Wendy could see them. Plus, there was just a weird feeling about the place.”
Nikhil planted his elbows on the counter. “You don’t think you’re maybe just saying that now?”
“No, it was spooky. His parents didn’t even come to the door. I asked Theo where they were, and he said they were working. I couldn’t exactly invite myself in, could I?”
“I would,” Wendy said. “If it were Texas at someone else’s house.”
Kate looked at Nikhil like, She named her kid Texas? He shrugged.
“It was the nineties,” Roberta said. “Things were more laid back.”
“Anyway, Mom left, and Theo went to get his markers and the poster board from upstairs. I sort of stood there by the door waiting for him to get back. I started messing with a photo from one of the piles, which I thought was hilarious because it had a naked woman in it, and then I heard a noise from above me. It was Miranda. She was standing on the stairs, staring down at me.” Wendy’s voice dropped to a confidential tone. “I thought she was mad about the photo, so I started apologizing. She waved me away, like”—Wendy made a shooing gesture—“and then she said, ‘What are you doing here?’ I said I was here to work on the school project. And she said, I’m serious, ‘Fuck the school project.’”
“To a child,” Roberta put in. “A child!”
“I was, like, dazzled,” Wendy said. “I was nine. Maybe ten? I had only heard the word a couple times from someone at school. And while I was trying to figure out what to say, she just sat down on the stairs and lit a cigarette. I thought she had forgotten I was there, but then she started talking again, saying something about how I shouldn’t do what other people say. How that was an important lesson to learn, because I was a girl, and soon I would be a woman, and it would get harder to say no. So I should practice now. Practice saying no.
“And I said, thinking I was so smart, ‘Well, if I shouldn’t do what people say, then I shouldn’t do what you say.’ And she put down her cigarette and smiled at me. It was the weirdest, most incredible smile. It was like she saw right down inside me. And she said, ‘No, of course you shouldn’t. I’m the last person you should listen to. Haven’t you seen?’”
When Wendy didn’t go on, Kate asked, “What did she mean? Haven’t you seen … what?”
“I don’t know. She never said.”
Wendy sat back with a flourish, signaling that the story was over, and lifted her glass to her lips.
Kate picked up her drink too, mostly to hide her frustration. The story was plausible, but too specific to be true. Surely no one remembered a random incident from their childhood in such detail. Kate’s own memory was far fuzzier. Puberty, first kiss, first drink, first rejection letter, first breakup, any number of the tiny humiliations that felt like public shamings—sure, she remembered those more watershed moments, but she still wouldn’t be able to piece together a coherent narrative. It was as if a fire had broken out in her memories of her youth, leaving behind only weird ravaged fragments that had fused together into a smooth, stonelike mass.
Wendy obviously didn’t have that problem. Maybe she rehearsed. Woke up every morning and recited five stories about herself, the way job-search guides recommend you do before an interview. Or maybe she had been dining out on the story for years, and had slowly shaped it into the perfect version of itself.
The more Kate thought about what Wendy had said, the more meaningless it seemed, like a broken piece of chalk that crumbled when you picked it up. She could have learned that Miranda was eccentric just by reading her Wikipedia page. And yet the story also made Kate ravenous. The vision of Miranda sitting on the stairs, smoking, lecturing a nine-year-old.
Haven’t you seen? If Miranda had been using it as an idiom, she would have said Haven’t you heard? So she must have been referring to something in particular. No, now Kate was reading too much into it.
“Want another?” Nikhil said, breaking into her thoughts.
Kate looked down and saw, to her surprise, that her glass was empty. Roberta had gotten a text and was asking Wendy how to open it on her phone. Kate agreed: the same again, please.
* * *
Victor Velázquez lived just a few blocks from Frank and Louise.