since you dumped that bastard? Five years? Honey, it's time for the Widow Stassos to cut loose a little.”
Mary picked up her menu. “Shall we order?” she said. “I'm starving.”
“What you heed,” Cassandra told her, “is a haircut. You need a change. What do you suppose would happen if you cut it right under your earlobes, just a simple blunt cut, and let it hang loose? No curls, no spray.”
“It's fine like this, really,” Mary answered. “I wouldn't know what to do with it any other way. Mm, chicken salad with papaya. That sounds good.”
“Maybe you should stop coloring it, too. Let it go gray, I'll bet it's a beautiful silver gray.”
“It's fine. Really. Thank you for your interest. Have you talked to Zoe lately?”
“This morning.”
“How is she?”
“She's all right,” Cassandra said. “Today is the day she works until seven, I'm picking Jamal up at kindergarten.”
“Do you . . . Do you spend a lot of time with him?”
“Zoe needs help, it's too much raising a child all alone.”
Mary sipped at her water. She believed she could survive this lunch just as she'd survived a wedding night and three births and a hard marriage and all the inexplicable little hatreds of her children. She could know someone like Cassandra. The peculiarity of all this could not harm her because she had lost her old hopes and she wasn't afraid anymore, not like she used to be. What else could happen? What more could be lost?
“I felt like I was alone when I raised my kids,” Mary said. “My husband was hardly ever there.”
“Well, then, you know.”
“Yes. I know.”
“Jamal is going through a gun thing right now,” Cassandra said. “Suddenly the world is made up of two things, guns and useless objects.”
“I guess that's normal.”
“Oh, sure it is. Aggression, what could be more normal? Zoe doesn't like it, she keeps imagining herself being interviewed after he sprays a shopping mall with bullets, but I tell her it'll pass. A little boy is not Winnie the Pooh, however much you might want him to be.”
“You sound like you've had experience,” Mary said.
“I raised two brothers and a sister. Our mother forgot to come home sometimes, and frankly, I don't blame her. If I was a woman named Erna Butz trying to raise four children alone on no money in Table Grove, Illinois, I'd
“She left you alone?”
“Please, don't start looking at me like I'm some kind of Dickens character. We were better off without her. I did a much better job with those children than she ever did.”
“Well,” Mary said. She was working for something further to say when the waiter came to take their orders. Mary ordered the chicken salad and, after a hesitation, a glass of white wine. Cassandra ordered the chicken salad and a cup of tea.
After the waiter had gone, Cassandra leaned forward and said in a low voice, “In case you were wondering, it's Bertram.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I was born Bertram Butz in Table Grove, Illinois. You think I blame my mother for taking off? Not for a minute, hon. I understand completely.”
“Do you talk to her now?” Mary asked.
“Oh, no. She died.”
“I'm sorry.”
“Oh, I suppose I am, too. Not as sorry as I probably should be.”
“What about your brothers and sister?”
“They don't know where I am.”
“You're joking.”
“No, it's better this way, believe me. They have very conventional lives. They all got married and had children and they live in Illinois. They don't want a visit from Auntie Mame.”
“That's terrible.”
“No, it's not,” Cassandra said. “All it means is we don't have to suffer through Christmases together. Now, what about you? You're a New Yorker, aren't you?”
“Well. I was born in New Jersey.”
“Italian, right? You've got those eyes and those cheekbones.”
“I was Mary Cuccio. My parents never quite forgave me for marrying a Greek.”
“Lord, the things people get worked up over. You married young, didn't you?”
“Seventeen. I wanted to get away.”
“Honey, I hear that,” Cassandra said. “Marriage wasn't exactly an option for me, so I went to college. I got a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin and I said to the kids, here's how the washing machine works, here's how to put Momma to bed when she needs putting to bed. Now sayonara.' “
“I probably should have gone to college,” Mary said. “I didn't really think of it, it didn't seem like something I could do.”
“Well, I lasted a year into graduate school, but I didn't finish. I was a literature major but I couldn't seem to .