The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [31]
The returning bus made several stops, and only she and an elderly Canadian biographer disembarked at the hotel, Linda slightly (and shamefully) uncomfortable with the association with greater age; and perhaps she emerged from the bus with a slightly jauntier step than was warranted.
He was sitting in a chair facing the entrance when she moved through the revolving door. He stood and they faced each other for an awkward second, a second during which they might easily have embraced. But having missed the moment, now could not. Behind them, the revolving door spun with couples dressed for a Saturday night.
—I know this is highly inappropriate, Thomas said. But would you like a drink?
—Yes, she said simply. I’d like that very much.
The mahogany was shiny, without fingerprints. Linda noted white linen cloths stacked high upon a shelf. The bartender was a pro, his movements long practiced, as fluid as a dancer’s. He made a sparkling martini that was like a package she did not want to ruin by opening. She’d thought, briefly, about ordering a scotch, for old times’ sake, but she knew that she could no longer stomach the smoky drink, and she marveled, as she sat there, at how, years ago, she’d drunk them down like orange juice. (All her own drinking seen now in perspective. . . .) Men, sitting at the bar, appraised her as she entered with Thomas; but then she wondered if their glances were, in fact, directed at her at all: might it not be Thomas who had caught their eye? (The men wouldn’t even know they’d looked, she thought, the need to look so ingrained.)
—You’ve had a haircut, she said to him with her own appraisal.
He rubbed the short gray bristles, unused to the feel of his own head.
—It’s cute, she said. Even in high school you didn’t have a crew cut.
—I thought you’d like me more, he said.
—You want me to like you more? Daring to flirt a bit.
—I do, as a matter of fact.
Together, as was expected, they clinked glasses.
—Would you like to talk about your son?
—In a while, she said. I need a minute. Of nothing.
Thomas, who would understand needing minutes of nothing, sat beside her on a stool. They exchanged glances in the mirror over the bar.
—You’d think that after all this time, your aunt would forgive you, Thomas said. Isn’t that what the Catholic Church teaches? Forgiveness?
—She goes to Mass. I don’t know that she necessarily forgives.
Her aunt spent her days in a cramped and darkened room the family had always called the den, sitting on a sofa upholstered in a scratchy plaid fabric. Two windows were draped with lace curtains; the TV was the centerpiece of the room. A bag of crocheting and a missal lay on the maple table beside the sofa. Linda was grateful for the daily excursions to Mass: at least her aunt had to leave the house and walk.
—I mind because when I see her, I want to ask her how you are, and I can’t, Thomas said.
Linda was silent.
—So how are Michael and Tommy and Eileen and all the rest? Thomas asked, having been denied information about herself. He picked at a small bowl of nuts. He would know her cousins mostly as names with faces attached, though he had played hockey with Michael and had been fond of Jack. But how to reduce six complicated lives, six different lifetimes filled with sorrow and success and shame into six sentences? She thought a minute and then counted off her fingers.
—Michael lives in Marshfield with a woman who has two boys. They’ve had a tough time of it financially. Tommy, who didn’t go to college, bought Cisco when it was 17, and now he’s worth millions. He never married. Eileen