I pulled the waistband of my underwear down and considered my reflection in the bathroom’s full-length mirror. My hysterectomy scar was still angry and red.

“I’m halfway to a sex change,” I said experimentally to Abby.

“What’re you talking about?” She was tired after her visit with Vivian and aggravated with me. I was late. After my dinner with Susan, I’d spent the night in my old bedroom at Nana’s house. We’d visited Hunter in the morning, and then my mother had dropped me off at the hotel. I’d asked Abby about her visit, and she’d said “fine” in that clipped tone she usually reserved for the particularly stupid.

“No uterus, only one ovary. If I started taking testosterone, I could be Frank Koslowski in six months’ time. For real, this time.”

“What do you mean this time?”

“Some kids in Michigan had started calling me Frank, just before we moved. No doubt sensing the butch-to-be.”

“Hmm,” she said. Her hair was freshly braided. The beads on the ends were bright blue. I knew the braiding process took about six hours. Perhaps she and Vivian had spent part of the day at a salon together. That seemed odd, considering.

“You’d need a double mastectomy,” she continued. “Not to mention chest reconstruction and a phalloplasty. It would take a hell of a lot longer than six months to make a man out of you.” She finished buttoning her blouse and tucked it into the top of her pants. The blouse was new, silk I thought, and the exact same color as the beads. If it weren’t for her expression, exasperation mingled with some emotion that I couldn’t read seething just below the surface, the overall effect would have been almost cheerful. She turned to me and sighed.

“You’re grieving. For a lot of things. Just at the moment, we don’t have time to talk about any of them. We’re going to be late meeting Kim. She’s been at the Rathskellar—” she looked at her watch—“for the past ten minutes.”

I pulled my pants on and slipped into my shoes. “I’m sorry I was late. We left the hospital in plenty of time. My mother just drives slowly.”

“I’m not angry that you were late. You have to spend time with your grandfather. That’s why we’re here, or some of why we’re here. We can talk about all of this when we get back this afternoon. Maybe we could go out tonight, have a quiet dinner somewhere.”

I grimaced.

“Or not. Susan again?”

“No, not Susan again. It’s Nana and my mother. We’re having dinner tonight at the Kanki.”

Her face relaxed, and the transformation was remarkable. She did look cheerful. In fact, she looked happy. I realized suddenly that I’d been waiting for this look to reappear ever since Rosalyn died.

“What are you grinning at?” she said.

“Sorry, I just . . . you’re coming with us. To the Kanki. My mother specifically invited you.”

Abby smiled. “You, me, your mother, and your grandmother. All at the same table?”

“You know it. Unless, that is, you’ll let me sit somewhere else.”

“Not a chance. You’ll be my garlic necklace.”

I buckled my belt and walked through the door Abby held open for me.

“Poppy,” she said. “I’m sorry. I was kind of on edge when you came in this morning.”

“It’s all right.”

“You let me get away with murder. But you don’t need to. Not anymore.”

“We do have a lot to talk about,” I said. “But first, we must dine with the lovely Kim DiMarco. Shall we walk or ride?”

“Walk, I think. If you’re up to it.”

“Lead on. I feel like a million bucks.”

For the fit and healthy, it was a five-minute stroll to the Rathskellar. At our steady but relaxed pace, it took us ten.

“Kim can order a drink,” Abby said. “Noon is not too early for Ms. DiMarco to have a cocktail.”

“She always liked a cocktail,” I agreed. “So, for that matter, do I. About tonight, Abby. My grandmother—she has blind spots. Big, huge, honking blind spots. Some of it’s generational and some of it’s, well, I don’t make excuses. Nana was wonderful to me when I was a small child. She was my rescuer. When Lucky Eddie was a bastard to me, which was most of the time, I could always count on Nana to do or say something that let me know that I was okay, that the problem was him. She wrote me letters, she called me on the phone, she . . .”

“You don’t need to explain or defend,” Abby said. “Your grandmother has flaws. We all do. No one is perfect.” She opened the door to the Rathskellar. “But if she pretends like she doesn’t know who the hell I am, I’m going to knock her block off.”

Kim had three ex-husbands, not two, and no boyfriends on the horizon.

“It’s so great to see you guys,” she said. “I’m sorry you’re here for such a sad reason, though.”

She reached a pudgy hand across the table and patted me kindly. She’d put on about twenty pounds since high school, most of it in her breasts and hips. As far as I was concerned, it only made her more attractive. Kim DiMarco, now DiMarco-Andrews-Stewart-Cooke, had a pleasant, open face. Her bright green eyes, no longer masked by corrective lenses, were framed by long dark lashes. She’d had laser eye surgery—best four thousand dollars she’d ever spent, she said. As I watched her, I felt a familiar wave of attraction sweep up from the pit of my stomach. Kim could have seduced the chair she was sitting on. She pulsed with good humor and charm, and she interacted with everything and everyone with an animal sexuality that wasn’t so much aggressive as inevitable. I reacted to it the same way I reacted to a warm, sunny day, soaking it up and enjoying it for what it was, a gift of nature.

“It must be hard,” she went on. “I know you and your grandfather were estranged.”

Estranged. Were we? I’d seen him twice during the last ten years, once when I was delegated to make sure that he arrived on time and sober to my cousin Sammy’s wedding, and then again a few years later when I went with my mother and Nana to visit him in the nursing home. We took him out to lunch, to some barbecue place about half a mile down the road. I asked him what he wanted, and he mumbled something that my mother interpreted as fried chicken. He’d lost his false teeth, having wrapped them in a Kleenex one night and thrown them away, but that didn’t stop him from tearing into a drumstick and gnawing it down to the bone. I didn’t ask any more questions. He knew who I was—he seemed mildly pleased to see me—but the spark of personality was gone. My grandfather, the Hunter Bartholomew I’d known, had been dead for much longer than a decade. I tried and failed to pinpoint the exact moment when he’d died. He’d died drop by drop, like Chinese water torture, drowning my awareness of him as a separate, sentient human being. Now he seemed like someone I’d dreamt up.

I made each decision about his care as it became necessary, and I had nothing but support from my mother and Nana. I was here for a reason. I was here to pull the plug. Everyone approved—Abby, the doctors, my mother, and Aunt Dot. Dot had trooped into the hospital room just a few hours ago, patted Hunter’s leg, and said, “Well, I guess it’s his time.” We were all agreed; he was going to die. If I’d said, “Now it’s time to put the pillow over his face,” I don’t think anyone would have stopped me.

“We had a complicated relationship,” I said.

Kim laughed. “Is there any other kind? My oldest is thirteen and precocious as hell. She’s had little boyfriends since she was in kindergarten. Now, she wants to date. I tell her she can date when she has her Ph. D. and not before.”

The waitress came to take our order. She didn’t look old enough to drive a car, much less work in a restaurant that served alcohol. I wondered when I’d gotten old enough to notice how young other people looked.

“The Greek burger, please. And could I have a side salad instead of fries?”

“The same for me,” Abby said. “Only I want the fries and the salad.”

“I’ll have the Mousetrap,” Kim said. “I never eat anything else here,” she told us when the waitress had gone. “In all the years I’ve been coming here, I always think, this time I’ll have the Greek burger or the Provençal sandwich, but I never do. I get the Mousetrap, which is basically just an overpriced grilled cheese. Force of habit, I suppose.”

“I love this place,” Abby said. “I think I’ve sat at every table in here and had every kind of conversation. We were having dinner here when Rosalyn asked me to live with her. I was eating seafood fettuccine and she was drinking this ridiculous drink called a Scarlett O’Hara, bourbon and cranberry juice with a maraschino cherry. I had a sip. It tasted like cough medicine.”

Abby and I rarely spoke about Rosalyn. We didn’t avoid the subject—if she came up naturally in the course of conversation, we didn’t flinch or begin talking about something else—but neither of us mentioned her death or its aftermath with any apparent deliberation. Sometimes I wanted to make a point of talking about Rosalyn. I wanted to say something that would let Abby know that I no longer believed that she was going to crack up and step aside, that I knew she was healthy again, changed but intact.

“How was your visit with her sister yesterday?” Kim asked.

“Good,” Abby said. “They were close. Vivian was the only one of her sisters Rosalyn could talk to about the cancer. She listened, she didn’t turn away or, worse, put on a happy face. This is the first time I’ve seen her since the funeral. We went to Duke Gardens and walked around. Some of the plants were in bloom. Most were just beginning to bud out. Vivian has Rosalyn’s ashes. She wants me to take them.”

The waitress brought our sandwiches. She’d given Abby and me both French fries and forgotten our salads. Abby didn’t seem to notice. I poured ketchup onto my plate and made the best of it.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I think I’ll take them,” she said.

“You could sprinkle them somewhere pretty,” Kim suggested. “Somewhere that meant a lot to the two of you.”

“But not here,” Abby replied. “I don’t think the Rathskellar would go for that.”

Chapter Nineteen

Kim told us about her daughter, Tory, and her son, Justin. Tory was a freshman at our high school alma mater.

“She’s terrible in math,” Kim said. “Even simple algebra. She wants to be a poet, dresses in black with white makeup all over her face. She looks like that guy from The Cure. What was his name?”

“Robert Smith.”

“That’s it. Although I suppose she’s trying to look like someone else, God knows who. I feel so out of it sometimes. When did we switch from MTV to VH1?”