Chapter 10: Grandmother's Front Room

"Is this true?" Evan's mother said.

She said it to Madeline, not to me.

"Ask her," Madeline said, and smiled.

Every woman in the shop was looking at me.

The bride in room two had her veil clutched to her chest.

I stood up from my stool with one hand on the pedestal.

"The baby is Evan's," I said. "I've lived with him for seven years, in his apartment on Marlborough Street. Until last Wednesday."

The woman from Roslindale said, "Oh my God," to nobody.

Madeline laughed, a little silver laugh.

"See? This is what she does."

Evan's mother didn't laugh.

"If you'd like to know the rest," I said, "come to my grandmother's house tonight. Alone. I'll show you."

I wrote the address on the back of a Furlong's business card and held it out.

For a long moment she didn't take it.

Then she did.

She came at seven.

She came alone, in a black car that idled at the curb the whole time, and she walked up Gran's front steps in low heels and pearls.

Gran let her in.

Gran had put on her good blue dress.

She'd taken out the wedding china, the set with the gold rims that came out at Christmas and funerals.

She poured tea into the cups without asking if anyone wanted any.

Evan's mother sat on the edge of Gran's couch, under the picture of the Sacred Heart and the photo of my grandfather in his Navy uniform.

She didn't touch her tea.

"Well," she said. "Show me."

I put the shoebox on the coffee table between us.

It was a Converse box with masking tape on the corners.

I'd kept it in the back of Evan's closet for seven years.

"He never let me post anything," I said. "Not one picture. So I printed them."

I took out the first one.

Evan at twenty-five, sunburned, asleep in a beach chair in Provincetown with my sun hat over his face.

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