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fork from the napkin’s cocoon. She looked up at the waiter and batted her lashes in a gesture she must have perfected seventy years earlier. “We thought you’d never get here!”
    “Sorry for the delay,” he said, setting the plates on the table.
    Gretchen tore into her eggs and eagerly mopped the plate with bits of toast. She was so hungry. Even though she would consume a lavish meal tonight, she felt incapable of depriving herself now despite the extra pounds she was toting. She’d even had to buy a new dress, black of course, for the wedding; nothing she owned fit anymore.
    Lenore, who had ordered blueberry pancakes, was pouring the syrup into concentric circles on their speckled brown surfaces; she added a pat of butter—softened and fluffy as whipped cream—on top. Unlike Betsy or Angelica, Lenore never included the caloric content of what she—or anyone else—ate in her conversational repertoire.
    “Do you want a bite?” Lenore looked up from her plate and held out her fork, on which she had impaled a large and particularly tempting wedge. Gretchen wavered for a moment before leaning forward to accept a mouthful.
    “Delicious,” she said and felt her annoyance with her grandmother dissolve along with the warm, maple-laced morsel that slid so easily down her throat.
    She suddenly remembered a time nearly thirty years ago when Lenore had taken her to Bloomingdale’s, where she bought Gretchen a cranberry-colored dress trimmed with a black velveteen collar, and a tiny pot of iridescent pink lip gloss, something Gretchen’s mother would not have bought her in a million years. Later there had been grilled cheese sandwiches and chocolate milk shakes in a coffee shop—the shopping bag with its new dress tucked tightly between Gretchen’s knees, and the lip gloss in her coat pocket, where it seemed to give off a subtle electric charge. She loved that lip gloss so much that she barely permitted herself to use it. She was so successful that she still had the nearly spent pot, its lid dinged and crazed from its tumultuous life inside her various book bags, backpacks, and handbags, when she went off to college.
    So magnanimous did this memory cause Gretchen to feel that she actually let her grandmother drive home, something that would have made Betsy, had she known, crazy. Gretchen sat beside Lenore, whose eyes never left the road. There was little traffic, and Lenore seemed perfectly competent, if a tad prone to speeding, in the driver’s seat.
    “Slow down,” Gretchen told her at one point.
    “Slow down?” Faded eyes blazing, Lenore turned to her. “At my age, there’s no time to slow down!”
    Gretchen almost reached for the wheel, but then the speedometer slipped back a few crucial numbers, and besides, here they were with the car nosing right up to the house like a horse finding its way home.
    Ennis had not yet arrived. Good. She needed more time to ready herself. She had not thought to ask whether he was bringing a date, and when the possibility occurred to her, she felt physically sick. But she did not believe Ennis would be so brazen or so cruel, and Gretchen banned the thought from her mind.
    Back in the bathroom of her flowered quarters, she took a long, indulgent shower. There were three kinds of body wash, two shampoos, and two conditioners from which to choose. And then—the dreamy white towels. Afterwards she reached for her dress, which she had bought without trying on; those pesky new pounds made any dressing room mirror a small smack to her self-esteem. Pretty risky, but it was black, and although black was hardly the ideal choice for a June wedding, the dress was also stretchy and had looked very forgiving on the hanger.
    Her first full-length view of herself was, then, a surprise, though it turned out to be a welcome one. The dress was more than forgiving: it was downright flattering, making her look curvy, not fat. The low-cut neckline highlighted her cleavage—always a strong