Now it was Stephie’s turn to wink at Con. Her friend raised her wine glass in a toast. Con couldn’t have said why an old inside joke made her want to cry, and for a moment, her eyes got hot. Stephie just smiled and shook her head as if to say that everything was going to be alright. Con believed her. They touched glasses over the table, and she felt all her anxiety about not being wanted melt away.
“What?” Dahlia wanted to know, with a child’s intuition that she was being left out of something.
“Old inside joke,” Con said, but when she saw that wasn’t going to satisfy the girl, she told her the whole story.
“And this is Radiohead?” Dahlia asked about the music when Con was finished. “It’s alright, I guess. Bit sad.”
“See!” Stephie said, pouncing triumphantly.
“Dahlia,” Con said, laughing. “How’re you going to do me like that when we just met?”
“We just met?” Dahlia said, her face falling. “So, like, you really don’t remember me?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t. I’m not her, not exactly.”
“Because you’re, like, a clone? Is that it?” Dahlia asked with a child’s total absence of tact.
“Dahlia Irma Diaz!” Elena said.
“What? That’s what it said online,” Dahlia said. “Is that wrong?”
“I apologize,” Elena said. “Dahlia was very attached to . . . her. She took it hard when Con stopped visiting.”
“It’s really alright,” Con said and turned to Dahlia. “Is there anything else you want to ask?”
Dahlia glanced at her mother, who nodded sternly for her daughter to ask her questions but to tread very lightly.
“Why did you stop coming around?” the girl asked.
“I honestly don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out myself,” Con said.
“She was cool,” Dahlia said, clearly unsettled by the idea. “I wish you remembered me.”
“Me too,” Con said and meant it. Not only because she would feel more complete, but because she wished she had gotten to know them the way her original had. There was a pleasure in getting to know people that you could tell you were going to like, but Elena and Dahlia had already been through that with her. It wouldn’t be the same a second time, and it made Con jealous.
“But how could you forget?” Dahlia asked.
“I know it’s hard to wrap your head around, but it’s not that I forgot you. It’s more like . . . that was someone else who happened to be a lot like me.”
“But not the same,” Dahlia said. “Is that why you keep saying you aren’t her? Can you tell the difference?”
“Only because there’s stuff about her that I can’t know. Recent stuff. Otherwise, I’m the same person.”
Dahlia didn’t seem satisfied with that explanation. “So, I mean, why does it have to be one or the other? Why can’t you be both? Her but not her. Her but also you?”
“It’s complicated,” Con said. But she found the girl’s untroubled acceptance of her peculiar duality comforting. Sometimes children had a way of knowing when not to make more of a thing than it had to be.
“So? What’s wrong with that? Complicated is only bad to the kind of people who need things to be simple.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
Dahlia shrugged and, weighty philosophical insights dispensed, attacked her spaghetti like a hungry Viking. Elena and Stephie shared a proud look, and Stephie told the story of how she’d come to live in Charlottesville and own a music shop. Turned out, her aunt was a law professor at UVA. After the accident, the aunt had taken Stephie in and given her time and space to heal. Stephie told Con that between the grief of losing Hugh and the guilt at surviving the crash, she had barely gotten out of bed the first month. She talked about Hugh, not without pain, but with a fluency that only time could bring.
Elena reached out to sweep a strand of Stephie’s hair back but didn’t interrupt.
Stephie said, “My aunt had a son. There was a piano in the living room, and he wouldn’t leave it alone. I started teaching him just so he would treat it with a little respect. There’s only so long you can lie in bed feeling sorry for yourself while an eight-year-old clangs away at a Steinway. Turned out I was pretty good at it. That’s where the idea for the store originated.”
When everyone was finished eating, Dahlia cleared the table and did the dishes without being asked. That was not how Con remembered things going when she was twelve.