“Joyce Green.” She remembered.
“So good to see you. Mind if I take a load off?” She pushed aside the department store bags and scooted into the booth across from Margaret.
“I'm married now,” she said. “Seven years. One boy, and one on the way. His name is Jason, my son that is. I don't know what we'll call this one, maybe Mack Truck, ‘cause I never even saw him coming till he knocked me flat. How are you, Mrs. Quinn? How's Erica? Haven't heard from her in ages. She still out west? Arizona or New Mexico, was it? I can't imagine living in a foreign country like that.”
“She's still there,” Margaret lied. She had no idea where her daughter was at that moment. “Doing well.”
Her daughter's friend leaned across the table and whispered. “Did she ever get out of trouble? Is she married? Any kids?”
Mrs. Quinn sipped at her coffee. “Just the one. A girl. In fact, she's come to stay with me for a while.” She nodded at the shopping bags. “I was just after going to the store to buy the poor thing some decent winter clothes—”
“I love little girls’ things way better than boys’.” Joyce Waverly had already begun pulling out the items. She held up the gray parka and brushed the fake rabbit fur against her cheek. “They don't have much call for coats and mittens down in the desert, you know.”
“They're for my granddaughter,” Margaret said proudly. “Norah. Norah Quinn.”
THE STRANGER AT the booth nearest the door sat patiently until the waitress spotted him and wended her way. “Do you mind if I ask who was that woman? The one who just left? The one you sat next to and chatted with?”
“Mrs. Quinn?” Joyce lowered her pencil and pad. The man at the table looked kind and respectable, a bit like her grandfather.
“I thought so,” he said. “It's been years since I've seen her.”
“I was surprised to see her myself. We go way back, her and me. I was friends with her daughter Erica, and ever since that whole incident, she's been something of a hermit.”
He fingered the brim of his hat resting near the sugar dispenser. “Ever since the incident.”
“You remember,” she said. “They thought that boy Wiley kidnapped her, but I say they ran off together. Everyone at school knew they were an item.”
“Right, the incident.”
The icy blueness of his eyes transfixed her, and she imagined how handsome he must have been as a young man. He kept his gaze fixed on her, and in her womb, the fetus kicked and fluttered. The man lifted his hand and held his palm over the hump of her abdomen. “May I?” he asked, and when she nodded, he laid his hand on the spot where the baby stirred, and Joyce shuddered with pleasure as the warmth radiated across her skin, a penetrating heat that spread into her body. The unborn child stilled as if he had soothed it to sleep. Withdrawing his hand, he leaned back into the booth. “So my old friend, Mrs. Quinn, was on a shopping spree?”
Flustered, Joyce kept on talking. “For her granddaughter, come to live with her for a while.”
“Granddaughter? There can be no child.”
“Oh, sure there is,” Joyce said. “She showed me a new hat and coat. For Norah.”
He chuckled to himself. “What a pretty name.”
The baby kicked again at the sound of his voice, and wicked desire filled Joyce with a guilty pleasure. She twisted her wedding ring and looked hopelessly at the front door, wondering if anyone would come in.
10
During long division, as Mrs. Patterson worked on remainders at the chalkboard, Sean kept spinning around in his desk chair to make sure Norah stayed awake. Even when he was called to the front to demonstrate how to divide 400 by 6, he checked on the progress of her fatigue. Stultifying wet heat off the radiators made her drowsy, and she struggled to hold up her head in the cup of one hand. Her eyelids quivered, then closed in slow motion. Her head slipped from her palm, and then she recovered once before she could not fight off sleep any longer. With every inspiration, her nose whistled, and she began a purring snore, oblivious to the mathematics unfolding all around her. By tacit arrangement, everyone let her rest until art class began. Sean woke her with a whisper and a pad and colored pencils in hand, and she begged him to sit beside her at a table beneath the panoramic window.