Page 88 of Saltwater

“Can I see your silk scarves?” Naomi asks, leaning over the glass case. “But only the pinks, please.”

While the employees set about gathering them, Naomi pulls a pill case from her purse and slips two white pills into her mouth. She swallows.

“Would you like to see anything?” she asks me.

“I’m fine,” I say.

The truth is, she’s showing me everything I want to see. The cracks and fault lines that are growing,havebeen growing, between her and my uncle. Maybe, even, between my uncle and my father. I think of him on the Salto,his anger when I suggested we involve Marcus.

“Are you sure?” she says. “I think something in a robin’s-egg blue would look perfect on you. You have your mother’s coloring.” Then she pauses. “I love our mother-daughter days. Don’t you?”

The sales associate returns with a stack of scarves, and Naomi places one, printed with recumbent leopards, into my hands.

“What do you think?” she says.

“Gorgeous,” I say.

I’m trying to keep my enthusiasm for this. Smile. Touch. Compliment. Keep her talking. But my phone rings.

“You can get that,” Naomi says.

Somewhere between Ferragamo and Hermès she shifted, manically, from being on the verge of tears to magnanimous, and I feel the whiplash. Maybe it is just how Naomi deals with anger. It strikes me that I wouldn’t really know.

I look at my phone—it’s Ciro. I decline the call.

“Who was it?” she asks.

“No one,” I say.

“Freddy?”

“No.”

“You’re bad at lying. Did you know that?”

Her words raise the hairs on my arms, and I hope that she’s wrong. She fingers a stretch of scrunched silk toile, wraps it around her arm, drops it in the pile of the items she will pass on. It’s too bright. Toofuchsia.Not blush or rosé or shell.Fuchsia.Plain. She pulls another one and wraps it around my neck.

“Washes you out.” She stares. “You do look so much like her. Especially now.”

“Tell me what you remember about her,” I say.

“We’ll take these,” she says to the employee, who scoops up the pile and rushes into the back, leaving us alone. “Your mother was so talented. Too talented, I think.”

“Such a tragedy,” I say.

It was what we always said to each other:a tragedy.

Naomi cocks her head to the side and looks at me.

“He told you, didn’t he?” she says.

Her eyes are unfocused, and they dip to my mouth and then past my shoulder, as if she’s watching something in the distance. “I saw it on you this afternoon.” She tuts. “I told you. You’re bad at lying.”

She knows. Has probably always known.

It’s a slap that I’m the only one they’ve kept it from all these years. All those days ofNo comment,all the times I defended him, defended them. There was probably nothing better for them than having a child run interference with the press.

See—her own child believes us.

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