Madly (New York 2)

“Like hold your hand.”

“Yeah. Or, say, compliment my clothes. And even before Matt, actually. I had a few boyfriends in college and high school. None of them were big hand holders. Did you and Rosemary hold hands?”

He glanced at her, then at their joined fingers. “Once upon a time.”

“Long ago and far away, huh?”

She felt his shrug in her own shoulder. “I wouldn’t have wanted to hold my hand either, by the end.”

In the too bright sunlight, under the trees, holding his hand, she watched his face. Sorrow, and reproach, and then something like acceptance.

“I think the main thing divorce has taught me is how little I want to put up with sadness,” he said. “My own, or the sadness of the people I love. There’s not enough time in life to be miserable, and let misery make us mean.” He swung her arm with his, forward and back. “It’s better to hold hands.”

They did, all the way to the Irish Hunger Memorial: a perfect little jewel of New York that she’d never heard of and never would have discovered without Winston to guide her there.

It was a small stone cottage set on a small green hill, a fallow potato field, a green space in the city, a piece of public art.

It was a place for walking around on, for thinkin

g about loss, and death, and what life is supposed to be worth.

They walked over it together, and he held her hand.

Chapter 18

Beatrice stood with her right foot out of her sandal, the bare sole balanced against her inner left calf, her eyes cast to the ceiling.

Her thinking pose. Rosemary had once been called to the headmaster’s office at Bea’s school to discuss the disruption their eleven-year-old daughter caused when she insisted on standing that way during exams.

It’s just how I think, Bea had explained, tearfully, that evening at home.

They were all assembled at her coffeehouse, as she’d ordered. He’d had to promise Chasity a particularly generous bonus next quarter in order to obtain her consent to turn up at such a nontraditional venue, and he’d worked himself up worrying over how she would get here and whether she’d be able to navigate the tables and foot traffic in her wheelchair, when of course it turned out she was perfectly competent to handle all the arrangements without his assistance. They’d taken over one corner of the shop, spread out among a flowered sofa in a terrible state of disrepair, two stained leather wingback chairs, and a table with only three legs.

“No, you’re right, I’m sure you are,” Bea said to Nev. “But I do think we can bust this thing open if we put our heads together. I have this friend—Hang on. I’ve got a customer.”

She bustled to her spot behind the counter, and the silence held for a moment as they watched her. It had been like this for twenty minutes of stop-and-start conversation. He thought perhaps she’d be fired if her employer found out how she was conducting business during her shift.

On the other hand, none of her customers had complained. They all seemed to find her a perfectly adequate barista.

Allie shifted on the davenport beside him, slid out of her shoes and crossed her legs one over the other to settle more comfortably on the cushion.

Twenty-six years old. It had been a long time since he was capable of sitting comfortably in that position, even if the whim had struck him to do so. Which it had not.

She dipped her head to rest it on his shoulder for a moment. When he looked at her, she smiled the smile of a woman who’d spent nearly two hours wandering in the heat holding his hand, and he wanted to order Bea to bring her another iced tea, but he left it alone.

Whenever he glanced in the direction of May, sitting at the table, she was staring at him.

Cath opened the toggle on a nylon bag suspended from her wrist, fussed in it for a moment, and withdrew a tangled string tube attached to a pair of knitting needles.

“Ooh, what are you making?” Allie asked.

“Stockings. I hope they’ll be stockings, anyway, they’re a right bitch, and if I mess up the lace pattern even a little bit, it shows. I had to frog eighteen inches last week.”

Allie made a face like sucking lemons. “Balls to that.”

“Right? But I want the stockings, so it’s the price I’m willing to pay.”

“I have a friend on Etsy who sells hand-knit stockings for a small fortune. She hires knitters from India to help her fill the orders, and every time they get behind on production, she just raises the price.”