Dennis laughs. “I’m Dennis,” he says, leaning down and offering his hand, solemnly, for Amy to shake. Instead she ducks around Minna’s leg, peeking at him from between Minna’s thighs.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Minna says. “Say hi to Mr. Carey, Amy.”
“Hi,” Amy whispers.
Dennis straightens up again. “Is she yours?”
Minna nods. She won’t meet his eyes. I wonder whether she’s embarrassed about the fact that their moment was interrupted, or about the fact that it happened at all.
“She’s very pretty,” Dennis says.
“Say thank you, Amy,” Minna says sharply.
Amy says nothing.
The kitchen door opens.
“In here, Mom,” Minna says, before Caroline can ask.
Caroline comes into the hall a moment later. In her large gray cashmere jumpsuit, she looks like an overgrown dust mite. And yet there—underneath it, underneath her—I can’t help but see another Caroline: thin and beautiful, with the same wide, lost eyes, drifting from room to room. Even then, she was like dust—blown from place to place.
“The service here—” she starts to say, and then, seeing Dennis, stops. “Oh God. You must be Mr. Carey. I’d completely forgotten—”
“It’s no problem,” Dennis says, starting forward. He goes to shake her hand; she extends her hand limply and allows it to be engulfed. “I wasn’t waiting long.”
“You don’t look like a lawyer,” Caroline says, and she laughs as though she has made a joke. “Surely you’re too young.”
“A lawyer?” Trenton has skulked into the hall, too, and stands with his shoulders hunched practically to his ears.
Minna says offhandedly, “I never could stand lawyers.”
Dennis clearly doesn’t know who to address. He again adjusts the collar of his shirt. His neck is thin, and his Adam’s apple prominent, as though he has swallowed a peach pit at some point in his life and it has been lodged there ever since. “I was lucky enough to work with Mr. Walker in the later years of his life,” he says.
Caroline claps her hands. Her eyes are very bright. “I suppose we might as well get started,” she says. “No point in delaying the inevitable.”
“Get started on what?” Trenton asks.
Caroline looks from Trenton to Minna in her old, bewildered way, as though both of them have just materialized from nowhere. “Mr. Carey is here to read your father’s will,” she says. She turns a smile back to Dennis. “Let’s go into the study, shall we? It’s so much cozier in there. I’ll just nip into the kitchen for a glass of wine. I have a feeling I’m going to need it.”