“A topper?” Pauline says. “Yes. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll get you a topper.”
Pauline says the word topper as if it’s foreign, and Phoebe imagines she is writing down on a little pad, What’s a topper? Either way, Pauline sounds relieved.
By the time Lila returns, Gary and Phoebe have freed two shelves of books.
“What are you doing to the décor?” Lila asks. She looks at them like she’s stumbled upon a bank robbery.
“They’re books, not décor,” Phoebe says.
Phoebe doesn’t have too many beliefs, but this is one of them.
“Are you going to tell me that books have souls now or something?” Lila asks.
The elevator doors open.
“I am going to tell you that they are books,” Phoebe says. “They’re meant to be read. That’s what books are.”
“Okay, Siddhartha,” Lila says, then pauses, as if she caught herself being too much like the Lila that she is around Phoebe. “Pauline says she’ll get me a topper. Do you want one, too?”
“No,” Gary says. “I need a firm mattress.”
“Right,” Lila says. “Your back. How is it?”
“It’s, you know, still my back,” he says, and chuckles softly to himself. Then they ride in silence until Lila says, “Why is this elevator so slow?”
“It’s from 1922,” Phoebe says, reading the plaque.
“But why wouldn’t they have renovated it when they redid the hotel?”
“Beats me,” Gary says, and then they are at the top.
“Well, that was fun,” Lila says. “A fun day.”
“Absolutely,” Gary says. “Very fun. A great idea.”
But Phoebe hates the word fun. Phoebe thinks that if people could just stop using the word fun, stop expecting everything to be fun, everything could be fun again. She was exhausted by her husband’s insistence that everything should be fun. He never used to speak like that, when things were actually fun, but at the very end, when nothing was fun, he would say, “Let’s go for drinks, it’ll be fun.” “Let’s go hiking, it’ll be fun.” And wasn’t that why she suggested they go to the Cornwall in the first place? “Let’s do something fun for spring break,” he had said.
“So Vivian, my maid of honor, will be flying in from Chicago tonight,” Lila says. “She’s my best friend from college. She’s amazing. I know you’re both going to love her.”
“I’m sure we will,” Gary says.
Then Lila lists off other good things that will happen today: “The reception will start at seven on the patio. Nat will be playing the harp with an award-winning cellist who served in Iraq and learned to play cello as part of his PTSD treatment, and maybe it would be good to tell Roy that.”
“I’ll let him know,” Gary says.
The doors open.
“Oh, good,” the mother of the bride says, kissing Gary and Lila on the cheek. “You’re back.”
She looks like the kind of woman Phoebe might see at a very high-end flea market. Flowy linen that matches the color of her hair. She gives Phoebe a kiss on the cheek.
“My sweater looks good on you,” the mother says, and pulls away to get a look at her.
Phoebe forgot she wasn’t wearing her own clothes, though how she could forget about sequins on her shoulders and a sunflower wedged between her toes, she’s not sure.
“Mom,” Lila says. “This is Phoebe.”
“So you’re the woman from Missouri who didn’t bring a sweater to the ocean.”
Phoebe smiles and shrugs. “First-timer.”
“I didn’t realize there were people still like that! Well, you certainly need this sweater more than I do.”
Up close, the mother of the bride has a strong jaw, like it’s been strengthened over the years from staring blankly at the ocean. She smells faintly of booze, though what kind Phoebe cannot tell.
“Do be kind to it,” the mother says. “It was the last gift your father ever bought me, you know.”
“Oh,” Phoebe says, horrified. “You know what? I’ll take it off.”
“Don’t be silly,” the mother says, waving her hand. She gives Phoebe a look that suggests she is not, at this point in her life, ever getting anything back. “Enjoy it. It’s yours.”
“Mom,” Lila says, looking at her mother’s door. “Why are there a bunch of statues lined up outside your door?”
“Oh, Carlson is going to remove them,” she says. “This hotel is very lovely, but the art in the room is just terrible. So morbid.”
She picks up one of the statues. “Who would put a sculpture of this dead bird in an old woman’s room?”
They all study the bird sculpture. Lila looks disturbed by it but says, “I don’t think that bird is dead.”
