“Patty?”
“The youngest Nicely girl. She and I are friends now.” Angelina pushed her sunglasses up on her nose.
“Well, that’s nice,” Mary said. “That’s nicely. How long have you been friends?”
“Four years. She works with me.”
Four years, thought Mary. Four years, I have not seen my dearest little angel. Glancing at her daughter, Mary thought again that the girl’s jeans were too tight across her little bottom. She was a middle-aged woman, Angelina. Was Angelina having an affair? Mary shook her head slowly. “Well, I was thinking of them when they were little girls, the Pretty Nicely Girls. Your father and I went to the wedding of one of them. They had the reception at The Club.”
Angelina had started walking again. “Do you ever miss it?” She asked this over her shoulder. “The Club?”
“Oh, honey.” Mary felt winded. “No, I can’t say I miss The Club. It was never my thing, you know.”
“But you guys went there a lot.” A small gust of wind raised Angelina’s hair so that the ends rose above her shoulder, straight up.
“We did.” Mary followed her daughter up the street, and after a moment Angelina turned to wait for her. “That one wall they had, filled with Indian arrowheads under glass, I don’t know,” Mary said.
“I didn’t know you didn’t like it,” her daughter said. “Mom, my wedding reception was held there.”
“Honey, I said it wasn’t my thing, and it wasn’t. I wasn’t raised that way and I never got used to it, all the showing off of new dresses and the women so silly.” Oh dear, Mary thought. Uh-oh.
“Mom, don’t you remember Mrs. Nicely? You know, what happened to her?” Angelina, her eyes blocked by her sunglasses, looked at her mother.
“No. What happened to her?” Mary asked; trepidation came and nestled on her chest.
“Nothing. Come on, let’s go.”
“Hold on a minute,” Mary said. She stepped into a tiny shop and Angelina squeezed in behind her. The man behind the counter said, “Ah, buongiorno, buongiorno.” Mary answered in Italian, pointing to Angelina. The man placed a pack of cigarettes onto the tiny counter before him. Mary said, “Si, grazie,” and then something more that Angelina did not understand, and the man opened his mouth in a huge smile, showing teeth that were stained, some missing. He answered her mother quickly. Her mother turned, her huge yellow leather pocketbook bumping into Angelina. “Honey, he says you’re beautiful. Bellissima!” Her mother spoke to the man again, and they went back onto the street. “He says you look like me. Oh, I haven’t heard that in ages. People always used to say, She looks like her mother.”
“Mom, you’re still smoking?”
“My one cigarette a day, yes.”
“I used to love it when people said I looked like you,” Angelina said. “Are you sure the one cigarette a day is okay?”
“I’m not dead yet.” Mary was about to say: I’m very surprised I’m not dead yet. But she had warned herself not to speak of her death to Angelina.
Angelina tucked her arm into her mother’s and her mother pulled her out of the way of a woman on a bicycle. “Mom,” Angelina said, turning to look, “that woman is your age, and she’s smoking, and she has her pearls tossed over her neck, and she’s wearing high heels, and she’s pedaling her bike with a basket of stuff in the back.”
“Oh, I know, honey. It just amazed me when I came here. Then I figured it out—the women are just versions of people pulling up to Walmart in their cars. Only they’re on a bike.”
Angelina yawned hugely. Finally she said, “Everything’s always amazed you, Mom.”
Inside the apartment, Mary lay down on her bed, this was her afternoon rest, and Angelina said she’d email her kids. Through the window Mary could see the sea. “Bring your computer in here,” she called to her daughter, but Angelina called back, “You rest, Mom, I’m okay. We’ll skype with them later.”
Please, Mary thought. Please come in here and be with me. Because the fact that her youngest daughter—her favorite, the only one of her children who had not seen her for four years, who had refused to see her!, although the girl had said she would come a year ago—the fact that this girl （woman） was now in the next room of the apartment gave a feel of naturalness to Mary’s life, and yet it was not natural to have this child here, at all. Please, Mary thought. But she was tired, and the Please could also be for Paolo to have a good time with his kids, whom he was visiting right now in Genoa, or a Please that her other girls would stay healthy, oh there were many things Mary could say Please for—