I got it on and looked at myself in the mirror. Same honey-blonde hair, parted on the side. A little more grey in it than last year, and this time I left the strand where it was instead of tucking it away. I found I didn't much care who saw it.
"You're going to be the best-looking woman there," Oscar said from the doorway. "It won't be close."
I caught his eyes in the mirror. A year ago he had leaned in this same doorway and told me the car would be here any minute. Tonight he was looking at me, not the clock.
"You have to say that," I said. "You're contractually obligated."
"I don't say anything I don't mean. You know that about me. It's half my problems." He grinned. "The other half is I don't say the things I do mean. I'm working on that one."
He was. That was the thing I could say now that I couldn't have said a year ago. He was working on it, every day, on the ordinary days when nobody was watching and there was nothing to prove.
My eyes went to the door at the far end of the dressing room, the one to Jeremy's old room. Last year the sight of it had put an ache in me. Tonight I smiled at it, because Jeremy was coming, driving in from Brooklyn to meet us at the Cipriani, and he was bringing Libby. They had been together most of the year now, the two of them in the same architecture program at Pratt, and I had met her a handful of times when we drove up to see Jeremy. She was quiet and quick and a little bit in awe of everything, and my son looked at her the way I used to catch Oscar looking at me. Tonight was her first Jubilee. I reached for my lipstick, still perched on the little red ceramic leaf Jeremy made me at camp, and I put it on.
"Seven minutes," I told Oscar.
"Take fourteen," he said. "The party won't start without us."
That part hadn't changed. Some things you keep.
I slipped on the dress, a deep green one this year, and tied the sandals, and stood in front of the three-way mirror. I smoothed my hands over my stomach, the bulge I'd never lost after Jeremy and had stopped waging war on. I looked good. I knew I looked good, and I didn't need to be told.
But then Oscar's head came back around the door.
"Ruby." He stopped when he saw me in the dress. "God. Come here."
I turned. "What?"
"Come down the stairs and let me see you come down them. Humor me."
* * *
He was waiting at the bottom of the staircase when I came down, one hand on the newel post, watching me the whole way like there was nowhere else in the house worth looking.
"You look so beautiful," he said, when I reached the bottom, "that I'm about ready to carry you right back up these stairs and forget the whole party."
"Stop it." I laughed as I felt the heat come into my face. I was forty-six years old and blushing in my own foyer like a girl.
"I mean it."
"Shhh.” I put my hand flat on his chest, and I let it stay there, and I looked up at him. "Later."
His eyebrows went up, and I walked past him toward the door before he could say anything, pleased with myself, feeling him watch me go.
* * *
We sat in the back of the stretch limo for the hour into the city. A year ago this drive had been the loneliest hour of my life, Oscar lit up by his phone, me talking to the window.
Tonight his phone was in his jacket, face down, and it stayed there.
"I've been thinking," he said, somewhere on the turnpike. "About the spring. There's another one out in Pennsylvania, isn't there? Wright. Not Fallingwater, the other one."
"Kentuck Knob," I said, before I could stop myself. "It's twenty minutes from Fallingwater. We drove right past the turn for it."
"So we go back. Do them both this time. Make a few days of it." He looked over at me. "Unless you'd rather see something new. You're the one who knows where they all are. Pick anywhere. I'll drive."
A year ago I sat in this seat and told him I wanted to see Fallingwater, and he asked me if it was raining. I looked at him now, offering me the whole country of them, any house I wanted, and something in my chest turned over.
"There's one in Chicago," I said. "And a whole cluster in the Midwest. We could do a real trip. A week easily."
