“Did you eat?” Patsy said, slamming the door behind her. “I’m starving. What time is it?”
“Just after six,” said Pru. “Let me see the dress.”
With an aggrieved, insulted look on her face, Patsy opened the raincoat. Pru made her turn around so she could inspect the back, too.
“So,” she said, trying to sound disinterested. “How was it?”
Patsy had disappeared inside the refrigerator, where she was rummaging around. “God, let’s eat first. Do you have any eggs? Oh, you do.” She pulled out a carton of eggs and the milk. “Where’s your whisk?” Patsy began opening all the drawers, pulling everything out. “I’ve never met anyone like him. Why can’t I find a friggin’ whisk?”
“Here,” said Pru, closing the drawer Patsy was digging through and opening the one below it. “Let me do it.”
“Okay, but you let me clean up. Can I take a shower? I’m freezing. Don’t cook the eggs too much, okay? Oh, and make the coffee really strong, put in one more scoop, please. And don’t let me forget to call home.” Then she disappeared into the bedroom.
Pru toasted bread and cooked the eggs, the little coffeemaker gurgling away contentedly. She was trying to shake off her annoyance at Patsy. They’d hardly spent any time together. Wasn’t the point of this little visit to cheer Pru up and keep her company? Or to make sure she wasn’t contemplating some horrific, desperate act? Everyone took her sanity for granted, she thought, shaking salt and pepper over the eggs. She could be going off the deep end, here. Anything could have happened last night, while Patsy was out on her little tryst. She could have done something stupid. Hunted Rudy down and beaten him with a club. Jumped off the Woodley Park Bridge. Anything at all. She turned off the burner, plated the eggs, and dumped the skillet into the sink, filling it with hot, soapy water. She glanced up at the kitchen clock. It was still early. They could still make the zoo before Patsy’s flight, if they wanted to.
Patsy came back from the shower, talking as if she had never stopped: “. . . what time my flight is?” She wore Pru’s white bathrobe, a towel around her neck. She was using one end of the towel to clean out her ear. Pru admired her sister’s physical ease. She seemed so perfectly at home no matter where she was.
“Your plane leaves at two,” Pru said. “We have plenty of time.”
Patsy sat down at the little table. She was clean and shining with happiness. Pru brought the eggs over and put them in front of her, then poured two cups of the strong coffee. Patsy ate ravenously. She never stopped chewing, even to answer Pru’s questions.
“So?”
“There’s not much to tell,” Patsy answered through a mouthful of eggs. “This is it. It’s him. Do you have any ketchup?”
“What’s ‘him’?”
“Him is it. You know, it.”
“It?”
“Yup. You know . . . the One.”
“He’s the One? Like, the One, the One?”
“You got it.” She touched Pru’s hand. “Ketchup.”
Pru went to the refrigerator for the bowl of restaurant ketchup packets she kept on the door. She put the bowl in front of Patsy. Patsy tore a package open with her teeth. Pru continued to stand over her. “And, what, you just know this?”
“Yup.”
“How?”
Patsy squirted ketchup on the eggs, making a squiggly pattern. She shrugged. “I don’t know. What they say is true,” she said. “You just know.”
Pru looked down at Patsy’s tousled blond head. She was tempted to reach out and yank on her hair. Or push her face into the plate of eggs. “And does he feel the same?”
“I don’t know, Mom. But if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say yes.”
Pru didn’t know what to say. Patsy really wasn’t the type to go around making declarations of love. She liked to think of herself as the proverbial bird that must be free. As soon as a guy began to fall for her, she began bashing herself against the imaginary bars of her cage. Pru felt even more annoyed, though she forced herself to sit down and listen to the details of Patsy’s night.
As Patsy told it, they’d packed a whole month’s worth of dates into less than twelve hours. They’d eaten at Mira, had a salsa lesson at Brazilia, and driven around looking at the monuments by moonlight. They hit a midnight show at a jazz club, and at three in the morning they were having pie and coffee at a diner in Georgetown. They’d sat on Pru’s front steps to watch the sun come up and finish finding out every last little thing about each other.
Jacob was adventuresome and smart and ambitious. He had a strong, intelligent mother and many women friends—an extremely good thing, in Patsy’s book. He wasn’t a typical Yalie. He had depth. He’d met Lou Reed at a club in New York, when he was a med student by day and a punk scene hipster by night. He knew of a remote island in the Caribbean you could get to only by chartering a private boat. He could actually talk intelligently about Kabbalah. He was confident and exciting, and being around him made Patsy’s head spin.
“He’s all Aries,” Patsy said. “Pure energy. He likes the intensity of emergency medicine. Oh, and guess what—I’m coming back next weekend. With Annali. He wants to meet her.”
“Next weekend,” said Pru, startled. “Really?”
“And guess where we’re going—the beach house! Remember, Grandma’s beach house, in Rehoboth? You know it’s only three hours from here? Why don’t you ever go there? I swear, if I lived here I’d be there all the time.” She shook Pru’s knee. “So, thanks for the invite, but we won’t need to stay with you.”
“Since when do you need
