Текст книги "Her Name Is Rose: A Novel"

Автор книги: Christine Breen

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

Nine

Rose is woken by the seagulls, or is it her phone squawking? She gets up quickly. What time is it? What day is it? Her head hurts. Pages of sheet music on the music stand turn, others on the floor scurry, stirred by the wind as she opens the curtains and the door to a bright blue noon. Her phone beeps. She’s had several missed calls from Roger. Feck. She doesn’t want to speak to him.

Rose steps out to the balcony and her phone rings again. She lets it, considers letting it ring out, then snaps it on.

“Rose! I’d tried to reach you all day yesterday! Are you all right?” She hears Roger’s exasperated breath. “I was about to phone your mother, but I didn’t have her number. Where have you been? I need to explain. I need to apologize…”

The sun is bright in her eyes and she winces, then thinks of the lyric about the sun and lemon drops.

“Rose? Rose, are you there?”

Her eyes drink in the trees and redbrick buildings in front of her. A barge cuts along through the film of silken green algae on the canal. “I’m here,” she says quietly.

“The master class. It’s important that we straighten this out.”

Rose doesn’t say anything. She watches the wake of the barge, the ruffled silk return to smooth.

“It’s my daughter. Victoria. She came to see me in London. Her mother and I, we’re divorced. Victoria’s a musician, too … in New York. She came to tell me she’s quitting. Quitting! I tried to talk her out of it, yesterday. But she wouldn’t hear of it. She says it’s too fucking hard. After all that work, she wants to toss it away. She’s not like you, she has to work for her talent. You’ve got heaps of talent. A gift that can’t be taught.”

Rose listens but says nothing. A gift that can’t be taught.

“Rose? Are you hearing me?”

“Yes.” The canal is sour this morning. It happens in the heat. Effluent waves lap at the brickwork.

“I was hard on you, I admit. I’m sorry, Rose. Really sorry, hey? It wasn’t you. I was thinking of Victoria,” he says. “Listen, I’m taking a cab to Primrose Hill. Meet me at The Engineer in an hour and we’ll have a proper chat about it. Okay?”

“Okay, Roger. Maybe.”

On her small smartphone, Rose presses “End.” The phone in her hand feels heavy and she wants to drop it. She lowers her arm over the balcony but as she does, just seconds later, the phone rings again and she speaks, “Roger, I said I’ll think about it, o—”

“Rose … Rose Bowen?”

Rose doesn’t recognize the man’s voice.

“This is Conor. Conor Flynn.”

Her chin tucked, her eyes closed, Rose loses her concentration. “Conor?”

“Yeah. How are you?”

“Um … not great actually. I can’t talk now.”

“I thought not. I had an idea you might be feeling … well, pretty shit—”

“What?”

“Because, like, maybe, you lost something?”

“Oh God…!”

“Only you didn’t exactly lose it, is how I heard—”

“Conor, tell me.” Rose spins around on her balcony, loses her balance, and nearly drops the phone. Her left hand comes to join the right one holding it. She’s trembling.

“I got a call from this guy. A really nice guy, apparently, who saw you on the tube Tuesday night. He said you left your violin case on the seat and walked off. He said you stood watching as the train pulled away. He got off at the next station and went back to your stop. And—”

“Conor!”

“It’s all right … he’s got it. Or he did have it, I mean.”

“What…?” Rose’s voice skirls an octave higher.

“Easy … It’s all right, Rosie.”

He calls her Rosie. It registers like harmonics in her head. Rosie.

“What do you mean … he had it?”

“Well … he had it, and now…” Conor pauses. “It’s like this, if you want it, you have to come back to Clare. It’s on its way home. I asked him to courier it back, back to the wesshhtt, as we say. Like an Irish boomerang. It should arrive by Friday.”

Rose is silent. Tears fall down her cheeks, slipping down her chin. She slumps to a chair.

“I’m sorry,” Conor says, feeling her upset, “it’s not funny.”

For a long moment neither of them speaks. Finally Conor asks, “Rosie, what’s going on?”

She can just about get the words out. “I’ll come home.” She falls silent then. The Canal Club below at the Pirate Castle is setting up for the trip to Little Venice farther down the canal. Life jackets adjusted, the group assembles and slips into colored canoes. As they paddle away, Rose thinks about the man who saved her violin. He’d have found Conor’s cards inside the velvet box in her case.

She whispers his name. “Conor?”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

*   *   *

On Saturday, Rose is in Heathrow about to board the midday flight to Shannon. She rings her mother, again, for the third time that day, but doesn’t get her. She leaves Iris two messages, on cell and home phones, then she texts her mother’s friend.

Hi Tess, Can’t reach Mum. Pls, PLS, can u pick me up @ SNN 4 2day? :-) xx Rosie

She briefly thinks of how she had stood Roger up, sees him sitting in The Engineer waiting for her. One part of her would have liked to have left him there forever, but in the end she had done the right thing and texted him to say she’d gone home to Ireland and she’d be in touch next week.

And PS … good luck with Victoria. And PPS … Trust in the universe, Roger.

She’d left him a smiley face. :)

When Rose walks through the arrival doors, Tess is there waiting. Two of her boys are with her, but the smile on Tess’s face isn’t in sync with her eyes.

“There’s Rosie! Hey, Rosie!” The boys run when they see her and she greets them each by bending to their height, letting go her bag, and hugging them gently. She says, “Thanks for picking me up!” Then, standing to face Tess with her back to the boys, who scramble to take her bag, she says, “Where’s Mum?”

“A bit of a mystery that, but listen, pet, don’t worry. I’m certain she’s fine.”

“What do you mean? Fine? Is she not at home?”

“No.”

Rose stops. “I don’t get it. Where is she?”

“I don’t know.” Tess puts her hand on Rose’s back and guides her forward. “But knowing your mother, she could be off visiting some garden in Dublin or up north for a few days, and has forgot her phone.”

Rose isn’t convinced.

“Don’t worry. I saw her on Monday night. She was fine.” They walk out into the windy parking lot of the airport. “Was she expecting you home?”

“No. She thinks I’ve been preparing for a master class with my tutor.”

“Oh. Right.” Tess gives her a doubtful look. “Well, then, I hope it’s going well.”

Rose precludes further conversation on the subject by turning to the boys and asking how their soccer training is going.

They reach the car and load up, boys in the back, suitcase in between, Rose in front. In a panic, Tess shouts, “Where’s your fiddle? Oh God, did you leave it on the plane?”

“No, no. I didn’t. It’s all right.”

Tess glances at Rose, her eyebrows raise, her mouth opens about to say something more but then stops. “O … kay.”

“It’s a long story,” Rose says.

“Fab. I love long stories. So, will I take you home, or do you want to stay with us?”

“Home, please. Okay?”

*   *   *

Driving from Shannon to Ashwood under the ceiling of the western sky, violet blue and cloudless, Rose looks to the hills, green and rolling and dotted white with sheep and brown with cattle. They’re all moving in one direction, like followers congregating. Clare is a place Rose realizes she misses only when she returns. Then it hits her. Home. She carries it deep inside and, like a singing bowl, it rings in her whole being once the western wind strokes her face.

When they pull into the drive, Cicero meets them. The cat seems hungry and meows loudly. Tess retrieves the hidden key under the blue pot and lets them all in. The boys run into the kitchen and out again and Tess switches on the heat. Even though it’s summer, a two-hundred-year-old cottage with three-foot-thick walls is cold when it’s been vacant for more than a day. Rose opens the window to feed the cat on the outside sill. The flowers in pots along the front of the house are wilting. What the hell? She’s looks with fear to Tess, who’s listening to a message from a missed call on her cell phone.

“A client, Rose, not your mum. Sorry, pet.”

“Tess?”

“I know … I know how it looks, but—”

“But nothing! She should have rung by now. I’ve left her half a dozen messages since Thursday.”

Rose walks toward the doors that lead to the garden.

“Where are you going?”

“Check the post. See how many days she’s been gone.”

In less than a minute Rose returns. “What’s this?” she asks. It’s an envelope with a Breast Clinic logo. “What’s going on, Tess?”

Tess is skilled at therapeutics and doesn’t rattle easily but now, as Rose watches, the face of her mother’s best friend reveals concern. In a firm voice, Tess tells her sons to get back into the car and wait for her there. “I’ll be along in a minute.” They obey and the women watch from the window as the boys run to the car, chasing but without fuss.

“It’s probably nothing. Probably just a routine letter suggesting your mum make an appointment for a mammogram.”

“Will we open it?”

“Um … I don’t know, really. It’s … it’s addressed to your mum—”

Rose tears the envelope and reads:

Dear Mrs. Bowen,

We would like to remind you of your follow-up appointment at Breast Clinic on 12 June. We were unable to reach you by telephone or e-mail to confirm. Please contact the department to reschedule if you were unable to attend. As stated in the previous letter, in the majority of cases, women have nothing to fear, but it is vital you undergo an ultrasound, results of which the consultant will discuss with you on the day. But nevertheless, it is important you attend in the event you need a biopsy procedure …

Rose stops reading and looks to Tess. “Did you know about this? Is Mum all right? The appointment was for yesterday. Look at the date.”

“I see.” Tess shakes her head. “The truth is, I don’t know. I mean, I did know she had a follow-up appointment.” Tess takes Rose by the arm and leads her to the sofa, the one that faces the back garden where an iron table and two chairs cast shadows in the fading light. “Sit down. Let’s talk this through.”

“Just tell me.” Rose’s lips tremble.

“Two weeks ago, Iris went for a routine mammogram.”

“Go on.”

“That’s it. She was called back for a follow-up. They sometimes do that. That’s all. From that letter it seems she didn’t confirm her follow-up—”

“Confirm her appointment? She missed her appointment!”

“I know. She missed it. But I trust her. Really, I don’t think there is anything to worry about. Something must have come up. I know your mum won’t ignore it.”

“Then, where is she?”

Tess looks backward through the kitchen window to where the boys are chasing the cat around the car. “Listen, pet, I’ll pop over home quickly and drop the boys. Then I’ll be straight back. I’ll bring some groceries.” Tess rises and places her hand on Rose’s and kisses the top of her head. “You’ll be all right till then?” Tess gives Rose one long look. “Okay?”

Rose wants to believe everything is all right. It must be. If not, that would be too cruel. God isn’t like that. Tess is right, her mum probably forgot her phone. Right? And the follow-up is routine. That’s it. It’s so like Iris to neglect herself, she thinks. Ever since her father died. She walks into her mother’s garden, intense with twilight. She’s almost forgotten how bright it is in the evenings in the west of Ireland. She gets the hose and traipses across the front of the house to water the flowerpots for something to do while she waits. Iris’s garden is aglow with color. Names escape her, but there are blue, star-shaped flowers and red, pokerlike flowers and flat discs of yellow on silvery stalks. Cicero paces across the uncut lawn and nudges her. Rose picks him up and they watch the swallows dart in and out of the stone cabin’s doorless doorway. She sits at the wooden table under the porch for a while.

Then from a distance the sound of a motor rumbles on the narrow lane that runs in front of the garden. That was quick. She’s dying for a cup of tea and something to eat. And maybe Tess has news. Wherever Iris has gone, she’s taken the car. A blur of red breezes past the gaps in the hedgerow. A motor stops, a door clunks open and closes, and in the cabin’s dark doorway a figure stands.

Conor Flynn is carrying a violin case. He walks straight toward her, holding the violin over his head. “It arrived yesterday, safe and sound, Rosie girl.”

Rose reaches for it. Her hair brushes his face. He holds it a moment higher, then lowers it a bit over her head as if he’s about to embrace her but loses confidence at the last moment and gives it to her.

“Thank you,” Rose says and holds the case against her chest like it’s a baby.

He seems different, she thinks. He’s grown older, but still wearing that funny wooly hat. Then she realizes. “You cut your hair?”

“Yeah, too many bad hair days. Always bringing too much sea home with me. The wood didn’t like it.”

Rose doesn’t understand.

“Surfing was playing havoc with my hair and my workshop.” He laughs, big and open and musical like a major C.

Rose sighs.

“What?” Conor asks. “Tell me you don’t like surfers.”

“I’ve only met one and the jury’s not totally in on him yet.”

“A heartbreaker?”

“Something like that.”

The sun has sunk below the tree line and half the garden is in cool shadow. Midges emerge from the grass. Rose and Conor stand like strangers on a train waiting for that moment when a jolt will throw them together or apart. It’s Rose’s move. It’s her house. It’s her violin. The least she can do is invite him in.

“May I?” he asks once inside the kitchen, and takes out the violin before she can answer. He tunes it, takes the bow up, and begins to play an Irish reel. He ornaments it like a seasoned player with slides and rolls and triple notes.

“You never said.”

“What?” He stops.

“You’re a good fiddler.”

“There’s lots about me you don’t know.” Blue eyes dart from his bow hand to her face, then he continues playing. Music fills the room. It feels like the old walls resonate and release stored memories of bodhráns and spoons and ancient sounds of céilis and seisiúns that happened in the old cottage long before Rose came.

“A gift that can’t be taught,” she says quietly.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Conor hands her the violin. “Why did you leave it on the tube?”

She stares beyond him and out the window to the blue-flowered vine climbing on the cabin door. She remembers when she and her father painted that door. “To see if it would come back to me.”

“Why?”

Rose’s voice quivers when she says, “I was thinking of giving up.”

He takes this in but doesn’t say anything. The evening is gathering into night outside.

“I’m tired.”

“Sure,” Conor says. “I’ll get going, then.” He rises.

“I didn’t mean that. I mean. Oh. How come life can be so messy all of a sudden?” Her face is flushed and she pushes back her dark hair with both hands. Today it has a bit of a curl to it. She flops down into a chair.

“Tell me,” he says.

She looks at him, she looks at the blue eyes that seem full of understanding then, and so she does. She explains it all to him. The master class. Roger. Her mother gone missing. The letter. “Tess thinks that she’s gone visiting a garden somewhere and doesn’t have her phone with her. I don’t know. I thought she’d have rung me by now. It’s just not like her.”

“I’m sure it’ll be all right,” he says.

Rose rises quickly. “Why does everybody say that? How do you know? How does anyone know?” She paces. “And where’s Tess! She said she’d be right back!” She crosses to the counter and sees for the first time shriveled petals of red poppies and the naked stems with their bulbous seed pods. She bursts like a rain cloud and cries.

Conor goes to her, holds her, and she drops her head against his heart.

*   *   *

A little later Tess does arrive. Rose is standing, playing her violin, and Conor is beside her. A swath of light from the window catches them. Tess looks at Conor, who rises and introduces himself.

“Any news?” Rose asks. The anxiety makes her eyes look frightened.

“Actually, yes,” Tess says, still looking at Conor, trying to work out who the stranger is. “Your mum’s in Boston.”

“What?”

“I know. Crazy Iris.”

“A long way to go to visit a garden,” Conor says. He takes a sudden in-breath and turns to Rose. “Her phone mightn’t work there.”

“Right. I told her you were home and—” Tess says.

“Is she okay?”

“Oh yes, Rose. Sorry. She’s fine! Absolutely fine.” Tess takes her hand. “She’s going to ring you now. On the home phone from her hotel. When I told her you were home she was quite worried. Something about a big master class you are due to have next week?”

Rose nods. “Yeah, it was Tuesday. It got moved up and I didn’t tell her. But what did she say about the letter? And the appointment?”

“She didn’t and I didn’t—” Tess is cut short because just then the phone rings.

All three look to it.

Ten

The next time Hector saw Iris it was the morning after the concert and she was sitting on a bench in the community gardens of Titus Sparrow Park. Sunlight was hitting her hair. Hector noted that she looked sad, but he was so wrapped up in figuring how best to present himself that he didn’t quite register the white in her hand was a tissue. He wasn’t ready to officially introduce himself and so crossed the street and kept walking. His pace quickened. When he reached the end of the block, he veered right toward the river.

The words to “Down to the River to Pray” were running in his head. After about ten minutes he arrived on the banks of the Charles. He stopped, faced the river, sank back into his heels in a sort of Standing Tree meditation, and closed his eyes, needing grounding and inspiration and awaiting it like some thirsty, rooted thing. A breeze blew hard.

He thought about his vision the night of the concert of returning the fallen envelope like some knight in shining armor and how it had not in fact materialized. In meditation, more visions of himself, winged and angelic, appeared. And why not? he suddenly thought. Why couldn’t he have the angel’s part? Calm down, Hector. Breathe.

It was like the start of a new composition where he had a musical phrase, a cluster of notes, but no idea how to continue or in which key to begin, although he knew it was a minor, maybe D or G. Finally, he broke his pose and jogged along the esplanade. Sailboats on the black ripple water circled every which way, their white triangles flapping like swans’ wings. The heat of another scorcher sucked up into itself the cool greenness of the grass and in the sky bunches of clouds, staccatolike, shielded the sun periodically. He jogged for about a mile but when he couldn’t discharge his restlessness, he decided to return to the South End to discuss it all with Grace.

Grace, dressed in her tennis gear, met him at the front door. She spoke first. “Hector, Hector, we’ve got a problem.”

“Tell me about it!”

“No, really. It’s Mrs. Bowen … Iris.”

“Yeah, I know. I saw her in the gardens sitting—”

“No, she’s back. She’s in the kitchen now. Her cell phone isn’t working so I told her to use my landline. I’ve just heard her speaking with someone. Someone named Tess. When she hung up she was pacing around the kitchen. I’m afraid whatever this Tess said has upset her.” Grace looked at him with those nut brown eyes and whispered, “I think she’s crying, Hector.”

Grace led him into her office where there was a second door into the kitchen. Iris was on the phone again and they could hear her clearly.

“Hello, honey.”

There was a long pause.

Then they heard a kitchen chair scrape against the floor. “Oh, Rosie … honey … I’m so sorry. I thought your master class was next week. Why didn’t you tell me it was changed? Honey? How awful. I would have come. I wanted to come. Rose…” Several long silences followed, punctuated by Iris’s sighs. “Tell me what happened.”

“She’s speaking with someone named Rosie,” whispered Grace.

Under the circumstances it wasn’t right and Hector knew that, but to relieve his own tension he chuckled, “You’re a supersleuth, Grace.”

She shushed him. “Who is Rosie?”

“Sounds like … her daughter?”

Grace’s face lit up in a brief register of understanding but suffused quickly into a frown. Grace and Hector sat side-by-side, listening and half hearing; they were like an old, childless couple, strangers to the language of parental discourse.

From snippets of conversation over the next ten minutes, they pieced together that Iris hadn’t told her daughter she had come to Boston. And that Rose had some kind of master class that seemingly didn’t go well.

“What’s a master class?” Grace whispered.

“Shh.”

“Doesn’t sound good, though, right?”

Hector remembered how Iris had looked the night before, like she was bathed in a quiet sadness, and now whatever was going on was only adding to it. He stood, peeked in through the crack in the door. Sitting, her hand like a vise gripping her forehead, shielding her eyes, with her elbow on the table as a fulcrum, Iris rocked from side to side. She was explaining in that soft Irish cadence—music to his ears—that she was in Boston on a gardening gig. She’d got hired last-minute on an assignment for a UK newspaper, so she said, and she’d tried to ring yesterday but her cell phone wasn’t connected to a network. “As soon as I realized I rang you from here where I’m staying, but it didn’t connect. Yes. That’s right, honey. That’s why I rang Tess at home.”

“Gardening assignment? Hector…?”

“I know. I’m thinking, Grace.” A musician friend of Hector’s once told him that it’s the silence in between where the real stuff is going on.

“Oh … you opened it?”

There was silence.

Then Iris said, “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to worry you. Honey?… Don’t cry. Please … Rose? I’m sure it’s nothing. Absolutely. Really, I’ll be fine. I will, I promise. Dr. O’Reilly said I shouldn’t be worried. Honestly. Please don’t worry. Rose?” Pause. Sighs. Iris’s voice dropped lower. “I know. I know it was yesterday. I’ll reschedule as soon as I get home. No. It’s the weekend, I can’t ring now. Okay. Okay. I will. I’ll be home in just a few days. I promise.”

Grace’s mouth dropped open, but she covered the startled sound it made with her hand. She whispered, “Oh dear, this—”

“This is no ordinary conversation between mother and daughter,” Hector said.

“I love you, sweetheart.” Another scrape of the chair sounded against the floor, then a clunk of the phone receiver being replaced. Iris passed by the office on her way upstairs, as if she was trying to be invisible. The sound of her footsteps disappeared and a door closed.

“I should go to her, right?” Grace said.

“And say what? ‘I was being nosy and listened to your conversation’? I don’t think so. No. No, Grace. Here’s what we do. I’ll knock on her door under the pretense of returning the envelope. And see how she is.”

After a few moments Hector went upstairs, but just short of reaching the top step he stopped when he heard weeping. It took him by surprise. It was thoughtless of him, perhaps. He was acting from a cavalier notion that he could rescue Iris. But her crying made it suddenly real. He stood a few moments in the hallway outside her door, the green walls, like a forest, closing in on him. He was lost. Way out of his comfort zone.

He tiptoed on by Iris’s door and went to his own room down the hall. He got a blank piece of staff paper from his sheet music and wrote:

Dear Iris,

He crossed that out and wrote:

Hello Iris,

Crossed that out and wrote:

Dear Mrs. Bowen,

Unsure how to put his feelings into words, he put down the pen. He was a musician, for cripes sake, not a man of letters. Like a tourist in lovelorn territory, he was finding his way alone. He got a fresh piece and started again.

Mrs. Bowen,

Hope you enjoyed the concert last night. Thanks for coming. I was happy to see you there.

Here’s the envelope you dropped in the Mapparium. It fell from your bag. I was just arriving as you were leaving yesterday. I saw it. I saw you.

I hope I’ll see you later …

☺

Hector Sherr

Room 12

P.S. I hope everything’s all right …

He folded the letter around the envelope and held it to his chest. He wanted to kiss it and for a moment he was eleven years old on Valentine’s Day in Woodside Elementary School in California, where he grew up.

Outside Iris’s door Hector stood, listening to the quiet on the other side. He brought his fist to within an inch of the door several times, but in the end lost his courage. Finally, he slid the letter under her door and went downstairs, quickly, blushing like a schoolboy, and flew out onto the street.

Had he been too blunt? P.S. I hope everything’s all right? Would she know they had overheard her? Oh. Now he wished he hadn’t added the P.S. Did he always have to go one step too far?

He crossed the plaza. The splash fountain was turned off but a small crowd sat on the gray lip of the reflecting pool and cooled their feet. Thinking about Iris, about Sparrow in Summer, and listening to the summered voices mixing with the midmorning traffic, he stopped and closed his eyes. There was a kind of odd harmony to it all, rainbow-colored even.

“Mr. Sherr?”

A voice, breathless, was calling from behind him. At first he thought he’d imagined it.

“Mr. Sherr?” He turned. His heart, as if separating from springs, leapt from its held place and zipped toward her. Iris. She was holding his letter.

“Thank you. For your note.”

“Anytime.”

She looked at him with surprise.

“I mean—”

“And for…’ She stopped. Iris smiled weakly and what followed was a long pause when neither of them seemed to know what to do. It was the first time Hector was close to her. Her eyes were very clear, with tiny lines that stretched from the corners to her temples. The crying had only just left them. She had a pale patch of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her hair had been quickly tied up, but strands fell in twirls about her face and neck and she tried to fix them behind her ears. She was in a white cotton blouse and blue jeans. She was gorgeous, he thought. As he looked down he saw she was barefoot.

She turned to go but he caught her arm and blurted, “Stay. Let’s walk. Get a coffee. See the river.” His hands flung to the sides of his head as he stuttered.

Iris didn’t seem to notice his gawkiness, or if she had, it didn’t matter. She looked down to her feet and Hector put his hand on her back and, to his great surprise, she let herself be guided back to Grace’s. While Iris went in to get shoes, Hector waited outside, not wanting to dilute the spell he felt cast under. When she reappeared she was wearing sandals. Sunglasses nestled on top of her head. They walked north and cut through the Prudential Center Plaza, and continued on a few short blocks. Neither of them spoke. They passed onto Gloucester with its ornate streetlamps and old Victorian brownstones with their ancient lead-glass windows and black window frames. Crossing over Comm Ave., the street widened into two-way traffic and was divided down the middle by a tree-lined pedestrian walk. Iris looked into the shaded tunnel carved by the trees.

“Can we sit?”

“Great idea.” Hector swung around, looked for an empty spot, and strode to the nearest bench, landing with a thud as if in being able to claim it for her so solidly he was gallant. And just like that there she was, Iris of the blue dress sitting right there beside him. Her hands were folded in her lap. She looked up and down the tree-lined mall and across the avenue at the redbrick buildings.

“Magnolias,” he said.

“What?”

“Those trees you’re looking at. They’re saucer magnolias. This place is famous for them. In early May the streets are lit up like little pink and white balloons.” He was chuffed with himself and hoped he’d impressed her. If truth were told, everyone in Boston knew that about the magnolias in spring along Comm Ave. He didn’t know a thing about trees.

After a few moments she said, “I enjoyed the concert last night. Hearing you play—”

“Thank you,” he said. “That was a great audience.” He relaxed his tall frame, unfurling like a fern, fanning out across the bench, his arms abreast along the top rung.

“We don’t have too many outdoor concerts like that but we—”

“Ireland? Right?” He’d cut her off with his enthusiasm and immediately felt sorry.

“We do have a music festival every summer.”

“Yeah, of course you do. Everybody’s heard of the Cork Jazz Festival. I mean, anyone in the jazz world.”

“Actually we have one near where I live. Doonbeg.”

Hector raised his eyebrows with a look that said, Wow. But before he could ask her more about it she added, “My daughter’s a musician, too.”

“I’m sorry,” he blurted (thinking back to the morning’s phone conversation). “I mean, what does she play?”

Iris looked at him quizzically but continued. “The violin. Classical violin.”

“Double wow.” Suddenly it was impossible for him to know what more to say because he felt guilty and thought it must be written on his face. Next she would tell him her name.

“Her name is Rose.”

He wanted to say something. But what? Say something supportive. “I like the way you wear your hair.”

Iris looked at him and then couldn’t help herself, she laughed. Really laughed. It was as if a river rippled from her and spilled onto the path and climbed up the trees, a sort of tintinnabulation. And Hector felt it, too, and laughed with her. Didn’t hold back.

Hector jumped up and held out his hand. She took it briefly, then let go. Then, as if feeling less cautious, she walked forward. After a few blocks, they’d crossed onto the footbridge over Storrow Drive, then down to the Charles, where they walked along the esplanade. Hector felt surprisingly jaunty and began humming. Iris’s footfalls were soft and she picked a long blade of grass and swung it around in the air. It was one of those near perfect days of summer, blue sky even though hot. And for a moment, Hector imagined they were just two second-chance lovers sauntering on a midsummer’s morning along one of the finest promenades on the eastern coast of America.

“Hector?” Iris said at last, her voice a different tempo and thinner. “Can you show me where the public library is?”

“The library? Sure. Yeah. It’s not too far, but we have to cross back over.”