The day stretched out ahead of me, empty and open and free, and for once that space felt luxurious, instead of like time that needed to be filled.
What did I used to do, when I was single and lived on my own? It seemed like I was trying to remember a story I had once heard and barely recalled, the edges soft, the details inconsistent. Afternoons spent painting until the light faded and my eyes and fingers ached, evenings in the empty second-run cinema, my hands sticky with butter and salt from the popcorn. More than how I had spent each hour, I remembered the feeling—a giddy freedom, as though I were on an eternal summer vacation. I would look at the people around me and feel as though I were getting away with something, doing something wrong. Now I wondered why I had ever felt that way—it had been my life to do with what I wanted, after all.
“Well, well, slacking on the job, are we?” I started, my eyes flicking open. My face was growing hot from the sunlight, and there were spots in my vision where it had burned into my eyes. Blinking them away, I squinted until Sharon came into focus.
“Hi. I was just—my mother doesn’t keep any food in the house . . .” I was fairly sure she was joking, but I felt ashamed at having been caught here, like a cat in a sunbeam, when I should have been doing something responsible.
“Relax, relax. I’m kidding. Can I join you?” She was wearing a dress and a blazer, but before I could say anything, she eyed the black railing surrounding the restaurant’s patio, hopped up on it, and swung her legs over. A moment later she was settling herself into the empty chair across from mine, hanging her purse and jacket over the back, and looking around for the server.
I sat up from my lazily slumping position and rummaged around in my handbag until I found a pair of sunglasses that had probably been in there since the previous summer, judging by the level of smudging and scratching. My fingers brushed against my mobile phone, which was stubbornly silent. Phillip hadn’t forgiven me yet, I guessed. Or maybe he was just busy in New York. He was the one who had insisted we have cellular phones long before they became popular, and that we get the newest devices the moment they were released. Phillip always had to have the best of everything.
“What are you doing here? Do you live nearby?” I asked, a little too loudly, trying to force the thought of Phillip from my head.
“Me?” Sharon barked out a little laugh. She had the same voice she’d had in high school, rough and whiskey-edged. You could hear her laugh all the way across campus. “No, I couldn’t afford to live here unless I was stripping on the side. And that’s not likely to happen,” she said, gesturing at her body, which was short and comfortably solid. “I was actually just dropping off some fliers for another client. Betsy Lynn Chivers—do you know her? She and your mother are friends.”
I shuddered at the mention of Betsy Lynn Chivers, who dressed her dogs in outfits and carried them everywhere with her, but had shouted at me repeatedly when I was little for tracking dirt onto her carpet. “Unfortunately, I do know her. She gave me nightmares when I was a kid.”
“She gives me nightmares now,” Sharon said, and then interrupted herself to ask for coffee and an order of pancakes when the server came by. “But she’s rich and she wants me to sell her house, so, cheers!” She lifted her water glass to me in a toast and then drank.
“May it sell quickly and easily, then,” I said.
“No kidding. So what are you up to? Sorry for scaring the pants off you at the house the other day. I assumed your mother would have told you.”
“Yeah, well. My mother and I aren’t always the best communicators. Frankly, I don’t think she thought I’d care.”
“And do you care?”
“Weirdly, I do. Stupid, right? I haven’t lived in that house basically since I left for college.”
“Eh, people get weird about real estate. Don’t take it personally, though. Your mom just wants to get out of there. It’s a lot of house for her to manage.”
“And she’s moving into an apartment building? I can’t imagine it.”
“It’s condos. And all the Garden Society dowagers move there.” Sharon’s coffee arrived, and she took a stack of packets, shook them, and poured the entire pile into her coffee, rendering it ninety percent sweetener and ten percent liquid. “Betsy Lynn is moving there, too, and I am sure her neighbors are thrilled, because those dogs she has yap all the livelong day. Anyway, enough about her and her problems. I’m so glad you’re in town.”