Of course I was dismayed, but there was no way to get out of it because she was so keen for me to attend that she gave me options. I was available on every night she suggested because I had become a real loner. My friend Ivy had moved to America, and although I occasionally saw Eliza, she was part of a huge social circle and I’m more of a one-on-one kind of friend.
Well, as you know, I went to the dinner party. It was a terribly hot night and I kept reminding myself not to fall back into my old ways. I did drink a little too much, and as I’ve mentioned, I told everyone about Mum, but I didn’t do too badly. I even enjoyed some parts of it. For example, I enjoyed it when the handsome man told me I didn’t look like a potato.
If you recall, the night was nearly over and I was seated cross-legged on the floor. Hazel had fallen asleep on the couch, the bearded man was droning on, and the doorbell rang.
“Excuse me,” said Hazel’s husband, Tony, who I think was hopeful we would all go home soon. “That will be my brother.”
His brother was borrowing some kind of gardening implement and he came in briefly to meet us and try some of the German Black Forest cake. Tony introduced us all.
Ned seemed like a perfectly pleasant man. Blue jeans. Glasses. Average height. Not much hair. A kind of impatient energy to him. I felt nothing in particular toward him, but when he saw me, his face lit up like a Christmas tree. He handed his plate back to his brother and crouched right down, balancing on the balls of his feet on the carpet, to look intently at me, as if he were a naturalist and I were an interesting botanical specimen.
He said, “Kronecker delta girl.”
—
I had not the slightest clue what he was talking about.
Chapter 106
“Got to go,” says Eve.
“Wait, where have you got to go?” Dom sits on the end of their bed, taking off his shoes. He looks exhausted. He started his day at five this morning.
“The restaurant,” Eve reminds him. “It’s Thursday, remember? I’ll bring home leftovers.”
It’s a pizza and pasta restaurant and the boss encourages staff to take home leftover pasta at the end of the shift, which is excellent. Free dinner for tonight and tomorrow.
“Is it Thursday?” says Dom. “I thought it was…oh, I don’t really know what day I thought it was.”
She kisses his forehead. “All of this, the money, everything, it’s going to get better.”
“Is it?” he says, yawning. He is asleep before she even leaves the apartment. She thinks he only lets himself fall asleep properly now when he’s alone. It’s so, so stupid.
On the bus she checks the online chatter about the Death Lady.
Someone has posted: Could she be an insurance actuary? My daughter was on that flight and the language she used made me wonder that.
Yesterday, Paula sent Eve a message saying: The Death Lady’s first name might be Cherry.
So Eve googles, without much hope: Cherry Actuary.
And there she is. As easy as that. All this time she was only a Google search away.
She’s younger in the picture but there is no doubt: it’s the lady from the plane. She wears a silk blouse and pencil skirt, pearl earrings and red lipstick, and she stands at a podium gesticulating at a PowerPoint slide behind her. The caption says: Cherry Lockwood delivers another riveting keynote address at the Actuaries Institute December Luncheon! It was taken five years ago. She looks so happy. Not like a Death Lady at all.
Chapter 107
Ned Lockwood. That was his name. My hairdresser’s brother-in-law.
Ned was a high school math teacher. A beloved teacher. If you had Mr. Lockwood you remembered him forever, even if you hated math, or especially if you did, because his were the only math lessons you ever enjoyed.
“He leaps about the classroom like he’s doing a kind of interpretive dance,” a student once told me, laughing, and I laughed too, because I’d been married to Ned for five years by that time and this was such an accurate description. Ned leaped about supermarkets, cocktail parties, and museums in exactly the same way.
Ned had studied for his mathematics degree at Sydney University at the same time as me, and one day, according to him—I have no memory of it, I so wish I did—we sat next to each other during a lecture on the principles of Kronecker delta. Ned’s pen, even though brand new, ran dry and he asked if I had a spare one. Apparently I handed one to him without even turning my head, which was a little rude, but I was concentrating so hard on the lecture.
He said he fell in love with me at that moment.
That is not true.
We didn’t even speak and he was engaged to someone else at the time and he went right ahead and married her! It didn’t work out, thank goodness. She couldn’t cope with his energy.
Oh, and by the way, even if we had spoken it would have meant nothing because at the time I had eyes for nobody but Jack Murphy.
Ned and I went to see a movie for our first date. It was the “classic” romantic comedy, When Harry Met Sally. I loved it, but Ned didn’t have the patience for romantic comedy. He could not sit still or stop talking. The movie begins when the couple drives from the University of Chicago to New York, and Ned wanted to tell me about a drive he’d taken between New York and Chicago, and finally I whispered, “Go for a walk! I’ll meet you in the foyer after.” He was so happy to be given permission to leave. I’m sure the people around us were happy too. He was a stickler for good manners but was really very bad-mannered about talking in the cinema.
He said, “Really? Would that be all right?” It was so strange, because it was our first date, and yet I felt like I already knew him, as if I knew how to handle this man, even though he was unlike anyone I’d met before. I always preferred seeing movies on my own. (Years later, he did manage to sit through all of Titanic, which was a record, and he managed not to talk even when I could tell he was becoming agitated about Rose not letting Jack share her door. Afterward we had burgers and I told him I would have let him share my door. We would have sunk together to the bottom of the ocean.)
When I came out into the foyer after When Harry Met Sally Ned was waiting for me, and he took me in his arms, bent me backward, and kissed me like it was the end of the war. Mind you, that was our first kiss, a little presumptuous! (I didn’t mind.) “When Cherry met Ned,” he said, and then he took my hand and said we had to run, because he’d found this great Nepalese restaurant that didn’t take bookings, but he’d convinced them to hold us the perfect table in the window, and we made it, then sat down, started talking, and never stopped.
Ned Lockwood. The most exasperating, impatient, intelligent, funny, curious, intense man. On our first wedding anniversary he gave me a beautiful gold brooch inscribed with the Kronecker delta symbol. I’ve worn it every single day since.
Chapter 108
“I’m so embarrassed, that damned Death Lady has turned me into a hypochondriac,” says Sue.
It’s a Wednesday evening and Max is driving her somewhere. He’s planned a surprise and he’s gleeful about it. It’s not even her birthday. She’s fairly certain she knows which restaurant he has booked.
Sue’s illness turned out to be an ordinary virus. Her itchy rash was a red herring. It was an allergic reaction to a bath bomb given to her by her favorite daughter-in-law. She’s fully recovered now. Full of energy once again.
