her shoulder. Julian. He hadn’t done this to her in thirty years, but that was his stubble, his way of coming up from behind and just nuzzling you.
She turned to hug him. She said, “Well isn’t this something.”
He said, “You look radiant!” Then he whispered: “Serge told me you were getting laid here, but wow.”
Fiona swatted him with the bottle. She said, “I’m just radiant with nerves.”
She had spent the weekend looking into rental properties in Paris, ones that would let her stay one month, two, three. She could sublet her Chicago place easily.
Yesterday morning at breakfast with Cecily she said, “What if we both moved here? As roommates? What if we—I don’t know, Grannies in Paris. It sounds like a movie! We could do it, we really could. Why should all that study abroad stuff be wasted on the young?”
“No,” Cecily had said, and shook her head definitively. “Are you really considering this?”
“I mean, until she agrees to come home. Or until—I don’t even know. But listen, when we were young, we’d just plunge into the future without worrying. Right? At least I did. I don’t know when that stopped.”
“Don’t you have a dog?”
“And a job. I mean—I’ll figure it out.”
“Are you sure you’d even be welcome?”
“No.”
She explained then all the things she’d halfway worked out, lying awake. That she could work for Richard—didn’t he say he needed an assistant? That she could watch Nicolette, help Claire out financially, get her to a better neighborhood. Claire could work for Richard, for that matter!
She didn’t explain to Cecily the other things she was thinking: how it would be a fresh start, a hugely overdue one. How she’d never really left Chicago. Madison hardly counted, what with her constant trips back, her tethers to the city. How thirty years after Nico died, it was finally time to let things go. How maybe she could throw her fate out into the world as easily as Jake dropped his wallet onto a bar, knowing it would always come back to him.
Cecily had sighed and laughed and tapped her fork on the edge of her plate. “Well, I’ll come visit you,” she said.
Last night she’d written Claire a long email laying out the idea. “Don’t write back,” she’d begun. “We can talk tomorrow.”
So now on top of the social anxiety inherent in walking into this opening, and on top of the anticipation of seeing Richard’s footage of the ’80s, she was standing here in the gift shop waiting to be roundly rejected by her only child.
Julian said, “I need this pillow! What is this, Kandinsky?”
Fiona never saw what he was talking about, because here was Claire, in a black cotton dress and black boots, her hair in soft waves. She seemed more relaxed than she had in the bar or the park. Perhaps this felt less like an invasion, or maybe she’d just gotten used to the idea of seeing her mother. In any case, she adjusted her purse, gave Fiona a quick hug, scanned the housewares section as if she expected something else to happen now.
Fiona said, “I want you to meet Julian Ames.”
Claire bobbed her head and shook his hand.
“Julian was a friend of your Uncle Nico,” she said.
How strange to call him that when he’d never been anyone’s uncle. But she’d tried it throughout Claire’s childhood. This was your Uncle Nico’s drawing table. Your Uncle Nico didn’t like egg yolks either. And now, she supposed, Nico was a great-uncle. Dear God: Great-Uncle Nico. Who the hell was that? Some old man with bifocals.
Julian said, “Your mama took care of us all.”
Fiona saw Claire’s shoulders draw back.
“I’m aware,” she said. “Saint Fiona of Boystown.”
Julian glanced at Fiona. She wondered suddenly if the cult had made Claire judgmental of homosexuality, had taught her that AIDS was the wrath of God or something. She couldn’t imagine Claire falling for that, but then who knew anything at all about this stranger?
Claire picked up one of a set of melamine plates with Magritte images on them, this one his pipe-that-wasn’t-a-pipe on a spring-green background. She rotated it, stared at it.
Julian said, “I’ve been telling stories about your mom for years. She thought I was dead, and the whole time I was talking about her like she was Paul Bunyan. And for a long time I didn’t even know the half of what she did. I left Chicago, and she kept on going.”
Claire smiled up drily at Julian. “Well, I’m what stopped her.”