"You could have told me," she said. "When you texted. You could have said, *My mom got stood up and I had to take care of her.* I'd have understood."
"It wasn't mine to tell," he said. "It was hers. She was so ashamed, Avery. She made me promise I wouldn't tell anyone. Not Ellis. Not you. Nobody." He spread his hands. "So I let you think it was about you. That's on me. I know that."
She stood in Bev's dress in the buzzing light and found she had nowhere to put any of it. Three months of a story she'd told herself, about a mama's boy and an audition, and it had been wrong in every particular except the one that mattered: he hadn't been there. Whatever the reason, she had sat alone with the breadbasket.
"Who was it?" she asked. "Who stood her up?"
Dorian's eyes flicked, very briefly, toward the patio. Toward a broad, white-mustached man in a pineapple shirt who was refilling the orange lemonade dispenser with enormous care, as if it were the most important task in the world.
"That's hers to tell, too," Dorian said.
Avery followed his look. She remembered the stillness of Vivian's shoulders at the edge of the pool when Harlan spoke. Remembered that she hadn't turned around.
"Oh," Avery said. "Oh, *no.*"
"Yeah."
"This is his *house.*"
"He offered it. For the party." Dorian hesitated. "I think it was the only apology he knew how to make."
"Did she accept it?"
"She's here," he said. "I don't know if that's the same thing."
Avery looked at him for a long moment. Then she said, "I need to go home," and he nodded as if he'd expected it, and she said, "I'm not — this isn't — I'm not fine with this," and he said, "I know," and she said, "Okay," and walked away to find Fran.
She didn't look back. But she knew, the way you know a light's been left on in an empty room, that he'd sat back down on the bucket and stayed there a long time.
* * *
Fran drove a 2009 Corolla with a cracked dashboard and a bobblehead of Saint Honoré, the patron saint of bakers, which a customer had given her and which nodded agreement with everything.
"So let me get this straight," Fran said, merging onto the boulevard. "You jumped into a swimming pool. In front of thirty people. Fully clothed. To avoid a conversation with a sixty-something woman who wanted to apologize to you."
"I didn't know she wanted to apologize."
"What did you think she wanted?"