Rosemary put her fork down. She lined it up with the edge of her plate. Then she lifted her napkin and touched it to her lips and laid it back in her lap.
"Peg's boy," she said.
"He's not a boy, Ma," Lena said. "He's thirty years old."
"I know how old he is."
"We ran into each other. The kids started it. It was nothing."
"It didn't look like nothing from the front window," Rosemary said.
Lena felt the heat climb up the back of her neck and into her ears. She was twenty-five years old. She paid her own rent in Lakewood, three hundred and ten dollars a month, for an apartment with a claw-foot tub and a radiator that sang. She had once powdered the nose of a United States senator. And she sat at her mother's table and felt fourteen.
"I was bringing him something," she said.