“Papa?” Frances said in the vestibule, if you could call it that. It was more like the lobby of a small museum. Her voice echoed from all directions, magnifying the panic.
“In here,” came a voice, quiet, with a lilt of anticipation. Audrey followed it. The others—even Frances, who should have known the way sound traveled in her own house—were uncertain where it had come from. The lobby branched off in four directions, like four legs of a spider. Audrey moved down the back right leg into a den she’d never seen before.
Frances always entertained in bright rooms, the formal living room or the dining room or the sunroom beyond the kitchen, but he had set up the bridge table in here, in this small dark room. Audrey was aware of clutching her clutch, of the two beads of the clasp boring holes in her finger and thumb. He was counting the deck. He glanced up, down, immediately up again. The cards kept flowing fast through his hands. He smiled, eyes back down, shaking his head. “You made me lose count,” he said, barely audible.
The others caught up behind her.
“What’s all this?” Frances said, the way she would to one of her children if they’d made a mess.
“Do not ever let it be said that I broke up a bridge game.”
“Oh, Papa, no.”
Audrey couldn’t get over the Papa bit. From another century, or country.
“We can take our coffee in the sunroom.”
“I’d like to play. I haven’t played bridge with you since you were—”
“We never played bridge, Papa. Not once.” But she took the seat to his left.
Which meant that Sue had to sit down opposite her, because they were always partners. Which put Audrey facing Frances’s father.
He gave her a slight somber bow, though he was seated.
“Papa.” She couldn’t stop saying it, as if she’d been denied a candy and was now cramming them into her mouth. “This is Audrey Pennet and Susan West.”
“Ben Yardley,” he said to Sue and put out his hand.
“Pleasure,” Sue said coolly. She liked fighting other people’s battles.
He turned to Audrey. “Partner,” he said. His hand was small and warm. She watched it join the other to deal. Small quick hands.
She wasn’t lucky in cards. She never fanned them open and saw anything spectacular. She wasn’t that kind of person. Fortunately Elinor, her usual partner, was. So was Sue. And even Frances on occasion had a good streak. Audrey was the B actor of bridge. She had learned to play her mediocrity well.
He dealt her an extraordinary hand.
She hardly knew how to contain herself. She quickly added up the points. Three aces, two kings, a queen, a jack. A void in diamonds. Eight spades. Twenty-five points. She kept her eyes down. But oh how she wanted to look up and let him see it in her face.
He bid one heart. Perfect. The only suit she didn’t have an ace in.
Sue bid one no trump. Audrey bid two spades. Frances passed, Ben passed, Sue bid two no trump.
“Five spades,” Audrey said. She hoped not too loudly.
“You’re insane,” Frances said. “Double.”
Ben was the dummy and she played the round easily, feeling his approval without having to search for it.
“That’s my girl and a half,” he said when she took the last trick. It was something her own father used to say. Girl and a half.
They played out the rubber. Each hand was like Christmas. The aces and face cards sparkling at her like jewels.
“Why don’t we take a coffee break?” Sue said. “And maybe switch things around when we come back.”
He lowered his eyebrows conspiratorially. “They’re trying to break us up, Audrey.”
The kitchen was filled with sun. They squinted at each other as Frances moved briskly about.
“I’ll get the cups,” Audrey said, opening the cupboard.
“No, I want to use the Spode.”
“Where are they?”
“I’ll get them, Audrey,” Frances said, sharp, the way she spoke to the son she didn’t like much.
Sue had gotten the sugar and was filling the little pitcher with cream. Ben had wandered down the hall past the sunroom. Audrey found him at the end of the spider leg, in Cassie’s module. Cassie was the youngest and the farthest from her parents’ bedroom, which was down past the den.
“You passed the sunroom,” Audrey said from the doorway.
“It appears I have grandchildren,” he said, touching a copy of Madeline on Cassie’s unmade bed.
“Yes, you do.” She felt a flare of anger at him. Her own father had died a month before her first child was born. He’d written a letter to that unknown grandchild in a cursive jagged with pain. It struck her as more poignant now, that letter, than it ever had before. She had been so consumed by her own loss that she’d barely considered his. Though I will never cast an eye on you, he’d written, I will always love you, all your days. He had anticipated the end of his own ability to love anyone. When you die, she thought now, you can no longer give love. You can’t give love anymore. She wouldn’t be able to love her children. It struck her suddenly as the very worst thing about death, worse than not being able to breathe or laugh or kiss. A kind of existential suffocation, to not be able to give her children her love anymore. She thought of Larry. There would come a day when one of them would not be able to give the other love, when one would be alive without the love of the other. But this didn’t feel as dramatic.