“Oh, I just love it when people behave in character,” Mercy said.
“Me too, especially when it’s in bad character. And do you know what I really love?”
“What’s that?”
“I love it that for once it’s not me behaving badly.”
Then they both dissolved in giggles, putting their heads together like schoolgirls, while Candle watched, smiling shyly.
By the time their food arrived, the talk had moved on to Mercy’s own paintings. Was she still doing her house portraits? Was there much of a market for them? “Oh, no,” Mercy said dismissively. “Just, you know, a few commissions here and there, most of them fairly humdrum, although every now and then I’ll come across something intriguing, some place with real personality.”
To Candle, this sounded both modest and a little bit boastful, because it wasn’t really a few here and there; it was more like one or two, with months and months in between when Mercy’s paintings were only for herself. But she was glad her grandmom was putting on a good show. She didn’t want Magda to feel sorry for her.
Candle’s sandwich had potato chips alongside, but high-class ones, cut thicker than usual, with rims of brown peel left on. They could have used a little more salt, though. And there were weird dots of pickly things mixed in with the shrimp salad. But Mercy said her scallops were delicious. “I never order scallops back home,” she said. “They’re so often overcooked. Really you have to come to New York if you don’t want leathery scallops.” Then she gave Magda a playful nudge and said, “Robin claims the reason he hates to travel is, the food never tastes the same as it does in Baltimore. You just never can be sure what you might be getting, he says.”
They both started giggling again.
“Oh, my,” Magda said finally, shaking her head. “Darling Robin.”
“When our grandson left for his study year abroad,” Mercy said, “his parents gave him one of those watches with two faces, one face set to foreign time and the other to home time. And Robin said—” here she knotted her eyebrows, putting on a perplexed look. “Said, ‘Really? I would have thought,’ he said, ‘that a person would just always somehow know what time it was at home.’？”
This made Magda laugh again, and Mercy looked pleased. “Right?” she asked Candle.
Candle, who had no memory of that conversation, smiled but didn’t answer. She hadn’t even remembered that a grandson had studied abroad. （Could it have been her brother, Eddie, even? He was the one who liked learning new languages.） Oh, she was just too much younger than the others; that was the problem. She was hopelessly young, and out of step and inexperienced. But she was doing her best to catch up.
* * *
—
Say the word “gallery” to Candle and she pictured the National Portrait Gallery over in DC, where she’d gone once on a school field trip. A double row of columns, massive wings at either side…So when they arrived at Magda’s gallery, a few blocks from the restaurant, she was disappointed to find a tiny storefront with a single mullioned window. Mercy, though, had the opposite reaction. “Why, Mags!” she said. “This is very classy!”
“Ah, yes,” Magda said. “I seem to be moving up in the world.” Then she told Candle, “My last show was in a framing shop.”
Candle liked her for admitting that.
They went inside, and a young woman seated behind a desk stood up immediately. “Ms. Schwartz,” she said. “How nice to see you.”
“Hello, Virginia,” Magda said. “Is Mr. Phillips in?”
“No, he’s at lunch, I’m sorry to say.”
“Well, never mind. I’m just bringing my friends by to see the exhibit. Mercy here is an artist from Baltimore. We went to school together. And this is her granddaughter, Kendall.”
“How do you do,” Virginia said, and she made a little bobbing motion that was almost a curtsy. She wore a fascinating outfit, a black knit top that had a ruffle at the bottom too long to be mere trim but too short to be a skirt, with nothing below but black tights and black ballet shoes. Candle took careful note, wondering if her mother would allow her to wear such an outfit. Meanwhile, Magda had clasped Mercy’s elbow and was leading her toward the first painting. “This is the one I was telling you about,” she said. Candle followed, two steps behind. “I still can’t decide if it’s finished or not. What do you think? Should I have held it back until I felt more certain?”