“You’re imagining it, Irina. Lenny’s not competing with you in any way,” Seth consoled her. But he too was worried, because if his grandmother cut Irina’s hours, he would have fewer opportunities to see her.
That afternoon Alma and Lenny were sitting in the garden recalling the past as they often did, while a short distance away Irina was washing Sophia with the garden hose. On the Internet a couple of years before, Lenny had seen an organization dedicated to rescuing dogs from Romania, where they roamed the streets in wretched-looking packs, and bringing them to San Francisco for adoption by sensitive souls prone to that kind of charity. He was immediately taken with Sophia’s face, with its black patch over one eye, and without thinking filled out the online form, sent the required five dollars, and the following day went to fetch her. In the description they had omitted mentioning that the little dog had a leg missing. She managed a normal life on the other three; the only consequence of the accident seemed to be that she destroyed the tips of anything that had four legs, like chairs and tables. Lenny solved the problem by keeping an endless supply of plastic dolls; as soon as the dog left one of them without an arm or leg, Lenny threw her another, and that was that. Sophia’s only weakness was her disloyalty to her master. She was smitten with Catherine Hope and at the slightest excuse shot after her and jumped on her lap. She adored traveling in a wheelchair.
Sophia remained motionless under the stream of water as Irina spoke to her in Romanian to conceal her intentions as she listened in on Alma and Lenny’s conversation in order to convey it to Seth. She felt bad about spying on them, but investigating the mystery surrounding Alma had become an obsession for her and Seth. Alma had already told her that her friendship with Lenny began in 1984, the year Nathaniel Belasco died, and had lasted only a few months, but the circumstances had lent it such intensity that when they met up again at Lark House they could resume it again as if they had never been apart. At that moment, Alma was explaining to Lenny that at the age of seventy-eight she had renounced her role as matriarch of the Belascos, weary of fulfilling her obligations to people and keeping up appearances, as she had done ever since she was a child. She had been at Lark House for three years now, and was increasingly enjoying it. She said she had imposed the move on herself as a penance, a way of paying for her life of privilege, for her vanity and materialism. The ideal would have been to spend the rest of her days in a Zen monastery, but she was not a vegetarian, and meditation gave her a backache, so she settled for Lark House, to the horror of her son and daughter-in-law, who would have preferred to see her with a shaven head in Dharamsala. She was comfortable at Lark House; she had not given up anything essential and if need be she was only thirty minutes from Sea Cliff, although she had never yielded to the temptation of returning to the family home, which anyway she had never considered hers: first it belonged to her in-laws, and then to her son and daughter-in-law. At first she spoke to no one, and it was like being in a second-rate hotel, but as time went by she made a few friends, and since Lenny had arrived, she felt real companionship.
“You could have chosen something better than this, Alma.”
“I don’t need anything more. The only thing I miss is an open fire in winter. I love to watch a fire burning, it’s like the endless swell of the sea.”
“I know a widow who has spent the last six years on cruises. As soon as the ship docks at its final destination, her family presents her with the ticket for the next round-the-world trip.”
“I wonder why my son and daughter-in-law have never thought of that?” laughed Alma.