“Take them all with you,” says Leo. “We’ll call you when dinner’s ready.”Ashley herds her little brothers, tumbling, before her. As she passes her father, he drops the oven mitt from his left hand and reaches for her. She makes a slight ducking movement, shifting the baby to her other hip and eluding his caress.
“She’s a beauty,” says Cara. “What is she? Thirteen?” Persis doesn’t answer. She stares after her daughter, then turns her eyes to Leo, who once again is resettling roasting pans and kettles.
“She’ll be twelve next month,” says Lily. The three women look toward the open doorway that leads into the main room. They can hear the children giggling and the sounds of a guitar examining chords. The piping of a flute ascends the tonal scale, and the guitar follows it.
After a moment, Persis rouses herself. She gathers a handful of silverware and begins dealing it around the table. Lily takes a linen napkin from a stack on the bench beside her and folds it into a pyramid. Her tapered fingers caress the heavy material, creasing it into shape. She pitches the napkin toward the first place setting, then repeats the process until eleven pyramids dot the perimeter of the long table.
Cara wanders into the living room where three young people, all about twenty years old, sit cross-legged on overstuffed furniture ranged around a wide, stone fireplace. A chessboard inlaid with jade and white marble squares occupies most of the space on a table in front of the hearth. The arrangement of the chess pieces reveals a game nearly ended. The king stands in check. One young man strums a guitar, his brow furrowed in concentration over the placement of his fingers on the frets. A second young man listens attentively, occasionally offering advice about the correct fingering for a particular chord. His hand hovers hesitantly over the chess board. He traces possible moves in the air above the pieces. The young woman--Heather, Cara decides--sits sideways in a leather armchair on the opposite side of the chess table. Her legs are curled beneath her. With one arm propped on the back of the chair, Heather holds a silver flute to her lips. Its airy tones warble up and down the minor scale. Heather’s whole body droops and wavers with the notes of her flute. Her long neck arches languidly, as if it can barely support the weight of her head. Her hair is closely-cropped--as short as any man’s--and colored an intense yellow. For all her wilting posture, Heather’s eyes are bright and hard and fixed on the chess board.
Cara opens the front door and pulls her knapsacks into the tiny, skewed entryway near the base of a wide staircase. She gropes in one of the bags and takes out a small pill bottle. Shoving the bags into a corner, she grasps the bannister, and hauls her bulk upward. At the top of the stairs, she hesitates before several doorways on the landing. The one on the right opens on a room in bright disarray. The floor is littered with shoes, the bed piled high with dresses and shawls and scarves. Mounds of jewelry cover the dressing table. Boxes of chocolates and cartons of designer cookies lie ravaged on the nightstand. “Lily,” Cara mutters to herself.
Selecting another door, she passes into a long room that contains a king-sized bed on a raised platform and a dressing table with an oval mirror made from hammered nickel. Leo’s four-harness floor loom dominates one wall. It holds a weaving in progress, a mass of thickly-tufted blond wool hyphenated with dried grass. A folding Chinese screen at one end of the room shields a deep, claw-footed tub and a porcelain basin. Cara takes a pill from the bottle and puts it in her mouth. She cups her hands under the running tap and gulps water.
Just then, the girl Ashley puts her head around the edge of the screen. “Dinner’s ready.”
Cara gives a little jump. “Oh, Ashley! You startled me.” The girl doesn’t move. She swings her hair away from her face, and Cara notices that Ashley has her mother’s clear, light eyes and rather blank expression. Not much of Leo in her that I can see, Cara thinks, except maybe that air of ownership--over herself, at least.
Ashley stands without leaning, her arms crossed on her chest, and watches the older woman in silence. Cara splashes more water onto her face and neck and pats herself dry with a towel.
“Lily says you’re going to stay.” It’s not a question. “Mother thinks so, too.”
“Oh? And what does your mother have to say about that?”
“She said, ‘Oh no, not another wife.’”
Cara starts to smile, then checks herself. “What do you think about it?”
Ashley shrugs. “Doesn’t matter to me.” She turns away. “Dad said to tell you dinner’s ready.”
