a reference, you call me. You have a future, Kit. It’s just not at the Lido. I’m sorry.”
He hung up hastily. I knew he didn’t believe me.
Why should anybody believe me?
I was mixed up with Nate. I was living off him. This apartment wasn’t mine. I hadn’t bought these clothes. Of course it looked bad. It was bad.
I picked up the paper again. I hadn’t been able to do more than scan the article. There was another photograph of me, the one a photographer had taken the night I’d spoken to Dex Hamilton on the radio.
Who was that girl? That eager smile, the lipstick and powder, the bombshell in the tight dress?
They were comparing me to Virginia Hill, the mistress of Bugsy Siegel, the gangster who’d been shot a few years ago. The Flamingo, they called her. They hadn’t come up with a nickname for me yet, but I had no doubt that they would.
I’d always wanted to be famous.
Lucky Delia wasn’t around. She’d always told me that being famous was an occupation for fools.
Delia. I’d put out of my head what Billy had said about Delia.
Do you think you’re the first to shack up? Maybe you should ask your Aunt Delia.
What did he mean? Delia? My prim and proper aunt?
I looked over at the mirror, hung in an awkward place just to reflect a splinter of the blue-gray river. A reminder of home to someone who had seen a river every day, who breathed marsh and damp and salt, all running into a tidal bay toward the vast ocean.
And suddenly I could see her, I could see Delia placing that mirror just so. I could see her tapping in the nail, hanging the mirror, stepping back to adjust it. Staring at it when she felt herself lost in a place that seemed too big and yet too stuffed with people to have room for one more soul. Just as I had.
Could it be possible? The knowledge was like a rush of air inside my body, and it lifted me to my feet.
Is that what he wants here, a second chance?
Here. Here, in this apartment? Did Billy mean that Nate and Delia… but they hardly knew each other!
Good evening, Miss Corrigan.
Hello, Mr. Benedict.
I shook my head slowly, trying to fit the pieces together. Nate and Delia? Delia, with the rosary beads slung on the bedpost. Delia, with her disapproval of kisses that lasted too long in movies. Delia, who pressed her lips together at a dirty joke.
Delia and Nate?
What had Da said… that the three of them had been in each other’s pockets when they were young. They met that night, Delia swimming out to meet the boat, tossing her braid over her shoulder and wringing it out, and Nate looking at her like she was a selkie. At Buttonwoods Cove, he’d said. I’d thought it was funny that we’d been at the very same beach that day. Because Billy remembered it from his childhood.
I stood up as the realization pierced me. The beach was in Warwick.
I walked slowly back to the bedroom. I ignored the rumpled sheets, the blanket trailing on the floor, the memory of Billy in that bed. Instead, I knelt and looked for the silver compact that he’d kicked.
They’d taken the name of the place where they’d first laid eyes on each other, where, no doubt, they’d fallen in love. The Warwicks. Of course. And when Billy had looked down at the compact… how had he known?
I traced my finger over the whirls of the letter B. And suddenly memory flashed, uncertain and hazy, and I grabbed it. Me, twelve years old, leaning against my father’s side as he sat at a table, staring down at a legal document. I couldn’t decipher the language, but I saw the names, bold and black.
BRIDGET ROSE CORRIGAN
JAMES GARVEY CORRIGAN
Bridget was Delia’s birth name. She never used it; she’d used her nickname since she’d been born. I hadn’t even known her name until I’d seen it that day.
The Warwicks had lived here that last summer of the war, Hank’s mother had said, and before that, he’d only come on weekends. She was a quiet tenant….
Hadn’t Billy told me that his father had begun to have clients in New York? Had spent time there during the war? And Delia had told us that she was working in Washington the summer of ‘44. For the war effort, she’d said.
And the weekends! All those weekends she’d told us she was going to a