“Oh my God, Phoebe, you should come hold him!” Juice says.
So Phoebe picks up the dog. Feels the animal’s soft fluffy paws. “What’s your name?”
“Unfortunately, it’s Frank,” Juice says. “But you can change that, right?”
“Me?” Phoebe asks like this is crazy, even though she can already imagine it. This is Frank, her new dog. They’ll go on long walks together. They’ll go clamming in the mornings when nobody is awake. “I can’t buy a dog. The hotel doesn’t allow them.”
“Well, someone has to buy Frank,” Juice says. She points to a smaller beagle in a cage. “I’ve already decided I’m going to get that one.”
The entire ride home, Juice tries to come up with new names for Phoebe’s dog. But when they walk back into the hotel, Phoebe breaks the news.
“I don’t know, Juice,” she says. “I think I like the name Frank.”
Before Phoebe leaves for the bachelorette party, she returns Lila’s mother’s outfit. She knocks on the door of the Raven.
“Thank you for letting me borrow your clothes,” Phoebe says, and hands her the bag.
Patricia stands there with a cocktail in one hand, surprised, as if she truly said goodbye to the outfit in her mind and can’t comprehend how it is here, back from the dead.
“Just put them there,” Patricia says, pointing to the marble table where the raven sculptures sit, like that is where all the dead things must go. Phoebe puts the bag down next to the ravens, all of them turned around so they are facing the wall, like they’re in trouble.
It only takes one quick glance around the room to see that the ravens are everywhere, one painted just above the bed, one sitting under the lampshade on the nightstand. Next to it, Phoebe sees two books, How to Be Your Own Best Friend and We Die Alone.
Patricia turns back to where she had been sitting, which feels like a sign that Phoebe should go, but Phoebe feels compelled to stay. Maybe this woman will die alone, but she shouldn’t have to drink alone.
“May I join you for a drink?” Phoebe asks.
“You want to join me for a drink?” Patricia looks equally confused and delighted, like she just witnessed a sudden snowfall. “Usually Lila’s friends can’t get away from me fast enough. They think poor old widows are the plague.”
Patricia pulls out a glass for Phoebe and opens the beverage cooler.
“I went to your gallery today,” Phoebe says. “I mean, I looked in the window.”
“Thirty years we’ve been building that collection,” Patricia says.
“It must be impressive.”
“At first it was just living artists. And then, as we got older, and some of those living artists, well, died, we started to branch out into dead ones. That really opened things up for us.”
Now they host a huge collection of the Hudson River School paintings, not to mention one Warhol.
“You have a Warhol?”
“I should donate it to the hotel, honestly, give them something worthy to hang on the walls,” she says, then looks to the painting above her bed. “Tell me, Professor, this is a death painting, is it not?”
Phoebe looks at the image of a raven perched on a dried-up orange slice.
“That is undeniably a death painting,” Phoebe says.
“Thank you,” Patricia says. “Finally, someone with a little sense. Lila refuses to acknowledge it, no surprise there. And I understand the hotel is trying to achieve some level of authenticity here, bringing in the Victorian macabre, but must they hang it right over an old woman’s bed? It’s hard enough getting to sleep without the bird of death watching me.”
Patricia holds up a yellow bottle.
“I wasn’t sure about this spicy margarita elderberry hibiscus concoction,” Patricia says. “I’m quite suspicious of any cocktail with such a long name. But it’s delicious.”
Patricia pours her a glass.
“I’m sure Lila has told you all kinds of things about my drinking in the afternoon, even though I keep explaining to her that my doctor was the one who suggested I start day-drinking. I simply can’t drink at night anymore. Just two glasses of wine at dinner, and I’ll never fall asleep.”
Phoebe takes the glass and sips.
“It’s good,” Phoebe says. “Spicy.”
But Patricia is not listening.
“And honestly, what else does the girl expect me to do up here all day? She tells me I can’t bring a date to my own daughter’s wedding. Tells me I can’t give a speech. I can’t drink in the afternoons. Can’t come to the bachelorette party. She expects me to just sit up here with nothing to do. I’m like Rapunzel. Except nobody wants to abduct me. And my hair hasn’t grown past my ears since Bush Senior was our president.”
Phoebe laughs.
“Tell me, friend of Lila’s I know almost nothing about. How did I not know you before this week?”
“I’m not local,” Phoebe says.
“But to never have even heard of you,” Patricia says. “Lila’s closest friend in the world, and I don’t hear a peep? This is what it’s been like, Pamela.”
“Phoebe, actually.”
“See? I don’t even know your goddamned name. Ever since her father died, Lila keeps herself so buttoned up, so closed off to me. She used to tell me things. We used to be what you might call friends before her father got sick. Not that I believe in the whole mothers-and-daughters-being-best-friends thing. That’s, frankly, unnatural. But I do miss her. The real Lila, the one who used to sit in my bed and talk my ear off. Do you know what a talker Lila really is?”
