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By Root 1524 0

hated that kind of hair, which he called kinky—but not his blue eyes. Charlotte had always been sad about that. Nicholas had her eyes: ordinary brown eyes that she loved to look at, although she could not say why she found them so interesting. She had to remember not to look at him too long. Only that morning he had said at breakfast, “Charlotte, it’s a little unnerving to roll out of bed and be stared at.” He often called her Charlotte now. She had moved to Charlottesville six years ago, and although it was a very sociable town and she had met quite a few people (she had finally reached the point with most of them where they had stopped making jokes about a Charlotte coming to live in Charlottesville), she did not know anyone with a son Nicholas’s age. Oddly enough, she knew two women about her age who were having babies. One of them seemed slightly abashed; the other was ecstatic. It was a scandal (people parodied themselves in Charlottesville by calling scandals—which they did not believe in—“scandales”) that the ecstatic forty-one-year-old mother-to-be, a recent graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, was not married. Other gossip had it that she was forty-three.

Charlotte worked as a legal secretary for an old and prestigious law firm in town. She had left New York after she and Edward separated a dozen years ago, and had moved to Washington, where she enrolled in American University to resume her B.A. studies in preparation for entering law school. Nicholas went to Lafayette School, and was taken care of on the weekends by her parents, who lived in the Cleveland Park area, while Charlotte sequestered herself and studied almost around the clock. But there were problems: Nicholas had a hard time making friends in his new school; also, the bitterness between Charlotte and Edward seemed to escalate when there was actual distance between them, so Charlotte was constantly distracted by Edward’s accusatory phone calls and his total lack of faith in her ability to get a degree. It had all been too much, and finally she decided to abandon her plans of becoming a lawyer and became a legal secretary instead. Edward began to make visits, taking the Metroliner from New York to Washington; one day he turned up with a dark-haired, dark-eyed young woman who wore a bit too much jewelry. Soon after that they were married. The “and family” part of the gift card referred to her daughter from a previous marriage. Charlotte had never met the child.

Charlotte looked out the back window. Horatio was in the yard, sniffing the wind. Nicholas had stopped on the way south and bought a stake and a chain to keep Horatio under control during the visit. Actually, the dog seemed happy enough, and wasn’t very interested in the birds or the occasional cat that turned up in Charlotte’s yard. Right now, Nicholas was upstairs, talking to Andrea on the phone. Someone throwing a life ring to a drowning child could not have been more energetic and more dedicated than Nicholas was to the girl.

Charlotte poured another bourbon, into which she plopped three ice cubes, and sat on the stool facing the counter, where she kept the telephone and pads of paper and bills to be paid and whatever odd button needed to be sewn back on. There were also two batteries there that were either dead or unused (she couldn’t remember anymore) and paper clips (although she could not remember the last time she used a paper clip at home), a few corks, a little bottle of Visine, some loose aspirins, and a broken bracelet. There was a little implement called a lemon zester that she had bought from a door-to-door salesman. She suddenly picked it up and pretended to be conducting, because Nicholas had just put on Handel upstairs. He always played music to drown out his phone conversations.

“For the Lord God omni-potent . . .” She had forgotten to get back to the Tazewells about Father Curnan’s birthday party. She had promised that she would find out whether Nicholas would come, and then call back. She had meant to ask Nicholas at breakfast but had forgotten. Now she suddenly