Breakfast was there to eat. Linda Melajian had arrived with it on her arm, the plates marching from wrist to shoulder like the discs of a Vegas warm-up artist’s balancing act.
“Here we go,” she said, putting the plates down in front of them. “Are you sure you want to eat this stuff? He looks sick already.”
“He’ll be fine,” Gregor Demarkian said.
Then the door to the Ararat opened, and Gregor Demarkian was not so sure. Standing there, in one of those spaghetti-strap sundresses with the contrasting T-shirt underneath, was Bennis Hannaford, looking about as good as Bennis Hannaford ever looked, which was like a combination of the young Gene Tierney and the young Vivien Leigh. John Jackman saw her and blushed. Bennis Hannaford saw John Jackman and turned away, as if he didn’t exist. She went to a table on the other side of the dining room and sat down next to the wall. Then she picked up a menu and studied it, as if she didn’t already have it memorized. Linda Melajian shook her head.
“Bennis still isn’t talking to Mr. Jackman, I take it,” she said. “Well, I’d better go over and find out what she wants. Ever since all this wedding stuff started with Donna, Bennis has not generally been in a good mood.”
Bennis’s broken arm was sticking out from the side of her body like a maypole with a tilt. It was held up by this contraption of tape and stretchy bandage that looked about as comfortable as a pair of porcupine-skin underwear. Maybe she would be in a better mood if she were allowed to wake up with her arm healed, Gregor thought. He also thought he might be wrong. Bennis was Bennis. Bennis was a law unto herself.
“You know,” John Jackman said. “I think I’m with Tibor and all the rest of them. I think you should stop kidding yourself and just marry the woman. You’re never going to find anyone better.”
Gregor was going to point out that he hadn’t found Bennis—Bennis wouldn’t marry him if he asked her every day for a month while getting down on bended knee—but nobody ever listened to him about this anyway, so he decided not to try.
He dug into his pile of scrambled eggs and closed his eyes to blot out all signs of Donna’s coming (or not coming) wedding.
Then he thought about Patsy MacLaren.
FOUR
1.
IT HAD BEEN ON Molly Bracken’s mind for almost a week, and once she saw Evelyn Adder packing Henry’s clothes into the tall garbage pails in the walled-in little utility area behind the brick Federalist, it didn’t make any more sense to wait. It didn’t make any sense to proceed either. Molly knew that. It wasn’t a real crisis or an honest break in time. It was just the point beyond which she didn’t want to go. The “papers” Joey had picked up from Sarah and Kevin Lockwood were sitting on the side table in the family room in Molly’s big Victorian, right next to the photograph of Molly in her wedding dress in the silver Tiffany frame. All Molly could think about was the fact that she wasn’t like these women, not at all. Her life did not depend on her husband’s money. She wasn’t stuck here, like Evelyn Adder. Except that Evelyn didn’t look like she was stuck here. Maybe Evelyn didn’t care if she had to leave. Whatever it was, Evelyn was outside, packing all of Henry’s Ralph Lauren Polo and Armani down in among the table peelings, and she looked less heavy and ungainly and miserable than Molly had ever seen her.
“I tried calling them three times this morning,” Molly had told Joey before Joey had stomped out—presumably to go to work, but really, Molly thought, to go anywhere at all.
“Don’t you know enough not to buy land unless you’ve actually seen it?” she had demanded of him.
He had gotten red in the face, as red as he ever got, and begun to throw pro-life pamphlets at her from the stack she had left on top of the refrigerator.
“You think you know everything,” he yelled. “You think just because your father has built a few houses, you’re the greatest real estate expert since, since—I don’t know who. You think you picked it all up in your sleep.”
“I didn’t have to pick it up in my sleep,” Molly said. “It’s something they tell you about on public service programs on Sunday morning on PBS. For God’s sake.”
“It was supposed to be a birthday present,” Joey shouted. “It was supposed to be a surprise. For you.”
As if that was supposed to change things. Molly wanted to throw a dish at him, or even the heavy plastic-coated metal dish rack next to the sink. She wanted to scream.
“They’re gone,” she said instead. “There isn’t a car in their driveway. They’ve disappeared in the middle of the night with your cashier’s check and probably not only yours either.”