Chapter 8: Six Hundred Seats

By eight o'clock the Bexley Marina Club ballroom held six hundred people, and not one of them was looking at the food.

They were looking at me.

I stood at the edge of the floor in a green dress my brothers had insisted on buying and I had insisted on paying them back for.

The florist's cousin had stripped the brown out of my hair that afternoon in a bathroom, with the banquet captain holding the door.

It fell now to my shoulders in its own color, a deep, unmistakable copper.

I had not worn the pearls.

They sat in their white box on the chair at the head of the family table, with a card I had written myself.

Mother of the guest of honor.

Genevieve had arrived at seven-fifteen in silver silk, with Edmund on her arm and a photographer from the society pages two steps behind.

She had seen the box, put her hand to her throat, and smiled at it.

She wore no pearls at all.

I noticed that and did not know what it meant.

Brendan went up to the microphone at half past eight.

He had put on a suit, which he hated, and he held the paper with his speech on it in both hands.

"Good evening," he said.

"For twenty-five years the Gallivan Foundation has paid for scholarships, lifeboats, and a very large number of tugs."

The room laughed politely.

"Tonight it pays for something else."

He looked down at the paper.

Then he folded it and put it in his pocket.

"Our mother had seven children," he said.

"She told everyone she had seven, from the day the hospital told her otherwise."

He stopped and cleared his throat.

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