Lily at Dinner
Chapter 10 - Lily at Dinner
Lily arrived at the apartment on Saturday evening wearing a dark green dress and her hair in the same high ponytail it always occupied, and she stood in the apartment's foyer looking up at the chandeliers with an expression of such completely undefended wonder that the household manager, who had seen a considerable number of guests pass through this building over the years, found himself genuinely moved by it.
She held out a single red rose to Victoria.
"I thought you might still want one," she said, with the specific, grave courtesy of a nine-year-old who had decided this was the correct thing to bring and wasn't going to apologize for it.
Victoria accepted it.
"Thank you," she said. "It's my favorite."
Which wasn't something she'd known about herself until that moment, but which she found was immediately and obviously true.
The dinner itself was less formal than any dinner Victoria had hosted in the apartment in recent memory, conducted at the dining room table with its full complement of silver and crystal but without the usual professional service staff, Victoria having asked the kitchen team to set everything out in advance and leave them to it, and with James Ellery's presence at one end adding a note of professional seriousness that periodically yielded, at Lily's end of the table, to a considerably more ordinary meal between people getting to know each other.
Lily ate with the focused efficiency of a child who'd learned not to waste food and had brought that habit to a dinner table considerably better provisioned than most she encountered, working through three courses with a thoroughness that Victoria found, for reasons she couldn't fully articulate, enormously endearing.
"Are you my aunt," Lily asked, somewhere between the second and third courses, looking at Victoria with the specific directness children deploy when they've been thinking about a question long enough that politeness has stopped seeming like a reason to keep holding it.
The table went briefly quiet. James studied his fork.
"I think so," Victoria said. "I'm still learning exactly what that means. Are you all right with that."
Lily considered this with the gravity it deserved. "My friend Sophie has an aunt who lives in Connecticut and brings her presents on holidays," she said. "Is that what aunts mostly do."
"Among other things," Victoria said. "I think the present part is generally considered obligatory, yes."
"Mom said you might want to help with school," Lily said.
Clara, from the other end of the table, made a small, pained expression of maternal embarrassment. "Lily—"
"She said I shouldn't bring it up first," Lily clarified, to Victoria, "but she also said if you asked, she'd explain. You didn't ask, but I thought maybe you would have eventually."
Victoria looked at Clara, who was now pressing her lips together in the specific, helpless way of a parent trying not to laugh.
"What kind of help," Victoria asked.
"I'd like to go to a school with more science," Lily said. "My school is okay but the science is mostly just reading about science instead of doing it. I want to do it."
"Lily wants to be a marine biologist," Clara said. "This is something she's wanted since she was six and it has remained consistent."
"The deep ocean parts that nobody's been to yet," Lily said. "There's more undiscovered stuff down there than in space. Most people don't know that."
"Is that true," James said.
"Look it up," Lily said, with the confidence of a child who has deployed this fact many times and has never once been successfully contradicted.
James looked it up on his phone and confirmed that it was, in fact, true.
May you like
Victoria watched her niece at the dinner table, this small, confident person who had walked into a French restaurant with a tray of roses and changed everything with seven words and a name engraved in gold, and felt the particular, surprised warmth of understanding that she had been given, in the space of one week, an entire small person to love who apparently required a school with better science and was entirely right to want one.
She met Clara's eyes across the length of the table, and her sister smiled at her, a small, careful, hoping smile, and Victoria smiled back, and that was enough, for this particular Saturday evening, to constitute the beginning of something genuinely real.
