Would You Like a Rose

Chapter 15 - One Year

The anniversary of the restaurant occurred on a Tuesday, as it had the first time, in the same French restaurant because Lily had requested it specifically, with the specific, un-nostalgic enthusiasm of someone for whom the restaurant primarily represented excellent duck confit and the beginning of a sequence of events she considered, on balance, highly successful.

Victoria and Clara arrived together, which the maître d' received without visible surprise, though it was the first time he'd seen them side by side and therefore the first time he'd understood, with the specific visual clarity that face-to-face proximity provides, exactly what the family resemblance actually consisted of.

Lily arrived with her own single red rose, which she presented to Victoria at the table with the same grave ceremony as the previous year, and which Victoria accepted with the same specific sincerity, because it had remained her favorite, and she saw no reason to revise that assessment.

They had their own table now, the corner table, which Mr. Beaumont had found it naturally appropriate to offer to three regulars who were clearly the sort of people who needed a corner table, and they were in the habit of taking it for dinner twice a month.

Lily was in her third week at the new school, a fact she reported in considerable technical detail about the science curriculum and the ratio of actual laboratory time to reading about laboratory time, which was considerably more favorable than her previous school and which she described as better but still improvable, with specific suggestions, some of which her teachers had apparently noted and one of which had already been implemented.

"She's going to run that school by February," Clara said.

"She's going to run several institutions," Victoria said. "Let's start with the school and see how she does."

The legal matter had resolved the previous month, Teresa Reyes's patient, methodical work having produced a settlement that reflected the estate's legal reality without requiring the kind of litigation that would have consumed years of everyone's time and money. Clara had received her portion in a straightforward transfer that she had described, characteristically, as more than sufficient and considerably more than she'd ever expected to have access to in her life.

She hadn't changed many things, which Victoria had initially been surprised by and subsequently understood completely. She'd paid off the Pittsburgh apartment, which she kept as a rental property. She'd established a research fund in Daniel's name at a marine biology program he'd admired. She'd set aside a very large amount for Lily's education through graduate school and beyond.

She'd bought one new coat, because the old one's cuffs had been fraying for the past two years and she'd been waiting for it to become absolutely necessary.

"One coat," Victoria had said, when Clara mentioned it.

"It's a very good coat," Clara said. "It'll last twenty years."

This was, Victoria had come to understand, precisely how Clara moved through the world, carefully, efficiently, extracting the maximum honest value from whatever was available without performing wealth or performing poverty, simply evaluating what was actually needed and providing it at appropriate quality.

It was the most specifically different thing about them, she thought. Victoria had always lived in the performance of a certain kind of abundance, the specific luxury of never visibly needing anything, the careful art of appearing to exist above the ordinary friction of material life.

Clara simply existed in it, without performance in either direction.

Victoria was learning, at forty-eight, to find that more admirable than the version of herself she'd spent four decades perfecting.

She looked across the table at her sister, and at her niece, who was currently working through the third course with the same focused efficiency she brought to everything, and felt the particular, settled warmth of an ordinary Tuesday evening in a good restaurant with people who had earned the right to call each other family through considerably more interesting circumstances than proximity or blood alone could account for.