Avery looked out the window. Streetlights went by in slow amber pulses.
"I thought she was going to ask me more questions," she said.
Fran glanced at her. Saint Honoré nodded.
"That's the whole thing?"
"You don't understand." Avery pulled her knees up onto the seat, Bev's yellow hem bunching around her ankles. "My mother has never asked me a real question in my life. I told you about the house."
"The SOLD sign. Yeah."
"She didn't ask if I minded. She didn't ask if I wanted anything from my room. She'd packed it all into four boxes, and the boxes were in her new husband's garage, and she said, *I didn't think you'd want to be bothered.*" Avery's voice was flat. "That's her whole thing. Not bothering me. She thinks it's respect. She thinks if she doesn't ask, she's giving me space. I was nineteen and I had so much space I could've died in it."
Fran said nothing. She was, for all her bluntness, a good driver of silences.
"And then this woman sits down at a restaurant table and in forty minutes asks me more than my mother has asked me in twenty-nine years. And I answered all of it. I told her everything. And she listened like I was worth listening to. And then she got up and left, and I thought she'd decided. I thought I'd failed whatever test it was." Avery pressed her forehead to the cool glass. "And tonight she came across that lawn looking so *happy* to see me. And I couldn't do it again. I couldn't be liked like that and then left."
"So you got in the pool."
"So I got in the pool."
Fran drove a block. Then she said, "That's the saddest thing you've ever said to me. And you said it in a dead lady's sundress."
Avery laughed, horribly, and then she was crying, and Fran reached over without taking her eyes off the road and put a hand on her knee and left it there until they reached the apartment.
Upstairs, the lights were off. Paige was staying at Ellis's. In the living room, stacked against the wall where the bookcase used to be, were six cardboard boxes in Paige's neat handwriting. KITCHEN — FRAGILE. BOOKS (MINE, NOT AV'S). WINTER STUFF. And one, at the top, that said only MISC — DON'T LET AV THROW OUT.
Avery stood in the dark looking at them for a long time.
Then she set an alarm for three-thirty, because the dough didn't care what had happened at the party, and the dough would be waiting.
* * *
At the bakery she shaped forty-two loaves of country sourdough by hand while the ovens ticked up to temperature and the sky outside the back door went from black to navy to a thin, bruised grey.
This was the part she loved. Not the counter, not the customers who wanted to know whether the croissants were gluten-free. This: the cold bench, the flour, the slow tension of pulling a round of dough tight across the surface until it held its own shape. You couldn't rush it. You couldn't fake it. You did it right or the loaf spread flat in the oven, and either way you found out in forty minutes.
Fran came in at five, took one look at her, and said, "Pool lady's on the internet."