'No, thank you.'
She settled directly in front of me, straight and silent.
In the time it had taken to walk from the entry, her eyes had filled with tears.
'I'm sorry for your loss,' I said.
She wiped her eyes with a finger and sat even straighter. 'Thank you for coming.'
Silence filled the room and made it seem even colder. She wiped her eyes again and laced her fingers.
I said, 'You have a beautiful home.'
She lifted her hands and made a helpless gesture. 'I don't know what I'll do with it.'
'Have you lived here long?'
'Just one year. larry owned it long before that, but we never lived in it together. When we came to California, Larry said this should be our place.'
She shrugged, raised her hands again, and let them drop back to her knees.
'Too big, it's really ridiculous.... We talked about selling It Shaking her head. 'Please-have something.'
I took an apple from the bowl and nibbled. Watching me eat seemed to comfort her.
'Where did you move from?' I said.
'New York.'
'Had Dr. Ashmore ever lived in Los Angeles before?'
'No, but he'd been here on buying trips-he had many houses.
All over the country. That was his... thing.'
'Buying real estate?'
'Buying and selling. Investing. He even had a house in France for a short while. Very old-a chateau. A duke bought it and told everyone it had been in his family for hundreds of years. Larry laughed at that-he hated pretentiousness. But he did love the buying and selling.
The freedom it brought him.'
I understood that, having achieved some financial independence myself by riding the land boom of the mid- seventies. But I'd operated on a far less exalted level.
'Upstairs,' she said, 'is all empty.'
'Do you live here by yourself?'
'Yes. No children. Please-have an orange. They're from the tree in back, quite easy to peel.'
I picked up an orange, removed its rind, and ate a segment. The sound of my jaws working seemed deafening.
'Larry and I don't know many people,' she said, reverting to the present-tense denial of the brand-new mourner.
Remembering her remark about my arriving earlier than expected, I said, 'Is someone from the hospital coming out?'
She nodded. 'With the gift-the certificate of the donation to UNICEF.
They're having it framed. A man called yesterday, checking to see if that was all right giving to UNICEF' A man named Plumb?'
