no calendar or date book or clock. I blinked and said I didn’t know. The hostess looked back at the half-full restaurant, littered with tables marked RESERVED.
“Would you mind sitting near the bar area?” she asked and I said no, not at all, and she showed us to a small table and apologized for the mix-up.
I was pleased to see Ellie put her napkin in her lap before she looked around the room. It was a lovely space, high ceilinged and airy. I remember long ago, the entire structure had indeed been the potting shed for the Perkins estate, and Mrs. Perkins had been known to string it with lights and throw casual dinner parties for fifty people in it, which my parents were sometimes invited to. When the property was broken up and rezoned years ago, a family friend vowed to keep the casual dining tradition alive. The room was decorated in a garden motif—watering cans held simple bouquets that sat on sideboards that used to be potting benches. The tables were covered in brown paper with a cache of crayons in a clay pot. The waitresses wore denim work aprons that had pockets for corkscrews and pens. It was all very casual in the most offhand, upscale way imaginable. Ellie seemed quite taken with the condiment tray of five types of pickles, as well as the widemouthed jars that held their famous ketchup. I ordered a glass of house merlot, which they served in a huge snifter.
The burgers were delicious, and the French fries hot and crisp. We finished with mud cake for Ellie, which arrived in a terra-cotta planter. I sipped the last half inch of my wine and had one bite. It was still dusk when we got up to leave; the bar wasn’t quite dark yet, and the light looked odd, muddy, like the corner of a closet.
“Annie?” I heard as I opened the door.
“It’s a man,” Ellie whispered.
I turned around.
“Annie Harris, you son of a gun.”
Ellie looked at me, wide eyed and amused.
“Peter,” I said softly. I’d seen him several times in the last few years, but from across a room, not up close. From far away, I could only see the difference in his shadow, his extra weight and heft, the reddened tone of his skin. But now I glimpsed the old Peter inside the frame of this new one. His eyes, even half hidden in the flesh of his face, still twinkled. And when he smiled that broad smile his teeth were genuinely white, not the blue-white of people who have them bleached. A man who likes to talk needs nice teeth, I thought, and Peter had always loved to talk, more than any other man I had ever known. I realized with a start that I was smiling, and quickly pulled down the corners of my mouth.
“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your granddaughter?”
“I’m Ellie,” she said, stepping forward and extending her hand.
“Pleased to meet you. I’m Peter.”
“Peter the high school boyfriend who made the bird house?”
“Ellie, who told you that!”
“You did, Grandma,” she said and my cheeks went cold. When, exactly, had I told her that? And what else had I let on?
“Yes,” he chuckled, “the very same.”
“It’s a very nice bird house. You should make them for a living.”
“I’ll consider that vocation in my next life, perhaps.”
“What are you doing here, Peter?” I said, swallowing hard.
“Eating dinner,” he said, twirling the cherry in his Manhattan. “Like I do most nights before I retire to my bird house making.”
“A cherry’s not much of a dinner,” Ellie pointed out.
“That’s why I ordered a steak.”
“You eat here most nights?”
“Yes, it’s less lonely than Wyndon Manor.”
I raised my eyebrows, but I may as well have whistled, or said, “Well, la-di-da.”
“What’s Wyndon Manor?” Ellie asked.
“It’s a retirement community, sweetie,” he said.
“A very nice one,” I clarified.
“Sit down. Have a drink with me.”
Ellie plopped down next to him.
“Oh, but we have to go,” I said.
“No we don’t,” she replied. “I have no homework.”
“Remarkable! I have no homework, either. Come on, Annie, have a drink with your old friend.”
I sat down and looked at him as carefully as I could while pretending not to. The lines of his face, the definite jaw and the curve of his cheekbone were still there. Even his neatly trimmed sideburns had the same shape, if not the same color.
He ordered a Shirley Temple for Ellie and a glass of pinot noir for me, and showed Ellie how to play