Shirley gave her a skeptical look. “Clearly you don’t. Who, then?”
There was an edge to Shirley’s tone that made Lily a bit defensive. “What does it matter? I think she’s a widow. Her husband—he was probably ugly. Maybe she killed him and is running away to avoid the law.”
“All right,” Shirley relented. “Why did she kill him? Too ugly?”
Lily ignored Shirley’s smirk. “He was horrible to her.”
“This is becoming tragic.”
“Sorry,” Lily said. “I’m out of practice.”
Shirley popped a wa mooi into her mouth, going quiet while she chewed it, and Lily wondered if she was going to bring up the reason Lily was out of practice with their game. But after Shirley spit out the pit, she said, “We’ve been friends for so long, Lily. Let’s not forget that during our senior year.”
Lily couldn’t decide if this was an apology or an underhanded way for Shirley to blame Lily for what had happened between them. She took a sip of tea to avoid responding immediately.
“Truce?” Shirley said.
It wasn’t an apology, then. But if Shirley was offering a truce, she was also admitting it wasn’t all Lily’s fault.
“Truce,” Lily agreed, and she was rewarded with one of Shirley’s most charming smiles.
“Good.” Shirley reached for her hand and squeezed it. “Now, let’s make this more interesting. I’ll allow that she’s a widow, but she has to have killed her husband for a more interesting reason. Maybe he was a Soviet spy!”
The woman in the corner booth lifted a forkful of wide rice noodles to her mouth with a gloomy expression. A woman alone in a restaurant was unusual. She must have gone through something traumatic, something that had separated her from everyone she loved. What if she had fallen in love with someone she shouldn’t? Another woman, perhaps, like the girls in that movie, Olivia. Paula or Claire had said one of those teachers had committed suicide at the end of that movie. The woman in the restaurant needn’t have killed anyone at all to be part of a tragic love story.
“Lily, what do you think? Are you listening?”
Lily blinked and took a sip of tea. “Yes, he must have been a spy,” she said. But the game felt wrong now. She was relieved when the woman in black paid her bill and left.
24
Thanksgiving brought lowered skies and cold, drenching rain. Lily normally enjoyed Thanksgiving—it was the one day of the year that her mother cooked American food, which always seemed like a novelty—but this year she felt trapped by the gloomy weather. As she helped her mother peel chestnuts and chop onions and laap ch’eung* for the glutinous rice stuffing, her thoughts returned over and over again to the Telegraph Club.
She and Kath had decided to go again on Friday night. Jean was coming home for the holiday weekend, and Kath wanted Lily to meet her. Lily couldn’t remember much about Jean from school, and she was curious about what she was like. Kath often spoke of her in such admiring tones, as if Jean had been a heroic explorer of new worlds, but Lily remembered Shirley’s disgust at Jean and what she’d done in the band room. Lily knew it was ungenerous of her, but she couldn’t help thinking that Jean must have been stupid, to let herself be discovered like that. She should have known better.
“Are you finished yet?”
Lily nearly dropped the knife as her mother’s voice cut through her thoughts.
“Pay attention,” her mother admonished her. “I need to start frying that laap ch’eung. Hurry up with that last one.”
Lily bit back a sigh and returned her focus to the narrow red links of dried sausage. When she was finished, she took the whole cutting board to her mother, who had already begun frying onions in the cast-iron pan. Her mother slid in the laap ch’eung in and gave it a stir.
“Bring me the mushrooms,” her mother said, gesturing to the bowl on the kitchen table.
The telephone rang on the landing. She heard running footsteps as one of her brothers sprinted down the hall to grab it, and then Frankie yelled, “Papa! It’s Aunt Judy!”
Aunt Judy didn’t come up to San Francisco for Thanksgiving, since it was only a couple of days and Uncle Francis’s family was much closer to them in Los Angeles, but she always called long distance. She would talk to her brother—Lily’s father—first, and then the phone would be passed around to all of the children. As Lily waited for her turn, she washed off the cutting board and knife. The rain was still dripping down the kitchen window, and she hoped that it would stop before Friday night. She wondered if she should wear the same skirt and blouse to the Telegraph Club. Would anyone notice if she did? She wished she had a new dress to wear—something as fashionable as the dress that Lana Jackson had worn. Would she be able to pull off a dress like that? She was dimly reflected in the kitchen window, and she scrutinized her figure critically. She didn’t think she had the necessary curves.
“You’re daydreaming again,” her mother said.
“Sorry,” Lily said. She dried off her hands and brought over the glutinous rice, which had to be mixed into the pan of laap ch’eung and mushrooms, and then seasoned with salt and soy sauce. It would be stuffed into the turkey, which was waiting on the kitchen table behind them. Lily’s mother had rubbed salt all over the skin earlier, and now as they approached with the stuffing, Lily thought the bird looked particularly naked, the breast glistening and bare. Her mother dipped her hand into the pan of glutinous rice and inserted fistfuls of it into the turkey cavity, holding the bird in place with her other hand. There was something disturbing about it, and Lily was relieved when her father appeared in the kitchen doorway and said, “Your aunt wants to talk to you.”
Out on the landing, Lily sat down on the bench beside the telephone table and lifted the heavy black receiver to her ear. “Hello? It’s Lily.”