From the doorway, Ruby said, “Great. Jell-O. I love when they put fruit it in.”
She came in and took the bowl from Amy, holding it up to the light. “Is it fruit cocktail in there? That’s the best. Bananas turn brown. Once my mother called the Jell-O hot line to find out how to keep the bananas from turning brown, but they didn’t have any advice, so we just stick to fruit cocktail.” Lowering her voice, she added, “Did you know there’s like pork in Jell-O? Honest to God. Maybe that’s why it’s so good.”
She grinned and shook Amy’s hand with her other hand.
“I’m Ruby. I live in that house next to Olivia’s. The weathered shingled one with the blue shutters? My folks are sort of embarrassed to have me with them in this condition, so they went off to the Berkshires, and Olivia is kind of taking care of me.”
Amy frowned, and it was as if Olivia were reading right into her brain. Olivia can hardly take care of herself. How is she supposed to look after you?
“They must be pretty hard up for baby-sitters,” Amy said.
Ruby slurped down spoonfuls of Jell-O. “Well, actually it’s a little late for baby-sitters, you could say, right? But my mother is knitting the baby all of these little tiny sweaters, even though she’s like totally mad and upset and everything. She’s crazy like that. Isn’t she, Olivia?”
Ruby turned her sticky face toward Olivia, who nodded. But what Olivia was thinking was how good a liar Ruby really was. How very, very good.
Olivia’s father was a stiff-upper-lip kind of guy. When his company downsized after thirty-five years there and he was forced into early retirement, he said, “That’s the way the ball bounces.” Then he took up golf with a vengeance, and now he walked around with madras pants in silly sherbert colors and a lime green cardigan. He liked to brag that he was the first Italian-American to join that country club. “How do you like that?” he’d say smugly.
“Hanging in there?” he said to Olivia. He tapped her lightly on the arm like they were old pals.
“Yup,” she said, tapping him back. “Hanging in there.”
“Good girl.”
Olivia wasn’t sure, but she thought those were the exact words he’d said to her when she woke up from an emergency appendectomy when she was eleven. She went out on the terrace, where a crowd of people her own age had gathered. On her way, she grabbed a beer and quickly drank about half of it.
A man wearing an apron that said KISS THE CHEF was grilling sausages. A woman who was either his wife or his date—she hung on to his elbow possessively—told Olivia they were duck, smoked chicken, and garlic and herbs for vegetarians. Inside, she said, there were a variety of condiments, like apple chutney, cranberry relish, and hot mustard. Then she continued talking to another woman.
Olivia looked out, across the road, to the beach. The water was flat and calm; the air hung in a haze above it.
A man smiled right in Olivia’s face. He was too cute for Olivia to talk to. Give her Pete Lancelotta and she could handle it. Give her shoulders like this and a pair of blue eyes and surfer-boy blond hair and she was lost.
“Are you going to kiss the chef?” he asked, grinning and pointing with his bottle of Corona to the man at the grill.
“Doubtful,” Olivia said in her best leave-me-alone tone of voice. A cute man at a party talked to you and the next thing you knew you had to have drinks with him, exchange phone numbers, all sorts of unpleasant things.
“He’s a doctor, too. Can you believe it? A pediatrician. Would you want your kid to be taken care of by a guy who wears an apron like that?”
Olivia gave the cute guy a tight smile.
“Which is my way of asking if you have kids, which is my way of finding out if you are married. Subtle, huh?”
Olivia refused to be charmed by him. “Actually,” she said, “no.”
A woman came over and linked her arm through the man’s. “Hey,” she said.
“Obviously,” Olivia said, wanting to get him in trouble, “you’re here with someone.”
Then she recognized the look on the woman’s face. She wore the expression that Olivia found too familiar—sympathetic and worried.
“This is Amy’s sister,” she said to the man.
Olivia said what the woman couldn’t. “The one whose husband died last year.”
“Oh,” he said, slightly embarrassed.
“I remember when that happened,” the woman told Olivia. “I heard it on the eleven o’clock news and I thought it was one of the most tragic things I had ever heard.”
“Me, too,” Olivia said. She held up her empty beer bottle as an excuse to leave, then went back inside. Lines like that surfer boy used, and he was here with a date. Who could a person trust these days?
“That was a good party,” Ruby said as they drove back later that night. Ahead of them, the sky was bright with color and smoke from the fireworks show. “I love Jell-O like that. Can you make that? It must be hard. Or maybe not.” She shrugged and pointed to the sky. “Pretty,” she said.