The air around them seemed to warp and snap. The fans whirred above their heads. Maris put her mouth around the straw and sucked down everything in her glass except the ice.
“You can’t let Debra fire me,” she said for the third time. “It would put an end to me. It would be everywhere. In all the papers. I wouldn’t even be able to come back to Hollman. Do you think it’s easy, even the way it is, coming back here when you’re Queen of the goddamned May and I’m, what, your secretary?”
Geoff was paying attention now. He’d gone absolutely still, the way children did when they wanted to listen to the conversations of adults and not be noticed doing it. The surreal moment was over. Maris looked like—Maris. “I don’t know what you want me to do,” Liz said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to all this.”
“Say you won’t let Debra fire me.”
“I would never let Debra fire you,” Liz said carefully.
Maris shot her a quick, calculating, amused look. “My, my. Aren’t we being Jesuitical this afternoon.” She zipped her bag shut and slid out of the booth, into the narrow aisle between it and the first row of freestanding tables. “I’m going to go. I had to walk down here from Belinda’s place. You know as well as I do that I don’t drive if I don’t have to. I’ve got a long walk back up the hill.”
“I’ll drop you off,” Liz said.
“Don’t bother. Pay for lunch. You’ve got the money. And cheer up. Today, you achieved a lifelong ambition. You got to sit in the corner booth.”
Maris turned her back to them and walked off. She was not weaving. Liz watched her go all the way to the door and out of it. Less than a minute later, she came into view through the window, crossing the parking lot toward the sidewalk that edged Grandview Avenue. It was a long walk to Belinda’s, at least half a mile, but maybe that would help.
“Mom?” Geoff said.
“What?” Liz wasn’t really listening. She hadn’t eaten any of her salad. She didn’t want to. She was feeling a little sick to her stomach herself. It hit her, suddenly, that she truly hated this place: the Sycamore, the corner booth, the tables where little knots of girls had sat in triumphant exclusivity from which she had once been systematically and brutally shut out. Geoff was right. They should have gone to McDonald’s, even if it meant getting into the car and driving back out to the Interstate to do it. If there was one thing she had earned, in thirty years of a very eventful life, it was the right not to be here, now, or ever to be here again. The waitress had left the check on the table. Liz picked it up.
“Tell you what,” she said. “You haven’t eaten a single french fry. Why don’t we get out of here and drive out to McDonald’s and get you a Happy Meal? We could pick Mark up that chicken sandwich thing he likes and bring it back.”
“I only drank half my ice cream soda,” Geoff said solemnly. “Are you going to let me ask you something?”
“Ask away.” Liz got out her wallet.
“If Debra fires Maris, does that mean we don’t have to see Maris anymore?”
Liz took out two ten-dollar bills. Lunch came to only $13.95. She put the bills down on the table and put the check upside down on top of them.
“Debra can’t fire Maris,” she said slowly. “Only I can fire Maris. And I wouldn’t fire Maris. She’s not as lucky as we are. She needs a job just to have food to eat and a place to live.”
“She could get a job with somebody else.”
“What may happen is that Maris may stop working in the office with Debra and start doing some things just for me. She’d come out to Connecticut when she needed to or I’d meet her at her apartment.”
“She shouldn’t come out to Connecticut,” Geoff said quickly. “I hate it when she comes out to Connecticut. She makes up new rules for everybody and she’s always mad at us.”
“Well,” Liz said lamely, “she’s not used to children. She doesn’t realize they make a lot of noise.”
She ushered Geoff down the long aisle and out the door they’d come in through. In the parking lot, the sun was brighter and the leaves on the trees were heavier than she remembered them having been when they’d arrived. She unlocked the doors to the Mercedes and got Geoff belted in the backseat. She stepped back and looked around her. If you went around the curve and to the left, instead of going back up Grandview Avenue, there was a school called Grassy Plains, a red brick one, just the same as the one called Center School where she had gone to kindergarten, first, and second grades. It was surely closed now, just like Center, since all those grades had been moved to the new complex out at Plumtrees. If you stayed on the curve and veered to the right, there was the house where a girl named Debbie had lived with her mother. She was the only single child Liz had known in those years, and the only one with a single mother, but not the only one who lived in an apartment instead of having a whole house.