He wore a serene half-smile and he slid his eyes toward Kate as if to make sure she appreciated his position here.
“But enough about our mushroom man,” Mrs. Murphy announced. “Kate, you’ll have to tell us what you need for the apartment. Besides a desk, that is; we already know you need a desk. But how about in the kitchen? Did you find enough utensils?”
“Oh, yes,” Kate said. She hadn’t so much as opened a drawer in the kitchen, but somehow she felt the urge to live up to Mrs. Murphy’s notion of her. “Everything looks great,” she said.
“You should check our kitchen for duplicates,” Mrs. Murphy told Mrs. Liu. In turning, she let one foot slip off her footrest, and Pyotr bent without her noticing to lift it back into place. “I know we have at least two electric mixers,” she was saying. “The stand mixer and the handheld one. Surely we don’t need both.”
“Maybe not…” Mrs. Liu said in a doubtful tone.
“We will go see yard now,” Pyotr decided. “Talk about mixers some other time.”
“All right, Pyoder. Come visit us again, Kate! And you be sure to let us know about any little thing that’s lacking.”
“Sure,” Kate said. “Thanks.” And then—evidently still under the spell of Mrs. Murphy’s notion of her—she stepped forward and gave Mrs. Murphy both her hands again.
Out on the stoop, Pyotr said, “You liked them?”
“They seemed really nice,” Kate said.
“They liked you,” he said.
“They don’t know me!”
“They know you.”
He was leading the way around the side of the house now, toward the picket fence that separated the front yard from the rear. “In garage,” he said, “are garden tools. I will show you where I hide key.”
He lifted the latch of the gate and then stepped back to let her go through. Again he allowed far more space than she needed, but it crossed her mind now that it might be for his sake as much as for hers. Both of them, for some reason, seemed to be feeling a little shy with each other.
On her wedding morning, Kate opened her eyes to find Bunny sitting at the foot of her bed. “What, are you checking out my window seat?” she asked, although Bunny wasn’t even looking at the window seat. She was sitting tailor-fashion in her baby-doll pajamas, staring at Kate intently as if willing her to wake up.
“Listen,” she told Kate. “You don’t have to do this.”
Kate reached behind her to prop her pillow against her headboard. She glanced toward the sky outside; there was a whiteness to the light that made her wonder if rain might be on the way, although the forecast was for sunshine. (Aunt Thelma had been reporting the forecast throughout the past week, because she was hoping to serve drinks on her patio before the “wedding banquet,” as she had taken to calling it.)
“I know you think you’re just doing a little something on paper to fool Immigration,” Bunny said, “but this guy is starting to act like he owns you! He’s telling you what last name to use and where to live and whether to go on working. I mean, I do think it would be nice if I could have a bigger room, but if the price for that is my only sister getting totally tamed and tamped down and changed into some whole nother person—”
“Hey. Bun-Buns,” Kate said. “I appreciate the thought, but do you not know me even a little? I can handle this. Believe me. It’s not as if I haven’t dealt my whole life with an…oligarch, after all.”
“An…”
“I’m not that easily squashed. Trust me: I can take him on with one hand tied behind me.”
“Okay,” Bunny said. “Fine. If your idea of fun is sparring and squabbling, so be it. But you’re going to have to be around him all the time! Nobody’s even mentioned how soon you’ll be allowed to divorce him, but I bet it’s a year at least and meanwhile you’re sharing an apartment with someone who doesn’t say please or thank you or smile when you’d expect him to and thinks ‘How are you?’ means ‘How are you?’ and stands too close to people when he talks and never tells them, ‘I think maybe perhaps such-and-such,’ but always, flat-out, ‘You are wrong,’ and ‘This is bad,’ and ‘She is stupid’; no shades of gray, all black and white and ‘What I say goes.’ ”
“Well, part of that is just a matter of language,” Kate said. “You can’t always