Patrick looked at the next table for help, three women enjoying mimosas, at least fifty percent orange juice (suckers), and individually designed omelets with any combination of thirty ingredients. They ate without constant interruptions and exclamations and Patrick was envious, as if he were already mourning a former life. Should he consider this, taking them in? One of the women made eye contact, recognition, or an attempt, perhaps, at pity. No. It was out of the question.
“We’ll find you someone. Your grandparents, maybe,” Patrick said. “I’ll even pay for your swim lessons.” Grant seemed to find this agreeable; crisis averted. “Is that really what someone told you? Your house was too sad?” Patrick’s heart was still breaking.
“You have a pool.” Maisie brightened. It was all coming back to her. “You could teach Grant to swim in Palm Springs. Could I have my own room?”
“SHARE!” Grant screamed. Patrick observed he had taken to sleeping in his sister’s room, and had, apparently, since Sara was checked into hospice.
“No, I want my own!”
“You’re not coming to Palm Springs. We already decided. It’s better for you that way. You’ll see.” Grant flipped his place mat over to look for kid activities, but it wasn’t that kind of establishment. “Your father and I shared a room, you know, for a time. We had bunk beds. I had the top bunk. I felt bad for him as I grew and that top bed started to sag. I swear, by the time your aunt Clara left for college and I moved into her room, he couldn’t so much as roll over without scraping his nose on my undercarriage. He got his revenge when he discovered a certain teenage pastime and I had to fall asleep with the bed swaying like we were adrift on a gay cruise in monsoon season, if you know what I mean. Anyhow, cheers.” He picked up his champagne and clinked glasses with Maisie and Grant, who it seemed enjoyed a good cheers.
“Cheers!” Maisie added.
“Poop!” Grant said, and they both laughed. Patrick wanted to drop his head to the table with a deafening thud, but it would only draw attention to Grant’s “joke.”
“Can we eat brunch in Palm Springs?” Maisie asked.
Maisie was plotting something out and Patrick didn’t like it. “You’re not coming to Palm Springs.”
“Yeah, but could we? If we were.”
“Oh, god, yes. We only eat brunch in Palm Springs. Brunch and lupper.”
“What’s lupper?”
“You don’t know lupper, either?” Patrick sighed for effect. “Well, if brunch is a combination of breakfast and lunch, what do you suppose lupper is?”
Maisie got there first. “Lunch and supper!”
“Exactly. It’s a mid- to late-afternoon meal, which is good for digestion. If you eat too late you get heavy unless you’re European. They have dinner at an ungodly hour and never gain so much as an ounce, but they’re evolved and they walk everywhere and smoke cigarettes, which helps, so—you know.” Patrick put his napkin in his lap and made a production out of it so the kids would follow suit. “All my meals are portmanteaus.”
“You talk funny,” Grant said.
“Me talk funny?” This time Patrick did an impression of a chimp, scratching his head with one hand and under his armpit with the other. “I suppose I speak with a certain élan. But that’s not a bad thing.”
“Why don’t you talk like everyone else?” Maisie leaned forward and put her lips on her apple juice without lifting the glass from the table.
“‘Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.’ Oscar Wilde.” Patrick looked at his nephew also gnawing on the edge of his drinking glass. “Don’t do that.”
Grant shrugged without sitting back in his seat. “I’m being mythelf.”
“You know, it’s one thing if you throw my own words back in my face, but do not throw Oscar Wilde’s. Now sit up like human beings or at least use a straw.” Patrick picked up one of the paper-wrapped drinking straws Barry had left for them, tore off one end, and blew a puff of air through the straw so that the wrapper hit Maisie square between the eyes. Grant erupted in laughter. “So what do you think?”
“About what?” Grant managed as he tried to control his giggles.
“About brunch!” Patrick said. “It’s growing on you, isn’t it?”
“I can only eat thoft foods.”
“Why?”
“Loothe tooth.”
“WHAT?”
Maisie translated. “His tooth is loose.”
“What sort of Dr. Seuss nightmare is this?” Patrick muttered under his breath. “So?”
“What if it falls out?”
“I do not like a loose tooth, I do not like one in this booth. I do not like a tooth at brunch, I do not like foods that crunch.”
“Be therious!” Grant implored. “What if my tooth falls out?”
“Then we’ll just shove it back in.” He took a long sip of his champagne, ignoring Grant’s stunned expression. He let the bubbles evenly coat his tongue before letting them slide down his throat. Maybe they weren’t so hard to manage, the kids. “Perhaps you can come visit. You know. For a few days. You could even invite Audra what’s-her-face.”
“Brackett.”
“That’s right.” If they brought a friend, they might even amuse themselves.
“Actually, we can’t,” Maisie replied.
“You can’t?” Patrick was surprised. Relieved, somewhat. But surprised. “You have other commitments?”
“No.”
“Then why not?”
Maisie looked down at her plate. “I don’t want to leave Mom.”
Patrick placed his silverware on his plate, the knife carefully between the tines of his fork. He recognized their grief, how untethered they were from the life they had known. He reached out and pulled the kids close to him, until he had one nestled under each arm. It was his job now to give them something, anything, to hold on to. “Let me tell you something. You can’t ever leave your mother, just as she can never really leave you.”
Maisie looked up at him, pleading for more.
Patrick inhaled, hoping the oxygen would give him the stamina to continue. Sara was very much there, in Maisie’s expressions, or Grant’s stoicism. He’d never had any interest in children himself but suddenly recognized some small
