“Ten years ago?” Harry whistles. “I wish I’d seen it back then.”
“I had no idea you were such an adventurer,” Mary says. “Hitchhiking around Europe and such.”
“Mary knows me better as the crazed mother making sure my daughter doesn’t fall head first off the curly slide,” Rachel explains.
“You have a daughter?” Harry asks her.
“She has a Sophia!” Mary tells him.
“Spelled differently,” Dan adds.
“Mine is S-O-F-I-A,” Rachel begins.
Harry finishes for her. “Like the city,” he says.
WHEN HARRY HEARS where she lives, he insists on driving her home. “You can’t walk there at this time of night,” he tells her.
It is very late. After dinner, they all go outside and eat strawberry shortcake on the patio. Dan brings out a bottle of grappa that he and Mary got in Italy.
“Is that when you saw the pope?” Harry asks. It is obvious this is a joke between them.
“Yes,” Dan says, “that’s when we saw the pope.”
By the time they are leaving, Rachel feels happy. She lets Harry take her arm. She agrees to his offer of a ride home. His car is a beat up Triumph Spitfire with a noisy muffler. She tries to ask something once, but the muffler is too loud. They cannot talk. When they get to her house, and he turns off the car, the silence almost hurts her ears. She thinks of how after rock concerts her ears would feel this way when she walked outside. This is something Harry would appreciate, but when she turns to tell him he has already moved out of the car and is opening her door for her.
“I would like to come in,” he tells her.
It is odd, but since that first rush of memories about Paris, Rachel cannot get the idea of it out of her mind. She misses Peter, yes. But she misses more than just him. She wants that again. The kind of love they had then, in Paris, and all the rest of their time in Europe, the months in Krakow and Sofia, the nights spent sleeping tangled together in second class compartments on trains, speeding toward—toward what? A future, she supposed. A future that was good, and right. She did not think of any of that then, drinking bad Polish coffee in the early morning, or walking the gray streets of Sofia, each tucking a hand into the other’s coat pocket, or chewing the yeasty warm rolls that every Hungarian bakery seemed to sell. You don’t think of the rightness of things then; you simply bask in it. Later, when you find yourself on a sidewalk in Providence late at night with a stranger, it all comes back—why, Rachel can almost taste those rolls! She takes Harry’s hand. It is small for a man’s hand, and soft. She takes it in hers and leads him inside.
MARY CALLS, FIRST thing Sunday morning. She has just come back from church—She goes to church? Rachel thinks, blinking against the sun that filters in between the slats of her mini-blinds—and, Mary squeaks into the phone, she only has a minute but she really really thinks that Harry liked Rachel. Rachel stifles a laugh. She is finding out that Mary is oddly innocent.
“I’m sure he’ll call you,” Mary is saying.
She sounds almost schoolgirlish, and for a moment Rachel imagines her in the plaid skirt and cardigan uniform of some Catholic church.
“I think he will,” Rachel manages. A conversation with a real friend would play so differently. She knows this. She can still smell Harry on her sheets; her thighs are sticky from him.
“All of that stuff about Europe,” Mary says. “He ate that up.”
Rachel stifles more laughter. She promises to tell Mary every detail when he does call. She promises to get the girls together later in the week. Until finally she can hang up, and go back to sleep.
WHEN HE FINALLY does call, on Wednesday, she invites him over for lunch. It is her day off, and Rachel is reworking her résumé. She does not want to manage the toy store anymore. In fact, she is sick of managing things. Rachel puts all of the papers aside, into a heap, on the kitchen table, and makes poached chicken. Then she pours herself a glass of wine—So decadent, she thinks, drinking wine in the middle of the day—and waits.