Avery would remember, later, that Dorian had not looked surprised. He'd looked stricken, like a man watching a glass tip off a counter. But he'd stood, and pulled out the chair, and said, "Mom. This is Avery," in a voice that gave away nothing. Vivian had taken Avery's hand in both of hers and said, "Oh, *Avery*. What a lovely, sturdy name."
And then the questions.
Where did she grow up? Outside Tucson. Was her family still there? Her mother was. Her father wasn't anywhere, as far as she knew. What did her mother do? Real estate. Remarried. A great deal of golf. Were they close?
Avery had opened her mouth to say *Oh, sure,* which was what she always said, and instead she'd heard herself say, "She's never asked me a question I couldn't answer with a yes or a no."
Vivian had gone very still. "Never?"
"She asks if I'm eating. She asks if I'm seeing anyone. She doesn't ask *what* I'm eating. She doesn't ask who." Avery had laughed, a little high. "Sorry. I don't know why I said that."
"Don't apologize," Vivian said. "Why bread?"
"What?"
"Why bread? Of all the things. Why do you get up in the dark to make bread?"
No one had ever asked her that. Not her mother, not her exes, not even Paige, who assumed it was simply a job. And Avery had sat in the candlelight at Lucca's with a stranger's mother and said, "Because it's the only thing I know how to make that's different every single time and still turns out. Because it needs you to show up at the same hour every day, and if you do, it rises."
Vivian looked at her as if she'd said something holy.
Did she want children? Avery didn't know. Was that rude to ask? It was a little rude. Vivian laughed, delighted, and said, "Good, you'll tell me when I'm rude, I like that." What was the hardest year of her life? And Avery told her. *Told* her — nineteen, the year her mother sold the house without mentioning it, and Avery came home from her first semester of community college to a SOLD sign and her childhood bedroom staged with someone else's throw pillows.
She had never told Paige that story. She told it to a woman she'd met twenty minutes earlier, over a breadbasket, while the accordion played "That's Amore" and the woman's son sat silent beside them with his hands clenched on his napkin.
Then Vivian's phone buzzed on the table. She glanced at it. Something in her face folded closed, neat as a letter.
"Excuse me," Vivian said, rising. "I'm so sorry. Excuse me."
She walked toward the restrooms. Not quickly. Very carefully, the way people walk when the floor has started to tilt.
Dorian was out of his chair before she'd taken five steps. "I'm sorry," he said to Avery. "I'll be right back. I'm so sorry."
Avery sat alone with the breadbasket.
Five minutes. Ten. The waiter came and asked if she wanted another glass of wine, and she said yes, and then she sat with it. Fifteen minutes. The accordion player moved on to "Volare." At twenty minutes she looked across the room at the two-top behind the ficus and saw what she should have seen at the beginning: two wine glasses, one full and untouched. A second place setting no one had used.
She thought she understood. She thought: *He brought his mother on a first date. He parked her across the room like a chaperone. He was checking with her the whole time — is this one all right, Mom? — and she came over to do the interview herself, and now they've gone off somewhere to discuss my answers.*