glitter, pipe cleaners, reflective stickers. In one of his mother’s lipsticks, he had written the words:Remember me?
The blond woman extends toward him a dainty, breakable arm.
“Sorry, you are—”
“Tillie. Didn’t your dad—”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“Oh.”
“I see.”
Sebastian is reeling, full of Madeira and the fact of this woman, her connection to his father.
“So, you make art?” she says, gesturing at the image.
“Sometimes.”
“I actually run a little gallery on Main Street, maybe you could come by.”
He’s seen those galleries, full of tragic, expressionless watercolors as bland as the people who buy them. They are places where art goes to die. Embarrassing. Embarrassing that she would consider him to be remotely interested.
Is this the type of woman his father wants?
His mother looks down on him with a conspiratorial laugh, and they are sharing in this, a gigantic joke, the brilliant coincidence of his timing. It’s as though they were in it together, the two of them reenchanting her, defending the house against this cookie-cutter Christmas-card country-club cockroach. How could anyone occupy the space Susan Byrne left behind?
