Darcy drove down to visit Penny almost every weekend. She often spent an hour or so trimming the older woman’s nails and painting them an unusual color, like blue, or magenta with glitter, hoping the sparkle would brighten Penny’s days. Penny wasn’t able to trim her nails herself. Her hands weren’t steady or strong enough even to work a nail clipper. Those hands that had once dug ferociously into the soil to plant flowers; that patiently, relentlessly tugged weeds from her garden; those hands that had cooked healthy meals for Darcy and applauded when Darcy sang at a school concert—those hands had fallen limp and useless, spotted with brown age marks, trembling when she tried to lift a teacup to her lips.
In the last year of her life, everything had to be done for Penny. She could not bathe herself, dress herself, brush her own teeth. Arthritis was causing her increasing pain. She was weak. She wore adult diapers. The nurses at the home were kind and attentive, Darcy could see that, and was grateful. Darcy always stepped out of the room when a nurse came to change Penny’s diaper and gently wash her body. Afterward, Darcy brought out one of Penny’s photograph albums and went through it, pointing to a picture of Penny in her prime.
“Your wedding dress was gorgeous,” Darcy would say. Or, “Check out this shot of you showing off the privet roots you’d dug up.” Or, “Here is one of my favorite photos, you and me all glammed up in Boston, ready to go to the ballet.”
Sometimes Penny would manage a lift of her lips. Just as often, she’d remain blank faced, too tired even to enjoy her memories.
Still, Darcy drove down from Boston in Penny’s old Jeep every weekend to visit her…although not quite so often after she met Boyz.
3
The winter Darcy met Boyz, she was taking her third semester at Simmons College. She had this “spring” semester and one more to go before she received her master’s in library science. Where she would go from there, she hadn’t decided, although she definitely wanted to stay in the Boston area. Her family was so scattered—her uninterested father in Florida with his second wife, Jean; her beloved grandmother Penny in a nursing home on the Cape; and her flaky mother, Lala, God only knew where. Darcy didn’t have the kind of family that gave advice, so she was pretty much working out her life step by step, day by day, scanning the horizon and hoping that some kind of well-marked route would suddenly unfold itself before her.
In the evenings, she worked as a waitress at Bijoux, a posh restaurant in Boston. She shared an apartment near the Gardner Museum in Boston with another UMass friend, but Rachael didn’t work because Rachael didn’t have to worry about money. Darcy’s father had agreed to pay the college tuition, but Darcy was responsible for everything else—rent, utilities, clothes, books—and she knew she could count on amazing tips at Bijoux, where she’d been working the past year.
So there Darcy was, in her chic uniform of tight black slacks and shirt, her short dark hair capping her head, her high heels already uncomfortable but looking amazing. She stood in the doorway of the kitchen, catching her breath after an already crazy-busy Saturday night. The ma?tre d’, Pierre—that was his real name—was showing a family to their table, a table in Darcy’s zone, and Darcy absolutely gawked.
They looked like a gathering of angels. Five people who had to be father, mother, two sisters, and one brother, with gleaming silver-blond hair and lean, athletic bodies, who looked as if they had their wings folded beneath their fabulous simple but elegant clothing. She’d never seen anyone quite like them.
She put on her best smile when she greeted them, and it was a good thing she’d said the words so often they came automatically, because when she was closer to them, she was nearly dumbstruck by their gorgeousness. They all possessed the same pale blue eyes beneath arched blond eyebrows and they all seemed so happy.
They liked her, too. The father asked her advice, and took it, for the main courses and the wine, and they complimented her on her suggestions. She felt the son’s eyes lingering on her, his appreciation of her almost steaming off him, and she knew if she let her eyes meet his, she would blush—and she did let her eyes meet his, and she did blush. They all wanted drinks first: the mother and the oldest daughter champagne cocktails, the younger daughter sparkling water, the father and son gin and tonics. The son’s eyes remained on her as she walked away.
The rest of the evening passed in a hormone-thick blur. Darcy wasn’t unaware of her own allure. She was tall, slender, and shapely, with dark hair and hazel eyes and a plump mouth. For Bijoux, she went heavy on the eyeliner, using kohl drawn a little up and out, giving her an exotic look. She didn’t do this to attract men; she didn’t especially want a man in her life. She was free, and she wanted to be free; she had plans. She wanted to work at the Boston Public Library; she hoped, by the time she was fifty, to be its president. If she’d ever had any kind of true home, it was a library.
The restaurant was clearing out, the bar still busy but several tables empty by eleven o’clock, when she returned to the table with the black leather folder holding the father’s credit card.
“Thank you for visiting Bijoux,” Darcy said sweetly. “I hope this is au revoir and not goodbye.” Pierre’s father, the owner of the restaurant, insisted his waitstaff say exactly those words and Darcy always obeyed, even though she wanted to roll her eyes as she said them.
The father cocked his head, peering up at her with a twinkle in his eye. “Well, Darcy, I know my son will be back. I can tell by the way he’s been looking at you.”
Darcy was too embarrassed to glance at the son. Of course she’d been flirted with before in the restaurant. She’d learned to flirt back carefully, playfully. But tonight, this table—especially the son, but not only the son—had captured her fancy and her admiration. The family had so much fun together, leaning toward each other to share a secret or a joke; and the father often whispered in his wife’s ear, making her smile. They teased each other, she could tell, and they shared their food, passing their plates around, tasting, commenting, nodding in agreement. Certainly she’d made a point to be equally charming to all of her tables tonight, so that the Szwedas, especially their son, didn’t know how bowled over she was by this family’s allure.
So she blushed, tongue-tied, and hurried away from the table, hoping the family would believe she left so abruptly because other tables were waiting, and that was certainly true. She stepped into the kitchen, where the diners couldn’t see her, and took a moment to breathe deeply and compose herself. When she returned to the dining room five minutes later, they were all gone.