What Was Mine: & Other Stories by Ann Beattie Page B

door banged open. Nicholas was at the top of the stairs, staring down. He did look as if he had been rescuing a drowning child: disheveled, with not an extra second to spare. “What’s he doing inside?” he asked.
    “It’s cold out,” she said. “Nicky, the Tazewells are having a dinner for Father Curnan’s birthday tonight. Will you go with me?”
    The sopranos soared in unison. She must have looked alarmed—surely he noticed that she had suddenly put both hands on the banister railing—and perhaps that was why he quickly nodded yes and turned away.
    Back in the kitchen, with her boots off, Charlotte stroked the dog with one stockinged foot, and in response he shot up and went into his little routine, his famous trick. Almost complacently, he sat and extended his right paw. Then he rubbed his snout down that leg, put the paw back on the floor, and lifted and rubbed the left paw in the same fashion. He sneezed, turned twice in a circle to his left, and then came over to be patted. The trick meant nothing, of course, but it never failed as a crowd pleaser. Sometimes Charlotte had even come into a room and found him doing it all by himself. “Okay, you’re wonderful,” she whispered to Horatio now, scratching his ears.
    She heard Nicholas’s footsteps on the stairs and called, “Where are you going?” It dismayed her that he kept to himself so much. He stayed upstairs most of the day studying, or he talked on the telephone. He already had on his coat and scarf. Instead of hanging them in the hall closet, he kept them up in his room. He kept everything there, as if he were forever on the point of packing up for some quick journey.
    “Back to the garage,” he said. “Don’t get upset. It’s no big thing. I asked them yesterday if they had time to line the rear brakes, and they said they could fit me in this afternoon.”
    “Why would that upset me?” she said.
    “Because you’d think the car was unsafe. You’ve always got your images of disaster.”
    “What are you talking about?” she said. She was addressing Christmas cards, trying to convince herself that there might be some truth to Better late than never.
    “When I had the broken thumb, you carried on as if I was a quadriplegic.”
    He was talking about the year before—a bicycling injury, when he’d skidded on some icy pavement. She shouldn’t have flown out to Indiana, but she missed him and she hated the idea of his being hurt. College was the first time he had ever lived away from her. She hadn’t made a scene—she had just gone there and called from a motel. (It was in the back of her mind, she had to admit now, that the trip might also be a chance for her to meet Andrea, the off-campus student who had begun to turn up in Nicholas’s letters.) Nicholas was horrified that she’d come all that distance. He was fine, of course—he had a cast on his left hand was all—and he had said almost angrily that he couldn’t tell her anything without eliciting a huge overreaction.
    “You didn’t forget the dinner, did you?” she said now.
    He turned and looked at her. “We already talked about that,” he said. “Seven o’clock—is that right?”
    “Right,” she said. She began to address another envelope, trying to pass it off.
    “It will take approximately one hour at the garage,” he said.
    Then he left—the way his father so often had left—without saying good-bye.
    She wrote a few more cards, then called the florist’s to see whether they had been able to locate bird-of-paradise flowers in New York. She wanted to send them to Martine, her oldest friend, who had just returned from a vacation in Key West to the cold winds of the Upper East Side. Charlotte was happy to hear that someone had them, and that a dozen had gone out. “I thought we’d have good luck,” the woman at the florist’s said. “If we couldn’t locate some paradise in New York, I don’t know where paradise could be tracked down.” She had a young