Chapter 11: Is She Mine

Nobody said anything.

The dish machine thumped through its cycle.

Poppy looked from me to Lawrence to Blair, waiting for somebody to answer her question.

Blair smiled.

It was the same bright, friendly smile she'd given me on the porch.

She didn't let it slip at all.

"Seating charts for the Fourth," she said, and held the clipboard out to Lawrence.

"I need you to look at table one. Your mother wants to be next to the governor's cousin."

Lawrence didn't take it.

So she set it down on the dish station, on top of a stack of clean sheet pans.

"Whenever you're free, darling."

She touched Poppy's curls on the way past.

Then she walked out through the swinging door.

She didn't hurry.

The door flapped twice and stopped.

I'd have rather she screamed.

"Poppy," I said. "Go and help with the bread."

"But are you kissing..."

"Bread, please."

She went, looking back over her shoulder the whole way.

Lawrence picked the check up off the shelf.

"I'm taking this," he said.

"Lawrence."

"I'll bring it back. I swear to you. But she's going to look at it."

He didn't wait for me to agree.

He walked out of the walk-in and out of the kitchen with my grandmother's tin still open on the shelf behind him.

I got through lunch.

I don't remember any of it.

At two-thirty the front desk girl came into the kitchen looking scared.

"He wants you upstairs," she said. "The Captain's Suite."

I climbed the back stairs for the second time that week.

The door was open.

Eleanor sat in the chair by the round window, exactly as she'd sat for her breakfast, except she was dressed now, pearls and all.

Lawrence stood in the middle of the room.