Free The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D by Nichole Bernier Page B

around Mount Rainier, and get a ferry over to Vancouver Island. Didn’t you know someone from school who opened up a B and B over there?”
    The waiter arrived with their appetizers and placed a bowl of steamed mussels in front of Chris, a beet Gorgonzola salad before her. The cubed beets bloodied the white of the blue-veined cheese.
    She imagined bringing James and Piper to Seattle, going to the fish market and then to Mount Rainier, marching up mountain trails into the thin cloud cover. They’d ferry across Puget Sound to Canada and stroll past the Parliament building and moored yachts, go for high tea at the hotel that was like a castle. They might love it so much that they would want to stay. When she’d traveled in her twenties, she’d sewn a maple leaf on her backpack like most people she knew, the well-known tactic for avoiding anti-American sentiment abroad. Their children would grow up drinking pure glacial water and speaking in sentences that lifted at the end like constant questions, safe from those waging war against the more controversial neighbor to the south. She took a bite of beet, and licked red from the tines of her fork.

    Chris ordered dessert and handed the menu to the waiter. She took the last sip of her wine, her second glass. The effervescence went toher eyes and scalp, her fingers and lips, all weightless and animated. The morning’s concerns seemed silly. They were doing fine. She was fine. Maybe she just needed to get out of the house more often; it might be as simple as that.
    He leaned back in his chair, crossed his hands over his stomach. “You were reading those journals pretty late again last night,” he said.
    She picked up the bottle and poured a small amount in her glass, then tipped the last into his. “It’s strange, reading about the way a person thinks her life is going to go and she has no idea what’s coming. When Elizabeth was young she really loved art. She wanted to be a painter in New York.”
    He pushed his glass back and forth, watching the wine slide and cling, and looked around the patio. “Do you know yet what she was doing with that Michael guy?”
    That’s what it always came down to in the end. The single greatest point of interest about a woman’s thirty-eight years was not what she had done, but what she hadn’t told anyone she’d done.
    “No,” she said. “I’m still reading about high school. It’s sad. She was a pretty lonely teenager and didn’t have a great relationship with her parents.”
    “That doesn’t sound like Elizabeth.”
    “I know. It’s like I’m reading about a stranger.”
    The playgroup had formed arbitrarily, eight new mothers grouped together by the town Newcomers’ Club. Kate had found them a bit much in the beginning, too polished too early in the morning, and their conversations had had no edge, no spice. But over the three years she’d been part of the group, they’d settled into a camaraderie: parties for the celebrations, meals cooked for the crises. Kate had felt closest to Elizabeth; with her, she hadn’t worked to fill silences when it felt as if there was nothing in particular to say. In the quiet she’d felt tacit understanding of … she didn’t know what, exactly. The simple things, the important things. But silences, like solitude, could contain any amount of comfort or discomfort, any degree of truth.
    “I still can’t believe she never told me about her sister.” As she said “sister,” Kate was thinking
affair
.
    “Maybe she just got used to keeping it to herself. Or the time was never right. It was years before our CFO told me he was a recovering alcoholic.” Then Chris thought a moment. “You know Andy, our communications director?”
    “Sure. The guy we had dinner with? And his wife, just before we moved.”
    “I just found out she’s actually his second wife. His first wife, the mother of their kids, died of cancer a few years ago.”
    Kate tried to remember their dinner together,