The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry Page B

looking at that statue all our lives. But that summer when she looked at it, she saw something completely different. She was laughing so hard she almost couldn’t tell us what she was laughing at. She stood on the curb directing us, making us walk around and around the statue, looking at it from all angles until we saw what she had seen. It was Beezer who saw it first, and his face turned bright red. He was so embarrassed he actually went back inside the house, although I’m sure he wouldn’t remember that now. It took me a lot 84 Brunonia
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    longer. By the time I saw it, cars were stopped, tooting their horns at me, and Lyndley was laughing, yelling back at the cars, telling them not to “get their panties in a wad,” a southern expression she’d picked up over the winter and one she used for everything. Finally a driver laid on the horn; and Lyndley gave him the finger. It was then that I caught the right angle on old Roger Conant, and I just started laughing hysterically. I don’t know if it was the expression on the driver’s face or on Lyndley’s or the sight of our distinguished founding father all robed and holding a staff that from the back right angle looked like an erect penis. I don’t know which thing set me off, but I didn’t stop laughing until Eva came and got me off the sidewalk and made me come back to the house. She didn’t ask me what I was laughing at. I had the impression that she didn’t want to know.
    “I’m not seeing it,” Anya says.
    “You can’t see it so well from here,” Beezer says to Anya. “It’s better from outside.” Then he tells her the story about how Eva single-handedly saved that statue and how it pissed Cal off royally but made Eva a town heroine from that moment on.
    I grab some more dishes and follow Ann Chase to the kitchen. She is standing at the sink, carefully peeling off a piece of lace that has gotten itself stuck to the bottom of a saucer.
    “She’s having fun with us tonight, I’d say,” Ann says to me.
    “Who?” I ask, thinking she means Anya, or maybe Irene.
    “Eva,” she says.
    I don’t say anything, don’t know what the correct response would be. She peels the lace, looks at it. “Do you read?” she asks, meaning the lace.
    “No.”
    “How come?”
    I shrug.
    “She told me how good you were.”
    “I guess I don’t find lace reading very accurate.”
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    “Really,” she says, half question, half declaration. She’s not buying it.
    “For one thing,” I say, not knowing why I feel the need to prove anything but unable to stop, “Eva told me I was going to have a daughter.”
    “And you’re not?”
    “Not a chance in hell,” I say. I was only trying to throw her off the track. I had wanted to avoid talking about Lyndley, but now there is an edge to my voice.
    Ann clearly doesn’t know what to say. “Eva taught a group of us to read the lace,” she says. “I’m afraid I’m much better at reading heads.”
    She squints her eyes at the lace, then gives up, folding it. “ ‘Well, sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t.’ ”
    I look at her strangely.
    “It’s a quote”—she looks at me—“from Little Big Man. ”
    “I know what it’s from,” I say, hearing the edge sharpen further.
    “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say anything I just said.”
    “My bad,” she says. “I’m nosy by nature.”
    We both smile. She hands the lace to me. “She was my friend, you know,” she said. “Long before it was fashionable to be my friend.”
    She’s extending her hand, still holding the lace.
    “Why don’t you keep it?” I say, not taking it.
    She looks doubtful.
    “I’m sure she’d want you to have it,” I assure her.
    “Thanks,” she says, and starts back to the parlor, stopping at the door.
    Another woman comes in then, a Realtor, I think. Someone that Jay-Jay introduced me to earlier. She looks around the kitchen. I can tell she was hoping to catch me alone, since she seems a