“Mom, can you give me a minute?”
Barbara apparently could not, and had not dressed for company for nothing. She peered over Evelyn, smelling of the vintage Babs leather perfume. “My goodness, Charlotte! What a delight. It was so nice of you to come all this way to see Evie. I quite like your hair out of those pigtails.” She affixed her great claw, manicured, somehow not chipped despite the reality that she now did dishes and cleaning, to the door and pulled it open wide so Charlotte could enter.
Evelyn stayed where she was, her eyes flicking over Charlotte’s as Charlotte took in the scene. For Charlotte, who had been to Sag Neck for several long weekends and Thanksgivings, it must have been like a game of Memory, Evelyn thought. Match the overstuffed couch wedged under the blinds to the one that sat in the piano room at Sag Neck. Find, in the stack of paintings piled against one wall, the one of a foxhunt that hung in the Sag Neck foyer.
Charlotte was standing uncertainly on the doorstep, her earlier bounty-hunting fire tempered.
“Mom,” Evelyn said, more firmly. “I need to talk to Charlotte alone.”
“I won’t hear of it, after the long drive she must have had,” Barbara said a bit too chirpily. “Charlotte, you’ll have to forgive my daughter. I think she’s lost her sense of propriety since leaving New York. Come in. Evelyn, will you get some cheese?”
Evelyn raised her free hand to smooth her eyebrows. “Some cheese,” she repeated. “Sure. Let’s see. We have some pepper jack, I think. Can I get you a slice?”
“I don’t really need cheese,” said Charlotte, pulling her blazer closer to her body.
“No. I’m sorry. It’s cold. Come in. The bathroom’s just down the hall, on your left.”
Inside, Barbara was whirling around, straightening up stacks of magazines and removing items from the refrigerator. “We’re just loving living downtown. It’s a little more exciting than the old house, which had just gotten way too big to manage,” she said as Charlotte passed her. “Can you imagine, being alone in that house at night? It was really frightening. I just hated going downstairs.” Barbara placed a small stack of cocktail napkins monogrammed with BTB and—were those Cheez-Its?—on a tray that Evelyn hadn’t been aware had made the journey from Sag Neck.
When Charlotte came back, Barbara set the tray in front of her. “I’ve found these delicious little cheese nibblies,” Barbara said. “I’m sure they’re loaded with calories, and we’ll all have to do our penance at the gym, but since it’s just a girls’ outing, why not?”
Charlotte dutifully took two Cheez-Its and a napkin. “Mmm.”
“It’s so lovely to see Evie’s old friends,” Barbara said, smoothing her turban. “Just lovely, really. Charlotte, can I get you something to drink? We have some white wine, or I could look in the cocktail cabinet to see what I might put together.”
“I think—Char, just give me two seconds to change, all right?” Evelyn said.
“Do you know, I’d just been thinking about Sheffield,” Barbara began as Evelyn hurried to her room and threw on jeans and a sweatshirt. As she returned to the living room, Charlotte shot her an alarmed look; Barbara was saying “… and she won’t talk to me about it, of course, but it seems like if Evie were just to extend an invitation to Camilla…”
Evelyn took a Cheez-It and hauled Charlotte from the couch. “We’re going downtown!” Evelyn said, as Charlotte said, “Thank you for the snacks, Mrs. Beegan!”
Charlotte and Evelyn were silent for the first part of the walk, passing the bare-branch trees in the park, the closed-for-winter-outdoor-patio Thai place, and the small brick town hall, but as they passed the bank, Charlotte spoke. “So you’ve been—”
“Here. Yes. In a tiny apartment. With my mother.”
“Roommates with the Babs. Jesus. Your dad?”
“Twenty-nine months.”
“That’s crazy,” Charlotte said. “Do you think he did it?”
“I don’t think the federal government brings cases that are made up,” Evelyn said. “But twenty-nine months? What he did is hardly worse than what guys on Wall Street are doing daily. In the scheme of things, I don’t know if he deserved what he got.”
Charlotte kicked a stone. “I read he got a really good prison.”
“Petersburg. His second choice.”
“Is it like college? Where you have safeties and reaches?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. Did you know there’s a whole prison-consultancy business? My father hired some ex-con to tell him about how to behave in the clink.”
“For one, you probably don’t call it the clink.”