“Occupational hazard. So? Did you buy the book?”
“Oh, yes,” Leslie said. “I did.”
When she didn’t say any more, Ellie pushed. “Are you going to tell us about it?”
Leslie reached to the floor to retrieve the package. When she’d finally gone to the cash register, the shopkeeper hadn’t said a word about the fact that she’d been sitting in the back of his store for about three hours. He obviously wasn’t the type of man to post No Loitering signs.
He’d just smiled at her, taken the ridiculously low price of three dollars that was marked in the front of the book, and told her that he hoped she’d enjoy it.
Now, Leslie opened the little brown bag and put the book on the table. “It’s about a Victorian woman who traveled around the world,” Leslie said. “She had several affairs but one longtime love, a man she had been engaged to when she was eighteen, but she left him to travel the world alone.”
“Sounds like you,” Ellie said, reaching for the book.
“Not quite,” Leslie said quickly, hoping she sounded as though she hadn’t thought of that idea. “I left, but I returned.”
“Would you do it again?” Madison asked as she popped something fried into her mouth. She really did eat more than Ellie and Leslie combined.
“You mean, leave Alan?”
“No. Go back to him. If you had to do it over again, would you leave New York and go back to your hometown boy?”
Leslie smiled. “Let’s just say that New York wasn’t going to throw open its doors for a dancer of my caliber. And I never had talent for anything else.”
“That’s what I thought while I was in art school,” Ellie said. “I lived, breathed, ate art. It was everything to me, but look at me now.” She had been about to bite into a fried clam, but instead she dropped it back into the paper container. “Maybe that was a bad choice of words. Don’t look at me now but look at me four years ago.”
“You mean when you were married to a man who was sick with jealousy over you?” Madison asked as she picked up the clam Ellie had put back.
Ellie looked at Leslie. “She has a streak of pure mean in her, doesn’t she?”
Leslie avoided both questions, the personal one from Madison and the rhetorical one from Ellie. “What about you?” she asked Madison. “If you had to do it all over again, what would you do?”
Before she could answer, Ellie said, “With or without knowledge of what’s happened since?”
“What do you mean?” Leslie asked.
“If you’re suddenly—speaking as a writer, that is—transported back in time and asked the same question as you were then, you’d probably make the same decision. Unless you had different knowledge, that is.”
Madison raised her eyebrows. “So you’re asking me if, knowing how it all turned out, I would take Roger’s call, listen to him beg me to return to Montana to nurse him back to health, then do it?”
“That’s exactly what I’m asking,” Ellie said. “Actually, it’s what you were asking since you started this.”
“Let me think about that,” Madison said sarcastically. “Roger or a life.” She lifted her hands as though they were a balance scale. “Roger. Life. Hmmm. Which way should I go?”
Leslie laughed. “You two have it easy. You know which way you’d go. Madison would stay in New York and become a supermodel before supermodels were invented. And, Ellie, you’d start writing because you’d know that’s where your real talent is. But with me . . . What choices did I have?”
“To meet men other than Alan,” Ellie answered instantly. “You don’t even know what’s out there.”
“Roger and Martin,” Leslie shot back at her.
Ellie laughed. “You d
o have a point.”
Madison twirled her fork in a pile of coleslaw on her plate. “But the men out there aren’t all bad,” she said quietly. “Thomas was out there.”
The way she said “was” made the other two women unable to say anything as they remembered his death.
Madison looked up at Leslie. “I’d go find Thomas,” she said. When the other two looked shocked, she gave them a look of disgust. “No, not like that. Not a séance! I thought we were talking about having a second chance. If I could go back to say, that day the three of us first met, and I knew what I do now, I’d do what I could to find Thomas. I don’t think he was in medical school, then but maybe . . .” Trailing off, she looked down at her plate.