Some things did not come back.
Two years.
That’s the honest number, and it’s smaller than most of the numbers in this story, and it is the only one I mind.
Two years of altering my own dresses and laughing at binoculars jokes and touching my own back the way he wouldn’t.
And my mother.
She d*ed four years before the auction.
She never knew.
That’s the thing I’d trade all of it for — five minutes to walk Thomasina Rourke through the lobby of the Carrow Building and say, “Mama, floors four through seven are yours now.”
Everett says she’d have said, “Who’s going to clean it?”
He’s probably right.
Corinne’s gala ran in April.
It runs every April.
She signed the ’27 renewal in June, through her assistant, and has never once spoken to me about it, and every spring her two hundred and forty guests raise money under my mother’s chandeliers for a foundation that gives out scholarships, which is a good thing to do, and every spring her rent puts eleven caseworkers in chairs, which is also a good thing to do, and I have made my peace with the fact that those two facts sit at the same table.
