Second Chances Read Online Free Page B

Valentine’s? Anyway, she said that the person you refer to as ‘this Bill’ will be there too.”
    Startled, Dudley nevertheless at that moment remembers, again, her chicken. And gets up and starts toward the kitchen.
    Sam follows her, still talking. “So you see? We do get to meet him, after all.”
    Bending down to the oven, breathing in steam along with the heavy aroma of herbs, the rosemary and lemon along with the garlic, Dudley just gets out “He might always be somehow not able to come.”
    Sam again makes an ambiguous sound. He has begun to put some dinner things on the round oak kitchen table, where they always eat when they are alone—stainless-steel cutlery, very bright and plain,and bright cotton napkins, unironed. And the room itself is large and bright and rather plain: gently weathered bare wood on walls and shelves and counters. Wide windows. It could all have been calculated (possibly unconsciously) to look as little as possible like the houses in which Dudley and Sam grew up: her parents’ narrow Georgian, with its lavender leaded windows, rooms filled with mahogany and cut glass and heavy silver; Sam’s family’s drab Victorian country farmhouse, up the river from New Orleans, bayou land.
    Standing up, Dudley is aware that sudden shifts in position are harder for her these days; in her back something suddenly hurts. But as usual she manages to speak banteringly. “I’ll make you a small bet,” she says to Sam. “ ‘Bill’ somehow won’t show up. There’ll be something about a business trip. A suddenly dead relative, or something. So there’ll be just us.”
    “And Sara,” Sam reminds her.
    “Well, Sara’s one of us, isn’t she?”
    “Well, I suppose she must be. She’s probably Celeste’s heir, in fact.” Saying that, Sam grins with what Dudley recognizes as his look of provocation. “Unless there really is a Bill, this person you seem to think Celeste’s made up. A real Bill, whom Celeste has it in mind to marry?”
    So that Dudley remembers. One day, not long after Charles died, Dudley and Celeste ran into each other at the local post office—a common enough occurrence in small San Sebastian. They stood there in line together, wanting stamps; Celeste had a letter to be registered. “I always register letters to my lawyer,” she distractedly whispered to Dudley, in her way. (As though anyone in town would care about or understand her dealings with her lawyers, Dudley not very kindly thought.) And then, pushing at some vagrant strand of hair, her eyes raised to meet Dudley’s eyes, Celeste, still in a whisper, said to Dudley, “Of course now everything will go to you and Sam. And Sara. So be sure to outlive me, darling Dudley.”
    An impossible statement to respond to. Dudley made a sound of embarrassment, confusion. Denial. She changed the subject to the weather, the lovely fall that they just then were having. How long could it last?
    *  *  *
    But now all that she did not report back to Sam comes vividly to Dudley’s mind, and in a horrified way she thinks, Have I been denying the existence of this Bill because I want to inherit from Celeste? To get half, of whatever? An intolerable thought, at which she frowns—she makes a small involuntary sound, an
oh
, which in her connotes extreme embarrassment, self-censure.
    Sam so often reads Dudley’s mind (or they so often seem to have thought of precisely the same thing at the exact same moment, as must be true of many people, long together) that Dudley sometimes takes steps to avoid just this process of thought transference, or whatever. Not wanting Sam to know that she has even considered inheriting from Celeste, she says to him, “We really know so little about Celeste, when it comes right down to it.” She has thought and quite possibly said just this before, surely to Edward, who speaks her language, and maybe also to Sam. However, no matter.
    “You mean, who her people were?” This is said teasingly: Sam