French Braid(2)

“You want anything yourself?”

“I’ll wait till we’re on the train.”

But he missed her point. He said, “Grab us a place in line if they post the gate while I’m gone, okay?” And off he went, without a thought.

This was the first time they’d taken a trip together, even this little day trip. Serena was slightly disappointed that he didn’t share her travel anxiety.

As soon as she was alone, she drew her compact out of her backpack and checked her teeth in the mirror. Dessert had been a sort of fruit crumble with walnut bits in the topping, and she could still feel them lingering in her mouth. Ordinarily she’d have excused herself after lunch and ducked into the powder room, but time had gotten away from them—“Oh! Oh!” Dora had said. “Your train!”—and they had all left for the station in a flurry, James’s father driving and James sitting next to him, while Dora and Serena sat together in back so that, as Dora had put it, “we gals can have a nice cozy chat.” That was when she’d said what she’d said about Serena’s meeting James’s sisters. “Tell me,” she had said then, “how many siblings do you have, dear?”

“Oh, just a brother,” Serena said. “But he was nearly grown before I came along. I’ve always wished I had sisters.” Then she had blushed, because it might have sounded as if she were talking about marrying into James’s family or something.

Dora had sent her a little tucked smile and reached over to pat her hand.

Serena had meant that literally, though. Ensconced in her parents’ small household, she had envied her school friends with their swarms of relatives all mixed up and shrieking with laughter and fighting for space and attention. Some had stepsiblings, even, and stepmothers and stepfathers they could pick and choose at will and ostracize if things didn’t work out, like rich people discarding perfectly okay food while the undernourished gazed longingly from the sidelines.

Well, you just wait and see, she used to tell herself. Wait until you see what your future family’s going to look like!

The train to Baltimore was five minutes delayed now, according to the board. Which probably meant fifteen. And they still hadn’t posted the gate number. Serena turned to look for James. There he was, thank goodness, walking toward her holding a drink cup. And next to him, lagging slightly behind, was the man she’d thought might be her cousin. Serena blinked.

“Look who I picked up!” James said as he arrived.

“Serena?” the man asked.

“Nicholas?”

“Well, hey!” he said, and he started to offer his hand but then changed his mind and leaned forward, instead, to give her a clumsy half-hug. He smelled like freshly ironed cotton.

“What are you doing here?” she asked him.

“I’m catching a train to New York.”

“Oh.”

“Got a meeting tomorrow morning.”

“Oh, I see,” she said. She supposed he meant a business meeting. She had no idea what he did for a living. She said, “How are your folks?”

“They’re okay. Well, getting on, of course. Dad might have to have a hip replacement.”

“Oh, bummer,” she said.

“What I did,” James told Serena, rocking slightly from heel to toe, “I noticed him by the newsstand, so I stopped a few feet behind him and said, very low, ‘Nicholas?’?” He looked pleased with himself.

“First I thought I was imagining things,” Nicholas said. “I kind of glanced sideways, not turning my head—”

“When it’s a person’s own name they’re quicker to catch it,” James said. “You probably wouldn’t have heard me if I’d said ‘Richard,’ for instance.”

“My mom’s having hip trouble too,” Serena told Nicholas. “Maybe it’s genetic.”

“Your mom is…Alice?”

“No, Lily.”

“Oh, right. Sorry. But it was you I sat next to at Grandfather Garrett’s funeral, I think.”

“No, that was Candle.”

“I have a cousin named Candle?”

“You guys!” James said, disbelievingly.

“Kendall, her name is really,” Serena went on, ignoring him. “She just couldn’t say her own name when she was learning to talk.”

“You were there, though, right?” Nicholas asked.

“At the funeral? Oh, yes.”

She’d been there, but she’d been twelve years old. And he had been, what? Somewhere in his mid-teens; a world of difference back then. She hadn’t dared to exchange a word with him. She had studied him from afar as they all milled in front of the funeral home afterwards—his self-contained expression and his pale gray eyes. The eyes came from his mother, Greta, a standoffish woman with a limp and a foreign accent, or at least a not-Baltimore accent. Serena remembered those eyes very well.

“We were supposed to go to lunch with everyone after the service,” Nicholas was telling her, “but Dad had to get back for a school play.”

“Speaking of getting back…” James interrupted. He jabbed a thumb toward the board above them. “We should head to gate 5.”

“Oh, right. Okay, we’d better be going,” Serena told Nicholas. “I’m so glad we ran into you!”