“Thank you, Michael.”
“You look good. And tired.”
“Better.”
He ordered the same thing he ordered every time here—the halibut, no substitutions. The menu was a formality. Anna suspected he opened it out of respect for the restaurant.
“Bea texted this morning,” Anna said. “Sam made them Campbell’s for dinner the first night. From a can.”
“Campbell’s.”
“With cornbread from a box. No egg.”
Michael looked at her. “That’s not dinner.”
“Then she took them to Carmen Sandoval’s studio. The painter Bea has been studying for two years.” Anna picked up her water glass. “Sam called Carmen at seven in the morning and got Bea in the door. Just like that.”
“That sounds generous.”
“That’s what scares me.” Anna set the glass down. “She’s being wonderful, Michael. She’s being exactly the kind of grandmother you’d want—the big gestures, the connections, the stories, the ‘come back anytime.’ And Bea is eating it up because Bea has been wanting this her whole life.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“That Sam does what Sam always does. She’s brilliant for a week and then she’s gone. She means every word of it while she’s saying it and then the light changes and she follows it and Bea is standing in the driveway watching her leave.” Anna turned her wine glass on the table. “I’m not afraid of Sam being terrible. I’m afraid of Sam being wonderful just long enough for Bea to believe it.”
The waiter came. Anna ordered something she wasn’t going to taste because she was going to be talking through most of the meal and eating between sentences. The wine came. She took a sip. It was the one she liked—he’d been choosing the right one since the first time they’d come here, and she still noticed.
“And Stella?” Michael asked.
“Stella I worry about differently. Sam doesn’t know Stella. Tyler left a voicemail a week ago saying ‘my daughter is coming too’ and Sam said ‘what a lovely surprise’ and that was it.” Anna picked up her fork and put it down again. “Stella is walking into that house and Sam has no reason to see her. She’s not a painter. She doesn’t reflect Sam back to herself.”
“Stella can handle herself.”
“Stella is seventeen. She acts like she’s forty but she’s seventeen and she’s never met a grandparent who doesn’t care.”
Michael was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “She has Tyler.”
“She does.”
“And Tyler will be on the other end of a phone the entire time.”
“He will.”
“Then she has what she needs.” Michael picked up his wine glass. Took a precise sip. Set it down. “Both of them went to Sedona with a foundation under them. That’s not nothing, Anna. That’s seventeen years of you showing up.”
Anna looked at him across the table.
“Even if Sam is exactly what you’re afraid she is,” Michael said, “Bea will come home and tell you about it. And Stella will come home and tell Tyler about it. And they’ll be fine. Not because Sam was good to them. Because you were.”
Anna didn’t say anything for a moment. The restaurant was quiet around them. The wine was good and Michael was steady and her daughter was in the desert with a woman Anna hadn’t trusted in twenty-five years.
“I keep thinking about the birthdays,” Anna said. “All the birthdays Sam missed. All the years she didn’t call. Bea doesn’t know about most of them because I never told her. I wanted Sam to be the grandmother who sends postcards and remembers sometimes. I wanted that to be enough.”
“Was it?”
“For Bea, yes. For a long time.” Anna took a sip of wine. “But Bea’s in that house now. And whatever she finds there, she’s going to come home knowing more than I wanted her to know.”
“That might not be a bad thing.”
