She doesn’t know what to say.
After an awkward moment of silence, he says, “You know what I want to know? Did you ever get your Victorian?”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you remember how much we both hated our raised ranches when we were living in Westchester? I was always fantasizing about moving to a farmhouse somewhere, and you wanted a big old Victorian. You used to talk about exactly what it would look like: gingerbread porch, pocket doors, high ceilings . . .”
He’s describing her house. Does he know? Has he . . . seen it?
“And you were going to furnish it entirely in period furniture,” he goes on. “You were so crazy about that era. Remember how we’d go to tag sales so that you could look for antiques? That one time, it took us an hour to walk two blocks with all the kids because we had to use one of the strollers to push that big old fringed lampshade you found.”
Unsettled by the memory—-particularly when she recollects that she’d casually lied to Jake about how much it had cost—-she quickly changes the subject. “Wait, you haven’t told me about your kids. How are they?”
“Liam and Erin are both in college, like your older two. And Vanessa’s boys have been grown up and out on their own for years now. They’re both still in the city, but ever since she died, it’s been—-”
“She died? I thought—-I mean, I assumed—-you’d gotten divorced. I’m so sorry. I didn’t—-”
“It’s okay. We were divorced a while back, and then . . . she died.”
What is there to say to that, other than “I’m sorry,” again.
To think she’d considered that Vanessa—-poor dead Vanessa—-might have been responsible for sending the package.
But . . . Rick? Could he really have sent it?
The waitress appears, providing a brief respite from the conversation as Rowan orders the coffee she’d sworn off earlier. She needs it desperately now, having expended every ounce of energy she possessed just to propel herself to this place—-not just physically, but emotionally. Now that the initial confrontation is over, the sheer exhaustion of the night before—-the week before—-has caught up with her. She’s finding it difficult to sort through her thoughts, and the conversation has already drifted so far off script that she has no idea how to steer it back.
She toys with the upside--down coffee cup on her scalloped paper placemat as Rick orders a toasted sesame bagel.
“Cream cheese?”
“No, butter, thanks, Bernice,” he tells the waitress, and Rowan remembers that he always did have a folksy way of addressing waitstaff by the first names printed on their name tags, and that he never did like cream cheese. He always ordered his bagels with butter. Sesame bagels. Real butter, not margarine—-which he specifies to Bernice an instant after the memory flits into Rowan’s mind.
“Real butter.” Bernice nods, writing it down. “Anything else?”
“Just ice in a go--cup with a lid and a straw and a lemon.”
A new wave of memories: he’ll keep adding hot water to his tea as they sit here, and when he leaves, he’ll dump what’s left into the cup and take it with him. Voilà—-iced tea. Two beverages for the price of one, he used to say, and she thought it was clever. Now it seems like cheating.
“What about for you, hon?” The waitress has turned to Rowan, pen poised on her pad.
“Just the coffee, thanks. I’m not hungry.”
“You can share my bagel if you change your mind,” Rick tells her after Bernice leaves.
An image flashes into her brain: Rick leaning across the table feeding her as they laugh together.
It’s not a memory; it never happened—-and never will happen.
How dare he offer to share his food?
Irrational anger flares within her.