Double Happiness by Mary-Beth Hughes

she got so thoroughly lost on the way to the Dordogne. She was stranded a whole long dull day in Amsterdam, where, she told Patty, she’d actually considered calling her mother. As a surprise. Could Patty believe it? I mean everything was completely different, and still I wanted to find a pay phone—there are none—and call and say, I’m home.

    You have a home wherever I am, dear, just try to get here. This was the inflated sentiment Patty used all the time, and it protected her. She’d heard the story of Coren’s mother long ago. And it was certainly sad. And Coren had been very young. And the stepmother she gained too fast had been feckless and hurtful. All of that, and then the refrain about a phone booth, the most unfortunate detail about her mother’s death. Patty felt it was almost tasteless for Coren to bring it up, even obliquely. But this was Coren trying to seed some kind of emotional ground. This would be the trouble: her husband Phil’s desertion—it had finally come to that, Patty heard—would equal her mother’s early death. Well, Patty had already decided she owed her. That’s what she’d realized watching her neighbor’s sons bent and laughing, collecting tiny fallen nuts in her young grove. Also that she did precious little in the way of aid and comfort, and maybe it was time.
    But willing and able are sometimes very far apart, Patty understood. This case, she could see immediately, was complicated. She watched through the Plexiglas wall in the tiny airport in Bordeaux as Coren shuffled past a customs officer, only to be waved back, then dragged back by a sleeve. His face amused and regretful. His lips quite red and curled. Patty knew the addled woman in gray would be tossed about between bored officers, perhaps even mocked and imitated. She tapped sharpnails against the glass. She caught his startled attention and smiled. This was the right place for her. She knew the right smiles, could calibrate a swift disarming promise. Such a different world and she may have been happier here all along. She was happy now, catching and holding a quick high strike in the eye of a pretty young man. He waved away the woman in gray and smiled an answer to Patty, a promise neither would remember a moment later.
    Patty always liked that easy way of playing with things, of lighting small tips of desire and turning away. Just fun. And her husband had never minded, never much noticed. Here it was more intricate, more competitive! And that left her always assessing, sizing up. The doors slid apart, and Coren reached around for a too-short handle to drag a thin red suitcase. She wore a sheath cut like a muumuu, an embarrassing hand-knit sweater, and a nice pair of boots, as if she’d robbed a chicer, cleverer woman. Their burnished coppery sheen looked out of place with the fade of her dress and skin and hair. First thing, Patty would release some closely held information about grooming in one’s fifties. Though actually, now that she thought about it, and she had plenty of time, as Coren seemed to lose her way between the automatic doors and the rope fence—Patty’s fresh cut roses drooped in her hand —Coren was ten years younger, at least. Not possible, she thought, What in the world had happened? And then she rememberedher mission. Aid and comfort, aid and comfort, nothing more. Coren! she cried out, Thank god.
    Patty warned Coren about sleeping too long, but it was little use. Coren poured herself into the guest bed and refused, in a complimentary way, to come down for dinner. Such a perfect bed she couldn’t move, though Patty’s roasting chicken was in all her dreams, the aroma divine. But at five in the morning, Patty woke to the bang of Coren in the kitchen, smashing against the chair rungs. Let her wander, Patty thought, not unkindly; she knew Coren would be happier for the moment on her own. She’d take her in hand in the