Madeline appeared behind her, wearing a red-and-white polka-dotted 1950s-style dress with a full skirt. Her hair was pulled up in a swinging ponytail.
“Jane! Happy New Year! How are you? It’s so lovely to see you. Look, my ankle is all healed! Although you’ll be pleased to see I’m wearing flat shoes.”
She stood on one foot and twirled her ankle, showing off a sparkly red ballet shoe.
“They’re like Dorothy’s ruby slippers,” said Jane, handing Madeline the muffins.
“Exactly, don’t you love them?” said Madeline. She unpeeled the lid of the container. “Good Lord. Don’t tell me you baked these?”
“I did,” said Jane. She could hear Ziggy’s laughter from somewhere upstairs. Her heart lifted at the sound.
“Look at you, with freshly baked muffins, and I’m the one dressed like a 1950s housewife,” said Madeline. “I love the idea of baking, but then I can’t seem to make it a reality, I never seem to have all the ingredients. How do you manage to have all that flour and sugar and, I don’t know, vanilla extract?”
“Well,” said Jane, “I buy them. From this place called a supermarket.”
“I suppose you make a list,” said Madeline. “And then you remember to take the list with you.”
Jane saw that Madeline’s feelings about Jane’s baking were similar to Jane’s feelings about Madeline’s accessories: confused admiration for an exotic behavior.
“Celeste and the boys are coming today. She’ll hoover up those muffins of yours. Tea or coffee? We’d better not have champagne every time we meet, although I could be convinced. Got anything to celebrate?”
Madeline led her into a big combined kitchen and living area.
“Nothing to celebrate,” said Jane. “Just ordinary tea would be great.”
“So how did the move go?” asked Madeline. “We were away up the coast when you were moving, otherwise I would have offered Ed to help you. I’m always offering him up as a mover. He loves it.”
“Seriously?”
“No, no. He hates it. He gets so cross with me. He says, ‘I’m not an appliance you can loan out!’” She put on a deep voice to imitate her husband as she switched the kettle on, her ponytail swinging. “But you know, he pays money to lift weights at the gym, so why not lift a few boxes for free? Have a seat. Sorry about the mess.”
Jane sat down at a long timber table covered with the detritus of family life: ballerina stickers, a novel facedown, sunscreen, keys, some sort of electronic toy, an airplane made out of Legos.
“My family helped me move,” said Jane. “There are a lot of stairs. Everyone was kind of mad at me, but they’re the ones who never let me pay for movers.”
(“If I’m lugging this freakin’ refrigerator back down these stairs in six months’ time, then I’ll—” her brother had said.)
“Milk? Sugar?” asked Madeline as she dunked tea bags.
“Neither, just black. Um, I saw one of those kindergarten mothers this morning,” Jane told Madeline. She wanted to bring up the subject of the orientation day while Ziggy wasn’t in the room. “At the gas station. I think she pretended not to see me.”
She didn’t think it. She knew it. The woman had snapped her head in the other direction so fast, it was like she’d been slapped.
“Oh, really?” Madeline sounded amused. She helped herself to a muffin. “Which one? Do you remember her name?”
“Harper,” said Jane. “I’m pretty sure it was Harper. I remember I called her Hovering Harper to myself because she seemed to hover about Renata all the time. She’s one of your Blond Bobs, I think, with a long droopy face. Kind of like a basset hound.”
Madeline chortled. “That’s Harper exactly. Yes, she’s very good friends with Renata, and she’s bizarrely proud about it, as if Renata is some sort of celebrity. She always needs to let you know that she and Renata see each other socially. ‘Oh, we all had a marvelous night at some marvelous restaurant.’” She took a bite of her muffin.
“I guess that’s why Harper doesn’t want to know me then,” said Jane. “Because of what happened—”
“Jane,” interrupted Madeline. “This muffin is . . . magnificent.”
Jane smiled at Madeline’s amazed face. There was a crumb on her nose.
“Thanks, I can give you the recipe if you—”
“Oh, Lord, I don’t want the recipe, I just want the muffins.” Madeline took a big sip of her tea. “You know what? Where’s my phone? I’m going to text Harper right now and demand to know why she pretended not to see my new muffin-baking friend today.”
“Don’t you dare!” said Jane. Madeline, she realized, was one of those slightly dangerous people who jumped right in defending their friends and stirred up far bigger waves than the first tiny ripple.
“Well, I won’t have it,” said Madeline. “If those women give you a hard time over what happened at orientation, I’ll be furious. It could happen to anyone.”
“I would have made Ziggy apologize,” said Jane. She needed to make it clear to Madeline that she was the sort of mother who made her child say sorry. “I believed him when he said he didn’t do it.”
“Of course you did,” said Madeline. “I’m sure he didn’t do it. He seems like a gentle child.”
“I’m one hundred percent positive,” said Jane. “Well, I’m ninety-nine percent positive. I’m . . .”
She stopped and swallowed because she was suddenly feeling an overwhelming desire to explain her doubts to Madeline. To tell her exactly what that 1 percent of doubt represented. To just . . . say it. To turn it into a story she’d never shared with anyone. To package it up into an incident with a beginning, a middle and an end.
It was a beautiful, warm spring night in October. Jasmine in the air. I had terrible hay fever. Scratchy throat. Itchy eyes.
She could just talk without thinking about it, without feeling it, until the story was done.
And then perhaps Madeline would say in her definite, don’t-argue manner: Oh, you mustn’t worry about that, Jane. That’s of no consequence! Ziggy is exactly who you think he is. You are his mother. You know him.