“Christopher and his family are coming over tonight.”
“Which is great,” I said, “but they live two miles away. They’ll go home after dinner.” That my half-brother and his family chose to live in such close proximity to his parents, one of whom was also my parent, was the great and abiding joy of those parents’ lives. It also removed the burden from my sister and me. Matthew, the younger one, lived with Lyle in Swampscott, a scant hour away, and near the beach! Christopher and his family provided regular attentiveness while Matthew and Lyle provided vacations.
“Let me talk to Lucas,” my mother said. “Let me see what the plans are.” As if Lucas might have plans of which she was unaware.
“Sure.”
“It might be better to wait,” she said.
“Sure,” I said, “of course, but Mom?”
There was a dead space on the line and so I went ahead. “I wanted to tell you that Jonathan and I ran into Eddie Triplett at the Met on Thursday.”
I knew my mother when I was young. I knew her through her marriage to my father, though I was four when that one ended,and I knew her through her friendship and marriage to Eddie, though, given the recent facts, I hadn’t known much. But in her marriage to Lucas, I had barely known her at all. I had never made a place for myself in that relationship, and no place was made for me. Then the boys were born and that was that. I called to tell her about Eddie because, I supposed, I still believed the primary relationship was between the two of them. Wasn’t it? They had been married. They had been divorced.
“Eddie?” she asked brightly. “Oh my god, how is Eddie Triplett?” It was more the voice I’d expect her to use if I’d run into her best friend from high school.
“He’s good,” I said hesitantly. “He seemed good.”
“You ran into him at the opera?”
“At the museum.”
“At the museum, that makes sense. Eddie had a great eye for art. We used to go to the museum in Boston, the big one?”
“The MFA,” I said. We were talking about museums?
“That’s right. He took me to the Gardner, too, and the one at Harvard. Anything I know about art today is something Eddie taught me. I can only imagine how thrilled he must have been to see you. He loved you, Daphne, you know that. He adored you. After that car accident? He was so torn up about having hurt you.”
“He didn’t hurt me.”
“Well, he wasupsetabout the scar on your face. He was. All those stitches. You looked like someone had hit you with an axe. He’s not still at Random House, is he? He must have retired by now.”
As much as I would have liked to separate out each of those sentences and address them individually, I could not. I had topick. “You knew he was at Random House?”
“I readPublishers Weekly. Even after I stopped working, I kept up with things.”
Someone started talking in the background and my mother stopped to listen. “I’m talking to Daphne,” she said. “Two more minutes.”
Lucas walked away.
“He didn’t retire,” I said. “He’s still working.”
“Oh, bravo, Eddie!” she said. “Good for him. Publishing is short on wisdom these days. All the mentors took the buyout. Of course I’ve been gone fordecades, but I have to tell you, part of mestillwishes I hadn’t retired. I stay so busy around the house, and at the end of the day I have no idea what I’ve accomplished.”
I took the phone away from my ear. I stared at it.
My mother was still talking. “It’s been such a long time since I’ve seen him, but—”
“Forty-four years,” I said, mystified.
“Is that even possible? It can’t be that long. Eddie was so good at his job. I can remember being at publishing functions over the years when his name would come up, someone saying they had worked with Eddie Triplett and what a good editor he was. Of course none of those people knew that we’d been married, and I wasn’t going to say anything. I don’t think they would have believed me anyway. Eddie Triplett. Do you think you’ll see him again?”
“I do,” I said.
“Will you tell him hello for me?”
I sat down on the couch. All this time I’d been standing, looking out the window into my backyard in Bronxville, and now I felt such a need to sit down. “Mom,” I said. “What the hell?”
