touching her forearm. She flinched as if he had burned her.
“Don’t put your hand on me. Ever again.”
“Mr. Everest, maybe you can convince her—it’s her sister’s wedding.”
“Leave him out of this.”
“Look,” Frank said. “We’re leaving. We’re leaving and you can go in. That’s—”
“I don’t think I told you this part of the story,” Estelle said to Edward Everett.
“Really,” Frank said, dropping his voice to a near whisper, “you needn’t.”
“Need, no. Want, yes. I think I neglected to tell you that I was engaged up until seven or eight weeks ago. What was it, Barbara? Seven or eight?”
“I don’t—” Barbara said.
“How could you come to this wedding?” Estelle said.
“Jack is my—” Frank started to say.
“I know who the fuck he is. I just didn’t think you would have the—” She let out a guttural scream, balled up her fist and struck Frank on his left shoulder. Then, suddenly, she was swinging wildly at him. One of her blows knocked the glasses off his nose and they flew across the lobby, landing several feet away, where a bellhop wheeling a luggage cart toward the registration desk ran over them, crushing them.
“My God,” Frank said, his right hand flying to his face, feeling for the glasses that weren’t there any longer. “You’re crazy. I knew you were crazy.” At the registration desk, the hotel manager was squinting in their direction, reaching for a telephone.
“Maybe we should …” Edward Everett said, certain the manager was calling the police. Estelle was weeping audibly now, standing in the middle of the lobby, her face buried in her hands, rocking back and forth where she stood. He should just walk away; she was no one to him, just a crazy woman who had attached herself to him an hour or so ago, someone whose last name he couldn’t even remember—some sort of bird, she’d said.
Frank was hunched over his glasses, picking up the pieces, the bent and snapped frame, the larger shards of glass, putting them gingerly into the breast pocket of his suit jacket as if they were something he could mend if he was careful enough.
The manager was crossing the lobby toward them, followed by a man in uniform.
“Estelle, you should really go,” Edward Everett said.
Estelle lowered her hands. Her face was blotchy from tears, her cheeks darkened with mascara. He should just leave her. He wasn’t part of their story. He didn’t even know what their story was. But he said, regretting it as he did, “Come on, Estelle.”
He began making his way unsteadily toward the elevators, Estelle following him.
“Damn it, Estelle,” Frank was saying. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Fuck you, Frank,” Estelle said. “Fuck you.”
Incredibly, they made it to the elevators with no one stopping them. As they reached them, the nearest opened, the bell dinging, the green “up” signal lighting. They pushed their way amid the crowd of people waiting, just barely fitting into the car. As the doors closed, someone on the other side of the doors called out, “Hey!” One of Edward Everett’s crutches was caught in the doors and they began to slide open. He pulled it toward himself, losing his balance and stumbling back against the obese man in the Mickey Mouse T-shirt.
“Watch it, man,” he said, giving Edward Everett a shove forward with his belly. But the doors shut. As they did, Edward Everett caught sight of the manager and a man in uniform. “Madam, madam,” the manager was saying.
“Mademoiselle,” Estelle said quietly, but they were safe, on their way up to the eleventh floor, while in the lobby, no doubt, Frank was telling whoever would listen about how he had been assaulted and giving a description of Estelle and Edward Everett. It struck him that Frank had no idea what his last name was. Everest, he can hear Frank saying, Something like that, like the mountain. That was not him; it was someone else.
Upstairs, he led Estelle to his room, where she went into the bathroom, closed and locked the door. Edward Everett, exhausted from the physical effort, slightly tipsy from the wine, dropped his crutches and fell back onto the bed. In the bathroom, Estelle had the sink faucet on all the way, the water splashing loudly into the basin. Despite that, he could hear her weeping.
This is crazy, he thought. How had he ended up with a sobbing stranger in his bathroom? An even better question was, how would he get rid of her?