A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [15]
Agnes nodded.
“And you are?”
Agnes gave her name.
The woman bent toward the guest book and flipped a page. “There’s a note here that says I should go get Nora when you arrive. You’re a friend?”
“I am,” Agnes said.
“Do you want to be shown to your room? Or would you rather wait while I find Nora?”
Agnes was torn. Nora might be busy now, and Agnes’s arrival would be an inconvenience. Though wouldn’t it be rude not to see her?
“I’ll wait for her,” Agnes said.
“I think Nora’s in the kitchen.”
While she waited, Agnes examined the hallway again. She noted the chair-rail molding and above it a series of black-and-white photos tastefully matted and framed in thin black wood. They were of village scenes from the 1920s and 1930s, to judge from the automobiles in the pictures. One was of a drugstore, with a woman in a suit and hat emerging. Another was of a house perched on a hill. Edith Wharton’s house, if memory served.
“Agnes.”
She turned, and Nora embraced her.
“Look at you!” Nora said, stepping back.
“Look at me? Look at the house!” Agnes said. “Nora, what have you done? It’s amazing. I hardly recognize it.”
“Do you like it?”
Agnes saw at once that Nora might be slightly vulnerable here, having anticipated and perhaps feared reviews. “What I’ve seen so far is beautiful,” Agnes said at once to ease her mind. “You’ve done so much work.”
“I have,” Nora said, not dissembling. “Yes. I have. Well, not always me. Mostly it was the contractor and the architect and the craftsmen. But it feels as though I hammered in every nail, scraped every wall. Come. Let me show you the rest.”
Nora turned to the woman behind the desk. “Judy, have Dennis take Agnes’s suitcase—is this everything?” she asked Agnes, and Agnes nodded—“up to room twenty-two.
“I think you’ll like your room,” Nora added to Agnes.
“Not my old room then.”
“It doesn’t exist. I . . . I had several of the smaller rooms combined into suites. You’ll have one of those.”
“Will it still have the quilt?” Agnes asked, allowing herself to be shown into the sitting room she’d visited just minutes before.
“What quilt?”
“The crazy quilt with the velvet and silk?”
“I think I packed that away. Maybe I’ll get it out again. It was frayed, wasn’t it?”
“It was lovely,” Agnes said. “I loved it anyway,” she added.
“We broke through a wall here and opened up this room,” Nora said, pointing. “We . . . they . . . finally got the fireplace to work, after all these years.”
Agnes remembered that the old house had been impossible to heat and that she, Carl, and Nora had often sat around with thick sweaters and blankets. Mostly, though, it had been just Agnes and Nora, Carl usually elsewhere, across the hallway writing or at school.
“Come see the kitchen,” Nora said.
Agnes followed Nora through swinging doors. Though Nora was dressed simply in a white shirt and black pants, Agnes couldn’t help but notice the chic cut of the shirt, the way it slipped just so over Nora’s slim hips, the way the pants were tailored so as to fall perfectly straight and narrow to the expensive black leather boots. “Your hair,” Agnes said.
Nora put a hand to the back of her head. “I got rid of it,” she said. “Too much work.”
Agnes could not imagine what work Nora was referring to. She remembered Nora’s hair as thick and chestnut colored, with red threads catching the light. She absentmindedly fingered her own hair, short because it had to be. With any length it would look lank and stringy. Why, if you had such riches, Agnes wondered, would you divest yourself of them? “How have you been?” Agnes asked, meaning Carl.
“Fine,” Nora said with a firmness that was new to Agnes. “Fine,” she repeated, and Agnes could hear a distracted note. As owner of the inn, Nora could be expected to be preoccupied. “Harrison is here,” Nora added.
“Is he?” Agnes asked, surveying a room in which the old dismal kitchen was only a faded memory. Two men were working at a pair of stoves set into an island topped with black granite. There were as well two large stainless