“French? Have you been to Paris? I was there with my grandmother, but she assigned a special guide to take me around while she did business. I liked what I saw, but I hated all the boring things he told me. We went to great restaurants, but I didn’t go up the Eiffel Tower or go on the big Ferris wheel. Did you?”
“Actually, no,” I said. “I was too young at the time to appreciate most of it. Someday I’ll go back.”
“I wish I could go with someone like you and not a professional guide.”
“Maybe someday.”
“You really think so?”
“Who knows? Two days ago, I could never even imagine I’d be here in this beautiful place talking to you, right?”
“Right.” She thought a moment and then lost her smile as if it literally evaporated. “I’d be terrible to travel with. I’d slow anyone down, and I’d be gawking at everyone and everything, and everyone would gawk at me. And there is so much I don’t know about . . . the real world,” she said. “You’d hate it.”
“I would not, and you will learn everything you have to learn about the real world, as you call it.”
She shrugged. “Once, when I described all the things I wanted to do, my grandmother said, ‘Just be grateful for tomorrow, Sheena.’ That was right after I was very sick, but I never forgot it. I hate being grateful for tomorrow. Only very old people are grateful for tomorrow, right?”
“No. We should all be grateful for tomorrow,” I told her, “sick or not.”
She smiled again. “I drink some wine, whatever my grandmother says I should, but honestly, I don’t know the difference between one or the other.”
“No one has ever offered to teach you?”
She shook her head.
“Perhaps one day, I’ll be able to show you what I know. If I ever get real time off, maybe we can have our own special lunch or dinner.”
“Would you?” she said, her face bursting into a smile that reminded me of Emmie’s smile when she opened her birthday presents. “That would be wonderful. I always feel so silly when the waiter asks me what wine I would like. Grandmother orders quickly for me, of course, but someday, I might go to a restaurant without her.”
“You never have?”
“No. There’s never been anyone else for me to go with. I certainly wouldn’t go with Mrs. Pratt. She makes me nervous. Does she make you nervous?”
“I suspect she made her own mother nervous the day she was born,” I said, and Sheena laughed.
I worked on my face.
“Did you always know how to make up your face?” she asked.
“Not like this. But I’m learning.”
“I really like what was done to your hair. I wish mine was done the same way.”
“Doesn’t your grandmother permit the beautician to do your hair, too?”
She shook her head.
How could that possibly be a no-no? Sheena lived here, but somehow Mrs. Brittany kept her sheltered from what was really happening. It made me wonder how much her granddaughter did know about the
escort business.
“I mean, she’ll take me someplace to have it cut and styled when she thinks it needs to be.”
“Not when you think it needs to be?”
“Oh, my grandmother knows so much more than I do about all that. She’s a very sophisticated, worldly woman. She knows princes, queens, kings, and senators.”
I nodded and rose to slip out of my bra and panties and put on my pajamas.