Pru’s mother was beaming, acting as though she didn’t notice Patsy glaring at her. “Isn’t this nice,” she said in her gentle voice, wiping her eyes. “Everybody together again.”
Pru had to agree. Already it felt less desperate, and although maybe not festive, at least things were looking up.
She opened the cooler to look at the turkey her mother brought from Ohio. It wasn’t about to fit in her oven.
ANNALI WANTED CHOCOLATE CHIP PANCAKES AT THE Korner. Patsy stayed behind, saying she had a headache. She’d barely exchanged two words with Jimmy Roy, who seemed to be taking her coolness in his stride.
Her mother shook hands with John, smiling at him warmly. John showed them to a table by the window, took their jackets, and brought over the box of toys for Annali. Was he being particularly solicitous of her mother? Pru wondered. Maybe. Unless she was just imagining it. There she was, spiraling into weird. Stop, she told herself. Just stop it. Then John brought their food, too, Pru noticed, even though Ludmilla was hanging around doing nothing.
Jimmy Roy and Annali were pretending to be deposed royalty from another country, which Annali called “Acobia.”
“Patsy did the same thing when she was little,” Nadine was saying. “Some kids had imaginary friends, Patsy had imaginary resorts.”
Annali was, of course, the Princess of Acobia, and Jimmy Roy was her bodyguard, both of them disguised as ordinary American tourists. Annali and Jimmy Roy jabbered at each other in a nonsense language that nobody but them understood. It sounded eerily convincing.
When John gave them the check, Nadine and Pru were still talking about the problem of the turkey.
“Why don’t you eat here?” he said. “It’ll be closed, you’ll have it all to yourselves. I have a six-burner Viking,” he added. “The oven is huge.”
“My mother had one of those!” said Nadine. Before Pru knew what was happening, her mother had accepted the invitation to use the diner and had made John promise that he’d eat with them. Before Pru could calculate whether this was a good idea or a disaster waiting to happen, John said that he’d love to.
Annali didn’t want to let go of Jimmy Roy when it came time for him to leave for the night. He and Nadine had gotten rooms at a little hotel in Dupont Circle, as Pru’s apartment was so over-occupied that it probably violated fire and safety regulations.
“I’ll come back later, Peach,” Jimmy Roy said, kneeling to kiss her. “Don’t worry, we have a lot of time together. I’m here for a long time.”
“Daddy will come back,” Patsy said, holding out Annali’s hat and her sippy cup of milk. “Bedtime for you.”
“I want Daddy to put me to bed!” Annali shrieked, clinging to him.
Jimmy Roy looked at Patsy, who said, blandly, “Of course, Daddy can put you to bed. I think I’ve done it enough these past two and a half years.”
“To Acobia!” Annali shouted, charging off to the bedroom. She could be Wendy, Pru thought, flying away in her white nightgown.
After Annali had fallen asleep, Pru walked her mother and Jimmy Roy to the hotel. It had been renovated in sort of a faux art-deco style, with reproductions on the wall of vintage ocean liners and the Empire State Building. Jimmy Roy and Pru saw Nadine to her room, then went for a drink in the hotel’s bar. It was dark, lit by blue neon lights.
“You were so great with Annali,” she said. “Your timing couldn’t be better.”
“She’s great,” said Jimmy Roy. “Patsy looks like hell. What’s going on?”
“Jimmy Roy, you’ll have to ask her. I really don’t know what she’d want you to know.”
He nodded, drinking his beer. “I get the picture.”
“But, tell me about you, Jimmy Roy. You look good.”
“Thank you, Pru.” He said this so seriously and politely that she had to hide her smile in her beer. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been on a campaign of self-improvement.” He looked her in the eye and said, “I’m sure Patsy told you I was an addict.”
She shook her head. Worthless, loser, burnout, yes. Addict, which implied needles and desperation and dangerous friends, no.
“I could say that it was just because of the painkillers, after the accident. But that wouldn’t be totally truthful. The painkillers just happened to be in my hand at the time. I’d take anything anybody wanted to give me. I didn’t care. So, when I was in the hospital and they gave me those pills, it just seemed natural to want more. It could have been anything, though. Anything that made me feel better than I was feeling at that moment. I’m not saying it’s not what most people do. It is what most people do. But for me, you know, getting stoned or watching TV, taking a few pills or going shopping—it was all on the same order.”
He took a long sip of his beer, then said, “I was living in my mother’s basement. I wake up one morning, and realize it’s January the fourth.”
“Annali’s birthday,” said Pru.
He nodded. “I hadn’t sent a present. I didn’t even have the money for gas, so I could drive up and see her. I called and sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to her on the phone, then I hung up and flushed all the pills and my last dime bags down the toilet.”
Pru listened, fascinated. She’d always wondered what it would be like to completely give in to something like that, some impulse that took you over. She wanted another beer, but it seemed a little odd to order one. She was relieved when Jimmy Roy ordered another one for her, and a soda for himself.
“One’s my limit,” he said to her. “I’m allowed to feel a little better, then I have to go back to feeling whatever I didn’t want to feel in the first place again. It’s not
