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Winter Chic suck in her breath. Smiling, I hurried her toward the car. I really couldn’t fault Anne. Though I commute regularly between Charlotte and Montreal, that first winter blast clotheslines even me.
Anne talked around topics on the drive to Centre-ville. Her cats, Regis and Kathie Lee. The twins, Josh and Lola. Her youngest son, Stuart, who’d become a spokesman for gay rights. Between bursts, she’d stop, and a moody silence would fill the small space around us.
Now and then I’d sneak a sideways glance. Anne’s face flickered in a mosaic of neon and brake lights.
OK, old friend. Tell the tale when you will.
An hour and a half later Anne began meandering through an explanation. As she talked, I sensed vacillation, as though she were testing ideas as she spoke them.
We’d stopped at home to deposit Anne’s things, and were now in the Trattoria Trestevere on lower Crescent. The waiter had just delivered Caesar salads.
And the chardonnay was working on Anne.
“I’m forty-six years old, Tempe. If I don’t search for some meaning now, there’s going to be nothing out there for me to find later.” She tapped a manicured nail to her breast. “Or in here.”
Again, I thought of my sister. Harry had come to Montreal questing for inner peace. She’d hooked up with apocalyptic crazies who were going to take her on a voyage to permanent peace. As in dead.
“So the kids are all right?”
“Peachy.”
“Tom didn’t do anything to piss you off?”
The nail pointed at me. “Tom didn’t do anything. Ever. Unless you count defending asshole developers who want to rid the world of trees, and spending the rest of the time seeking the grail of a hole in one. Guess it’s my own fault marrying someone with a name like Turnip.”
Tom-Ted’s surname had also been a source of much amusement over the years.
“The tuber is terminated.”
“You’ve left him?” I couldn’t believe it.
“Yes.”
“After twenty-four years and three kids?”
“This does not concern the kids.”
My fork stopped in midair. Anne and I froze eye to eye.
“You know that’s not what I mean,” she said. “The kids are grown. Josh and Lola have graduated college. Stuart’s off doing whatever it is Stuart does.” She jabbed at a lettuce leaf.
