“Any developments with Bitsy and her husband?” he asked. He had to ask once more before she heard him and then she still didn’t take her eyes off the magazine.
“Oh, no, same old, same old,” she said, folding over the corner of a page.
Graham had been wondering lately if it was a good idea to let Bitsy have so much access to Matthew. What if she found out about her husband’s relationship with the miniskirt girl? For all he and Audra knew, Bitsy could decide to run down her husband with their SUV while Matthew serenely folded an F-16 in the backseat. But before he could say anything, the phone rang.
“Oh, hi, Maxine!” said Audra.
So Graham read the newspaper while Audra had a fifteen-minute postmortem of last night’s party. Clearly there were a few blanks in Audra’s memory—“I’m so sorry I didn’t get a chance to meet your husband … Oh … Did he happen to mention what we talked about?”—but, in general, Audra was very supportive and told the Akela that it was a fabulous party; and no, the Jell-O shots were retro, not vulgar; and Audra was pretty sure everyone there was too old to be posting drunk selfies on social media this morning, so don’t worry about your judgmental colleagues. Then she said, “Tuesday would be super!”
When she hung up, she poked Graham and said, “That was Maxine, wanting to know if Matthew could come over for a playdate with Joey this week. I told you it would pay to network.”
Graham did not know what to say. He wanted to tell her that eventually Matthew was going to have to do this on his own, that she could not get him through life on the force of her own personality. But she was too happy. And she wouldn’t have believed him anyway.
Sadly, Graham was not home when Audra called Dr. Luxe, and so he had to imagine how the conversation went. All Audra told him was that Dr. Luxe was “delighted” to hear from her, that he remembered her “vividly,” that they had a “marvelous” time catching up, and that Dr. Luxe was “tickled pink” to be able to do them the small favor of recommending Elspeth to the Rosemund board. Graham didn’t believe that anyone under the age of seventy—and possibly no male of any age—used the phrase tickled pink, but he supposed that was about the gist of it.
In fact, Audra and Dr. Luxe were now such good friends that Dr. Luxe had invited Audra (and Graham and Matthew, even) to his son’s wedding the next weekend to bulk out the number of guests—something to do with a lot of guests canceling at the last minute.
“I don’t want to go to a wedding where I don’t know the people getting married,” Graham said. “I don’t even want to go to weddings where I do know them.”
It seemed to Graham that one of the benefits of getting older was that your friends stopped getting married and having expensive boring weddings that wrecked your budget and ruined your weekend. (There aren’t a lot of benefits of getting older, but that was one of them. Also: you don’t have to pick up cans and bottles for beer money; and if you stay out late, you don’t have to sneak back into your house through the basement window to avoid waking your parents. That’s pretty much it.)
“You’re the one who wants a favor from him,” Audra said mildly. “Besides, we can give them those horse-head bookends that my cousin Susie gave us as a wedding present.”
“We still have those?”
“Oh, yes,” Audra said. “Somewhere. I didn’t feel right giving them to the thrift store, but I didn’t want to give them to someone we actually liked, so they’ve been hanging around forever.”
And so, a week later, they drove out to Long Island on a perfectly good Saturday, all three of them (or five of them if you counted the horse-head bookends). Audra wore a short pale blue dress with a matching bolero jacket and a big white bow at the collar. This dress had always struck Graham as vaguely pornographic—it looked like a man’s fantasy of what a librarian would wear—but it was very pretty. Matthew was wearing khaki pants and a white shirt with one of Graham’s ties knotted at his throat. He had the same almost-auburn hair as Audra but much thicker and not as curly. Matthew’s hair was Audra’s delight—she said it was so perfect she didn’t even have to brush it.
Graham allowed himself a grudging approval of the wedding venue as he parked the car in the gravel parking lot of the church. The reception would follow immediately in the stately home next door—no drive, no re-parking the car, no waiting around. Ten minutes from wedding vows to a drink in every guest’s hand. Just as it should be.
“Tell me the bride’s and groom’s names again,” Graham whispered to Audra as soon as an usher had seated them.
“Bryant and Michelle,” Audra said in her normal speaking voice. “Bryant went to law school at Georgetown and now he works in multisomething finance in Boston.”
“And Michelle?”
“I know virtually nothing about her,” Audra said, “except that she gets very wet during sex. Don’t fidget, Matthew.”
An elderly couple in the pew in front of them suddenly sat up very straight, and the woman snapped the clasp on her purse shut with a startled click. Graham sighed. Perhaps Audra had once had a filter, but gossip overload had destroyed it.
It turned out to be an old-fashioned wedding with a receiving line, and Graham had to shake hands with the bride and wish her every happiness, all while trying very hard not to think about the only thing that it was really possible to think about now, or probably ever, in her presence. Audra seemed blissfully untroubled by this and hugged Bryant enthusiastically, saying, “Welcome to the world of marriage!” and then hugged the bride and said—actually said—“I’ve heard so much about you!”
The elderly couple were right behind him in the receiving line, and the man gave Graham a sort of sickly smile when he heard that.
Graham shook hands with the bride’s parents, and then Mrs. Luxe, a large woman in a battleship-gray dress, from which her satin-covered bosom protruded like the prow of, well, a battleship.
Next in the receiving line was Dr. Luxe. Now Graham remembered him—a big olive-skinned man with a large nose and abundant silver curls brushed back in what Graham’s mother called “finger waves.” His wife, clearly the second Mrs. Luxe, was much younger, blond, and timid-seeming.
“I’m sure you remember my husband, Graham,” Audra said to Dr. Luxe as Graham shook hands with him. “His ex-wife is the one who wants to move into your building.”
“Ex-wife?” Dr. Luxe looked startled. “I thought it was a friend.”
“Friend and ex-wife,” Audra said smoothly. “We’re extremely close.”
(This was possibly the biggest lie anyone had ever told in that particular church. Elspeth had refused to ever even meet Audra.)
“I admire that,” Dr. Luxe said.
“I didn’t want us to be one of those acrimonious couples,” Audra said. “That’s so hard on everyone. Actually, we enjoy Elspeth’s company immensely. We all go to lunch together and sometimes the movies. She even helped us with our kitchen renovation.”
“How refreshing!” Dr. Luxe said.
“Often Elspeth goes on vacation with us,” Audra said, completely carried away now. “Not if we’re going somewhere romantic, of course, like the Bahamas, but more like long weekends and things. You know, like if we’re going to the Berkshires, then we think, Why not take Elspeth? She’s so much fun! And so knowledgeable about nature and hiking and bird-watching.”
“That is the most civilized arrangement I’ve ever heard of,” Dr. Luxe said. “I think it’s marvelous.”
The second Mrs. Luxe’s eyes were huge. She was obviously terrified that she would now have to go mushroom hunting with the first Mrs. Luxe.
“But perhaps just maybe don’t mention