Claire turned her head and glowered at him.
The waiter immediately did an about-face, racing off toward another booth.
Once they were alone again, Claire turned her attention back to Anne. Her eyes, the same shade of blue as the afternoon sky, pinned Anne like a insect against a display. “Elaborate.”
As concisely and dispassionately as she could, Anne relayed the news of Sadie’s job offer. “And I had—well, honestly, I didn’t handle the news very well.” Brooke and Claire didn’t need to know the details. The fact of her panic attack was bad enough; attempting to explain it would be even worse. “It was upsetting. Understandably.”
“Understandably,” Brooke repeated. She exchanged a quick glance with Claire.
“I saw that,” Anne said immediately. “That look. What’s that look?”
“Nothing. A sister thing.” Claire leaned forward, arms on the table. “I mean, obviously, you’re upset, Mom. Your best friend might be moving three thousand miles away. Freaking out about it is a normal reaction. I mean, not normal foryou. But normal.”
The rest of the story refused to crawl out. Instead, Anne said, “I understand why she’d want the job. Sadie loves what she does.Really, truly loves it.” A sharp, little laugh. “God knows I spent those three hours of my life helping her collect seaweed so she could make homemade paper for her students. You don’t do that without a lot of love. I mean, Sadie wouldn’t.”
“Sadie loves you, too.” For once, Claire’s voice carried no sting. “Clearly.”
“What do you mean by ‘clearly’?” Anne took a long swig out of her wineglass and didn’t ask:What do you mean bylove?
“We all know emotions really aren’t my thing, but come on, Mom, the way she looks at you with those big eyes? It’s exactly the way my dog looks at me when she wants me to take off my socks so she can eat them. You know how much Sarah Jessica Barker loves eating socks.”
So they’d all seen how Sadie looked at her. Like a sock-eating mutt, apparently. Anne didn’t know how to feel about that.
“And Sadie talks about you constantly when you’re not in the room. It’s always ‘Anne thinks this’ and ‘Anne said that’ and ‘Anne could glare the enamel off teeth’ and ‘Anne’s laugh sounds like the offspring of a wind chime and a wood thrush’ and ‘Don’t be too hard on your mother, Claire, she tries her best.’”
“Sadie said not to be hard on me?” That was news to Anne.
“Repeatedly. It’s extremely annoying.”
“She said something else, too, when she told me about the job.”Get it out,just state this fact, that’s all that it is, it’s just a fact. “Sadie said that she hadn’t decided yet what she wants to do. Except—she knows that—that she doesn’t want to live without me. That she can’t live without me. Isn’t that—?”
Sweet, kind, nice.Any of those bland words would do just fine, but instead, in horror, Anne could feel the tears rising in her throat. She held her eyes open without blinking as long as she could to keep any drops from falling.
“Mom.” Brooke looked alarmed. “Shit. Are you crying?”
“Oh my God, she’s crying,” Claire said helplessly, and turned to Brooke. “Bee, she’s crying. Do something.”
“What am I supposed to do?” Brooke hissed.
“Why are you asking me? Which one of us has seventeen children?”
“Three, and just because I have kids doesn’t mean I know how to—”
Anne, blinking furiously to get it all out of the way, managed, “There’s nothing to handle. I’m fine. It’s just—I can’t stop thinking about what Sadie said. Because the thing is—” She could get this out. “The thing is that I don’t think I can live without Sadie either.”
Brooke and Claire stared at her, slightly open-mouthed.
“Would somebody please tell me what thatmeans?” Anne wailed, and then immediately slammed her mouth shut. The other people on the patio might not want to witness an existential breakdown.
“Mommy,” Claire said quietly. Anne felt the old name like a pull in her stomach. “Are you trying to tell us you have feelings for Sadie?”
“Obviously I have feelings for her,” Anne snapped. She wiped her wet cheek with the corner of her napkin. “She’s my best friend.”
“Fantastic, you’re going to make me spell it out for you so we can all be even more uncomfortable. Mom, are you trying to tell us that you haveromanticfeelings for Sadie? Please respond in a way that traumatizes the two of us as little as possible.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Claire, I’m not a lesbian. Don’t be ridiculous.”
It was preposterous for her daughter to even suggest it, as if the problem was that Anne just lacked the sophistication to understand what was going on. That couldn’t be further from the truth. She wasn’t some uncultured rube; throughout her lifeshe’d come across a number of gay women, enough for her to know plenty about what lesbians were like. At Dartmouth, she’d had an androgynous-looking women’s studies professor who’d once alluded vaguely to her “significant other.” The mother of one of Brooke’s childhood friends had cut her hair alarmingly short after her husband’s death, then moved in with a woman. A few of the agents at Backlight Artists Agency over the years had obviously been of that persuasion. And that feminist group Anne had visited exactly once when the girls were little was full of them, looking like they’d stepped right out of that one chapter ofOur Bodies, Ourselves.