In turn, Estelle thanked Evelyn – the spirit of Evelyn, her arms out in an all-encompassing gesture, as though Eve hovered everywhere under the blazing white pontoon lights – for having given birth to Lou. She waved a balletic arm at Dorothy and Andrew, and the guests who couldn’t see them through the thicket of other guests called for them to stand up, which they did, halfway, briefly, and Dorothy nodded her thanks to Estelle and sat down again wiping her eyes with one of the linen table napkins. The other people at their small round table smiled and one of the strangers patted Dorothy on the arm and said, ‘It’s so great you’re here.’
‘My lady and me, twenty-seven years. It’s a thing,’ their tablemate said while they stood to watch the fireworks whistling, fizzing gold, traffic-light red in the sky, ‘being married to the same person, the same person for so long.’
‘The problem isn’t that they’re the same,’ Andrew said, ‘it’s that they change.’ The night had become cool, and he put his suit jacket around Dorothy’s shoulders for a cape. Their children had banded together with other kids and were leaping on the slope of grass, going crazy at the fireworks, even Grace and Lou exploding with squeals and applause, falling to their knees, rolling around getting juicy green stains on their brave teenage party dresses. One of the boys hit another one in the face by mistake and Dot inhaled, poised to run to the scene, but Grace was there, calming them, crouching down to hug a teary child and send him off to play again, not looking around for adult approval, just doing it. What had happened to that insecure toddler Eve had predicted such dark things for? Dorothy softened, watching her daughter. They were the lucky ones.
‘Excuse me, guys,’ one of the wait staff said, his hands gripping their plastic table and lifting one side off the ground, ‘we’re just setting up the limbo dancing here.’
‘Any time you want to leave,’ Andrew said to Dot.
‘My wife is awesome at the limbo,’ said the other guest, and he walked into the crowd of firework-lit faces to find her.
It had happened a couple of months after the school reunion, when she’d long stopped waiting for the call. One afternoon the phone had rung and it was actually Daniel. He was sorry for standing her up in the café, said a young man he sponsored ended up in hospital that day. He’d been thrown, had lost his bottle, wanting to see her was the old him, part of his disease. But he was going on tour now, to Sarajevo, and had something of Eve’s to hand over.
‘Post it,’ she said. She walked the phone to the window and checked down the street.
‘OK, that was an excuse. A Trojan horse. I want to see you.’
‘Now what is this, some kind of honesty high?’
‘Did you tell Andrew you were going to meet me at the café?’
Dorothy helped Hannah climb down from the table and wiped tomato sauce from her face with the paper towel. ‘I didn’t meet you at the café.’
‘Did you tell him though?’
‘No.’
‘How are your kids?’
‘Great. Amy’s broken her arm.’
‘Amy? She’s the second one?’
‘Yes. She came off a flying fox.’
‘Please, Dottie.’
Hannah was staring into the distance, scratching her bottom. Worm pills. Dorothy squeezed her above the knee and the girl imploded with giggles. ‘If we are going to meet I’m going to tell Andrew.’
‘Good.’
Instead she backed out of the room when Hannah wasn’t looking, hid in the bathroom and shut the door while they agreed a time and date for Daniel to come over, even though the only other human being in the house was three years old and not really listening. The phone disconnected. For a second Dorothy saw that the room she was in, and the bath, the cabinet, the towel rail, were made of cardboard. Through the window the bleached sky busted in. She ran to Hannah, slung her onto the sofa with an alphabet book and began to read it out loud. By the time the book was finished, home had solidified, become three-dimensional again, and when Andrew came back from polytech she had already given the children dinner and cleaned up, and it was six o’clock so the open bottle of wine was par for the course. Amy and Grace were breaking their brains over algebra and Donald knew all of his spelling words. She and Eve used to think their mother insane