leaned in and kissed her left eyelid. “I’ll make you coffee and fresh grapefruit juice in the morning.” He kissed her right eyelid. At the door he paused. “I’ve been thinking about that for a long time.” He stepped out and closed the screen gently behind him. The frogs chanted in the still night.
CHAPTER 37
From their table in Golden Rock’s garden, Els and Lauretta looked through the hedge-high poinsettias at the hazy profiles of Montserrat and Redonda.
Lauretta agitated her lemonade with her straw. “Condé Nast Traveler is running a piece on the Resort reopening and wants to include us in their Nevis ‘must visit’ list. With a photo. Just so you know, I’ve turned down two wedding requests. And I’ve been busting my butt to mend fences after you were so rude to that historical society woman.”
“She had the cheek to pull weeds on her way up the drive,” Els said. “Then she went nattering on about an encounter with Jack years ago. Said he was drunk at ten in the morning and wearing only a shirt.” She sipped her iced tea. “She seemed to believe it was his civic duty to open the garden for their fund-raiser.”
Lauretta twirled a curl around her index finger. “You aren’t Jack. Why turn down high tea among the flowers for a bunch of ladies we’d love to have as regulars?”
When their food arrived, Els made slow business of unrolling her silverware, spreading her napkin, and tasting her snapper. Lauretta plopped ketchup onto her plate and dipped a French fry.
“Book it soon, then, before the season really kicks in,” Els said.
“What’s the matter with you?” Lauretta said. “You’re barely listening to me.”
Els stared out at Redonda and chewed a slice of cucumber. “I’ve invited my mother to visit.”
Two weeks before her thirty-fourth birthday, she’d spent a boozy, blue evening mulling over all that had happened since she turned thirty-two, her last birthday with Mallo in the world. Though she’d found purpose again, and glimmers of a sense of belonging, she knew that immersing herself in the pub was barely keeping at bay her loneliness, and doing nothing for her blooming obsession with her mother. Before she could second-guess herself, she’d fired off a letter that said, in part, “I can’t have a life unless I understand what’s happened to me, to you. I must see you and try to know you, if you’ll let me. Please Mum, for this birthday, make your gift a visit.”
Jack had appeared as she was signing the letter, read it over her shoulder, and said, “Atta girl, sweet.” He’d smiled his pirate smile. “Grab life by the throat and give it a good shake.” He’d looked so self-satisfied, she’d wondered if he imagined the letter his own idea. The next morning she’d gone to the Nevis philatelic bureau, selected its most beautiful tropical stamps, and posted the letter before she could chicken out.
Lauretta looked at her over her flying fish sandwich. “I thought she wouldn’t budge off that Eye-talian island of hers.”
“I begged her to come while she still can.”
“She sick?”
“Fine, for all I know, but Father didn’t make sixty.” She pushed the snapper around her plate. “I’ve got questions only she can answer, I can’t risk her going senile, and I want her on my turf.”
“When’s she coming? We’ll have a party.”
“In about a fortnight,” Els said. “She might make the party or ruin it altogether.”
With her brief acceptance letter, her mother had enclosed a color photo of herself in a flowered bathing suit that accentuated her voluptuousness. She was talking to the camera operator, a hint of flirtation in her eyes. She seemed vibrant, animated. Els pulled the christening photo out of the study desk and compared her mother’s vacant expression with this flirty one, hoping the mother who visited would be the Ischia version.
Susie threw her front paws into Els’s lap, and Els stroked her ears. “Dum-da-dum-dum,” she sang. “Moment of truth, girl. If we’re lucky.”
Her mother had proposed to arrive just before Liz’s next time in port, and Els was apprehensive about how this collision of her unexplained past and barely coalescing present would work out. She reached for a piece of stationery and Harald’s fountain pen and wrote her reply slowly, reading over each sentence before starting the next.
When she finished, satisfied she’d cloaked her anxiety in cheery enthusiasm, she was unsure how to sign off. Her mother had closed with “baci—G.” Els wondered if she wanted to be addressed by her given name