That Part Was True Read Free Page A

but there was apparently no connection. Then she opened her card to its pristine interior and wrote:
    Dear Jack,
    Your memory is almost right about the under-ripe fruit. Jam fruit should be ripe, but not too ripe. If it is, the jam does not set well. I hope you will make some. In the winter, in the absence of peaches, preserves let in a little light.
    Eve
    She slid the card into its envelope and addressed it and put it in her desk. She’d ask Gwen to pick up some stamps tomorrow.
    Upstairs she could hear voices. Izzy and her boyfriend, Ollie, had driven down late the previous evening. Eve had gone to bed, leaving them plates of cold chicken and salad in case they wanted any supper, but she had heard them arrive; the thud of the car doors and Izzy’s instructions—issued with a bluffness that gave no concession to the hour—to Ollie about their luggage.
    Now Izzy was luxuriating in her favorite claw-foot tub in the big bathroom off the hall and talking. Izzy’s was a voice that had an authority in it, Eve thought, even when she was lying naked in a bath full of almond oil. Almost twenty-eight now, she was an art appraiser at a big auction house. She’d had the kind of career path people describe as “meteoric.” Eve supposed it had stood her in good stead, that voice. “Everything about her is compelling,” she said to herself as she got up and walked back down the hall, through the kitchen, and out the back door to the garden. She wanted to pick some mint for the lamb that she was going to roast later for lunch.
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    â€œBut what does she do all day?” Izzy lifted one foot out of the bath and onto a fat white bathmat. Then she shook the second foot behind her like a sleek animal clearing a fence and reached for a towel.
    â€œShe volunteers at that shop, doesn’t she?”
    â€œOnce in a blue moon. I don’t think the Red Cross are exactly dependent on her.”
    â€œFriends? Bridge or whatever?”
    â€œNot anymore. She used to do a few things like that, but I don’t think she really does now. And she only really putters in the garden these days.”
    â€œShe’s not very old,” Ollie suggested, tilting his chin to shave underneath it. “And she’s good-looking. Maybe she’s got a man.”
    If Izzy had responded to this, rather than simply reacting as was her tendency, she might have seen, in the patch that Ollie had cleared with his palm in the steam-fogged mirror, that he was smiling when he looked down to rinse his razor. But she didn’t.
    â€œDon’t be grotesque, Ollie,” she scolded, tucking the towel across her chest and flipping her head forward to wrap her hair in a second one. “Honestly, the idea.”
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    Eve salted and chopped the mint and left it to steep in sugar and water. Then she moved a jug of daisies into the center of the kitchen table and laid cork mats for a casual breakfast. Through the window, at the very edge of the garden, where the woodland backed toward the house, she could see a white foxglove. Eve loved white foxgloves; the genteel loll of them, the defiant brilliance among their more common purple cousins. She stood looking at this one and a small, silent bond blossomed between them for a moment until Izzy and Ollie joined her, dressed as they always were on their visits in studied country garb of expensive jeans and oversized sweaters.
    Eve saw immediately the reason for the impromptu trip. Izzy was wearing an engagement ring. Catching her mother’s eye, she flashed her hand up.
    â€œTa-daah,” she said flamboyantly, although the gesture and the twitching, dangling fingers it burgeoned were suffused with self-consciousness. But then, powerfully candid suddenly, she dropped her arm and burst out, “I wish Gin-gin were here. The wedding won’t be right without her.”
    The protest drowned Eve’s “Congratulations,” and she didn’t know