“Oh, well. We’ll just have to take our chances,” David said.
There was something different about him, Lily thought. He seemed more relaxed than usual. And he might have put on a few pounds. He’d always been on the thin side.
Alice appeared in the dining-room doorway. “Lunch is on!” she announced.
There was a general loosening of the atmosphere, a sense of relief. Everyone stood up and headed toward the table. For the first time, Lily noticed that Greta walked with the faintest hitch to her gait. She appeared to hesitate slightly after setting her right foot down, which made her seem even older than she was—not only too old for David but too old to have such a young child. Lily couldn’t figure the woman out, to tell the truth.
The lamb had been set at the head of the table, in front of Kevin, on a platter garnished with parsley and tiny red pepper-looking things, and there were side dishes in abundance, including Lily’s salad. Alice said, “Greta, I’m putting you at Kevin’s right. Mom, you’re on his left—”
“I think this must be why I’ve never much cared for Easter,” Mercy said. She was looking at the row of hyacinths. “Pink and lavender, together. Who thought that up, I wonder.”
“Emily, honey, you’re down at the end next to Eddie,” Alice forged on.
“I have no choice?” Emily asked in a small, chilly voice. She was addressing her mother; she had her eyes fixed on her mother’s face.
“You have no choice,” Greta told her firmly.
Alice said, “Greta, if you’d prefer to have her beside you—”
But Greta said, “She will be fine,” and Emily sat down next to Eddie and folded her hands in her lap.
Lily tried to think whether she’d ever heard a child word the question that way before: “I have no choice?”
Her son would have asked, “Do I have to?”
She herself was assigned a seat next to Robby. She could press her upper arm very lightly against his sweatshirt sleeve, unbeknownst to him. He was chuckling at a story Robby the Girl was telling. The children were grouped together at the foot of the table, and the three cousins had begun to chatter among themselves while Emily looked on silently. Robby the Girl was talking about her very fat music teacher. Why did children find obesity so funny?
Or most children, at least. Not Emily.
Lily’s father was shaking out his napkin, which had been folded into a sort of winglike shape. “What’s that she’s made? Roast beef?” he asked Lily in a low voice.
“Lamb,” she told him.
“Hmm.”
To Robin, even lamb was exotic.
Because Lily and Greta were on the same side of the table, Lily couldn’t study Greta further during the meal. She did have a good view of David, though, diagonally across from her. She saw how he kept sending glances in Greta’s direction, even while he was listening to Morris’s assessment of the current housing market. And she saw how his expression eased when Greta laughed at something Kevin said. Clearly he was anxious for her to feel comfortable here.
There wasn’t a chance, Lily realized, that Greta was only a friend.
On the other hand, neither were any announcements made that required a champagne toast. Most of the conversation amounted to a general catching up: Kevin reporting a proposal he’d made to develop a shopping center near Towson; Mercy announcing that Koffee Kafé had agreed to show four of her paintings. “Mom paints house portraits,” David told Greta, because much of the catching up was for Greta’s benefit, really. A “Here’s who we are” exhibit, so to speak. At regular intervals, though, some form of “And who are you?” would pop up. “Tell me, Greta,” Alice said, putting on an alert expression, “have you always been a school nurse?” and Greta responded in kind—equally alert, graciously forthcoming. “No, I worked in an emergency room until the time Emily was born.”
“Oh, yes, I imagine emergency-room hours would be difficult with a young child,” Alice said.
“Very difficult,” Greta said.
There was a pause. Then Alice said, “And is her father—？”
“We are divorced,” Greta said.
“Ah.”
Another pause.
“So!” Morris said loudly. “You still driving that VW, David?”
“Absolutely,” David said. “Going to keep it running forever, if I can.”
“I have to say I envy you,” Morris told him. “If it weren’t for company policy I’d buy a Beetle myself, first thing tomorrow. I’m in real estate,” he added in an aside to Greta. “We have to have big cars for driving clients around.” And so they were back once again to “Here’s who we are.”