So did the handbag. For several minutes the party existed in a stunned after-state. People spoke too softly. Someone led the younger children inside so they would stop staring at the flames.
Margaret turned off the gas to the fire pit, and Glenn used long metal tongs to pull the ruined handbag onto a stone paver once it stopped actively burning. Eleanor’s cousin Denise began picking up the scattered candles because she needed something useful to do. Nobody touched the cake. It had been a custom lemon cake with raspberry filling from Bell & Finch Bakery, the same flavor Eleanor’s late husband Richard ordered for their thirtieth wedding anniversary.
Eleanor had not chosen it for sentimentality exactly. She disliked being treated as fragile because she was widowed. But she had chosen it because sixty-five felt like an age at which she could allow memory to sit at the table without pretending memory was grief. Now frosting soaked into the stone grout.
Margaret came beside her. “Do you want everyone to go?” Eleanor looked around at the faces waiting for instruction. Her first impulse was yes.
Send them home. Wash the patio. Throw away the cake. Go upstairs, take off the silk blouse, and become a private person again.
Then she saw her granddaughter Lucy standing by the sliding door holding a paper birthday crown she had made that morning. Lucy was Harrison’s daughter from his first marriage, nine years old, and had been watching everything with huge frightened eyes. Her mother, Harrison’s ex-wife Claire, had dropped her off before the party and planned to pick her up after dinner. Eleanor suddenly understood that the spectacle was not over just because Sloan had left.
The remaining people needed to learn what happened next too. She straightened. “No,” she said. “The party continues.”
Margaret studied her. “Are you sure?” “No.” But that isn’t the same question.