As the weeks went on, Daphne seemed, to the people in her life, to have
rebounded. More precisely, she seemed to have overshot. There was a
feverish, manic excitement about her all the time, as she rushed from one
place to the next. Mostly from one shopping expedition to the next.
For Daphne had made an important discovery. Money was not going to buy her the rest of her life, but it could sure as hell buy her happiness for whatever time she had left. Or so it seemed. With thirty-five years' worth of frugality ingrained in her, it was a swift, heady rush when she realized that she could run up all the bills she wanted. Again, so it seemed. She was dying, wasn't she? Lord knew how much time she had left, especially since (she had a little nagging twinge of conscience about this every now and then) she couldn't bring herself to see a doctor. What difference was it going to make, anyway? It wasn't as if they had a cure. And if they could extend her life significantly, what would that do? She'd spend ten years dying. Who wanted that?
No, it seemed perfectly clear that all she really had to look forward to was a few months. And if that was true, then what difference on earth could it possibly make if she racked up some unpayable VISA bills?
You can't put a car on plastic, of course, so she paid the hefty down payment and the first month's payment out of the joint savings account she and Niles had shared. Taking "shared" in a very loose sense. Of course nine-tenths of what was in there had originally come from Niles and not from her. But, she rationalized, she and Niles had discussed getting her a new car, and that was of course where the money would have come from. Granted, they hadn't really been talking about buying her a brand-new fire- red Corvette convertible. But so what? A car's a car. And that one was quite a good model. Not to mention seriously sexy.
The car was only the beginning. Daphne was discovering that a no-holds- barred shopping spree could be just the thing when reality began to encroach a little too far. And with a VISA with no credit limit (gotten new when she and Niles had combined their bank accounts) and a taste for the expensive that she'd resolutely been denying all these years, she set about indulging herself.
She didn't go halfway. She needed to redecorate the apartment, that was a definite - she couldn't bear living in the atmosphere she and Niles had created any longer. By all rights, she should have found a new apartment, but the market was tight just then. And of course she wanted a new wardrobe. Her old things really were dreadfully tatty. And shoes, well, of course she needed new shoes to go with the new clothes, but in the end, wasn't shopping for shoes an end in and of itself? And then there were new appliances to buy - the coffeemaker, of course that was too reminiscient of Niles, and who knew what wonders could be discovered when you browsed casually through the appliances in Sears? Breadmakers and pastamakers and all sorts of things to make the cooking which the Crane men ridiculed automated. And a new TV. And a new VCR, and a DVD player. And decorative scented soaps for the bathroom. And teddy bears and other stuffed animals - mostly Gund. And.
The list went on, but her favorite item was always clothing. Clothing and shoes. She'd been eating like a horse of late, mostly rich chocolate desserts with about ninety-six grams of fat each; but it hadn't started to show, and when it did, well, she figured there were times when a high thyroid level could be an advantage. That would be dangerous, of course, but what was the worst it could do to her? Kill her?
So she went on buying pile after pile of new clothing, and looking - with the aid of a new hundred-dollar-haircut - better than she'd ever looked in her life. This had the unpleasant side effect of attracting a lot of male attention, which she was in no state to deal with at that point - no relationship could ever be consummated anyway, so what was the point? Was she going to find herself a serious boyfriend only to inform him that it wasn't to go beyond hand-holding? However, on the whole she was pleased with how good she was looking, and all the things she was accruing. It made her feel a little safer. She went right on shopping.
She was in Neiman-Marcus ringing up a three-hundred dollar purchase when she ran into Mel. Actually, she was intent on her purchases, savoring the usual heady rush of having acquired more stuff, when she was startled by a light tap on her elbow. She froze upon seeing who it was, unsure what to do. She had no idea how Mel felt about her at this point, and even less of an idea how she felt about Mel. She'd been accustomed to detesting her for so long that it was difficult to shift all her opinions around, even if she had done so seemingly effortlessly when Niles had first broken the news; that apparent sense of comradery had been, she now realized, born less of any real desire to befriend Mel than of the fact that Niles clearly wanted to forget all about her. But he wasn't around anymore, and she felt no urge to spite his absent image.
At the same time, what she'd said to Niles that last night - "she and I are in this together" - hadn't been totally off the mark, either. The best emotion she could summon for this woman just now seemed to be an unexpected surge of pity; but it was real and true, and it kept her from blowing her off.
While she'd been pondering all this, she'd missed something Mel had said. Asking for a repetition, she discovered it had just been her name. She nodded and realized she was making a distinctly vacuous impression. She cleared her throat, grabbed the bag the clerk had just handed her, and tried to put herself together.
"Well," she said, and realized that didn't do much to diminish the impression of vacuity. Grasping after words, finding them suddenly slippery, she ended up blurting out the first thing that came to her tongue - "This is a little awkward -" which was, of course, wrong. Then again, this was awkward. Mel simply nodded, leaving that where it was. At least she didn't seem annoyed.
The customer next in line tapped Daphne's shoulder gingerly. Jumping again, she got out of the line. The register began clicking again.
"Well!" Mel said, with that little breathy inflection of hers, as she looked Daphne up and down, eyes lingering for a moment over the sales bag. "I didn't expect to run into you here."
"No, I. no," Daphne said, realizing suddenly that Mel was wondering how in hell she was going to afford the purchase she'd just rung up. Since she was wondering the same thing herself, she let it pass. There was a moment of silence which would have become very awkward very quickly, had not a tall woman with ash-blond hair fading to gray breezed up just then.
"Are we about done here?" she said to Mel, then faltered slightly upon seeing Daphne. "Oh, hi," she said, evidently wondering who Daphne was. Mel intervened.
"Um, Daphne," she said, "This is Kyra Malone, my - er - roommate. Kyra, this is Daphne Moon."
Daphne was too hung up on "my - er - roommate" to notice that this Kyra quite clearly recognized her name. She was just deciding that the logical conclusion as to meaning of the stammer, not to mention the out-of-place college-age designation, was absurd when the conversation moved on again in another of those jerky starts.
"Uh, Kyra," Mel said, "I was thinking that while you went to the bookstore like you were hoping to do, Daphne and I might get something to eat. If that's all right," she added, looking at Daphne. Daphne nodded wordlessly, impressed at how quickly Mel had been able to concoct that little scenario, since it was quite clear Kyra had previously had no intention of visiting any bookstore. She was a good sport about it - "I'll occupy myself somehow," were her exact words - and before she knew it Daphne had been more or less propelled toward the local food court, and then propelled right past it towards a ritzier-looking café sort of deal. A more upscale version of Au Bon Pain, it did not look to be the sort of place where you could get an extra-large slice of cheesecake. Daphne sighed.
"So," Daphne said, once they were seated with tiny portions of light, unsatisfying food which made it clear neither of them was really interested in eating. "This isn't how I expected to be spending my afternoon." She hoped that didn't sound as nasty to Mel as it did to her.
"No," Mel said, sitting forward a little. "I'm a little relieved, though. I've thought about calling you a couple of times, actually, but I. well, you know."
"Yes," Daphne said, far more impressed with the beginning of the sentence than with its ending. "I'd thought about giving you a call too, I guess, at first, but I - oh, I don't know." Why was it that she suddenly found herself on the brink of blurting out some home truths? Why was it that she had to actively stop herself from saying that she'd essentially been running from it all for the past two months? She'd never gotten so far as admitting that to herself, and she was on the verge of admitting it to a woman she didn't even like.
"No, it's not exactly easy to deal with," Mel said, with admirable composure. "And it's a difficult situation. If Niles hadn't - if things weren't like this I'd never want to see you again."
Give her credit for honesty, anyway. To her own surprise, Daphne laughed a little. "No, I know what you mean," she said wryly. She took a sip of water. "You know, just before Niles -" she cleared her throat. "Just before he left," she said, hitting the last word too hard, "I said something to him about how we, you and I, were in this together and. what did I say?" she asked, noticing how Mel's eyes had suddenly glazed over.
"Excuse me," Mel said, and coughed. "What was that about his - leaving?"
"Yes," Daphne said, puzzled. "You're not going to tell me you hadn't heard." She realized with a brief flash of regret that there had been an opportunity, there, for her to act her way out of this and leave one more person with a false impression. All this unmitigated honesty was already getting to be difficult.
"No, I - well, I haven't been keeping up with that sort of thing very much," Mel answered, snapping Daphne back to the conversation. "My life's changed a lot over the past few months, and I haven't really been keeping up with - I had no idea." She hesitated, clearly wanting to ask more questions, but unsure about what would be appropriate. Daphne felt an illogical twinge of that same pity again, mostly because she could sense that Mel was genuinely trying to be decent about this, and decided to make things easy on her.
"He's been gone months now," she said, watching one of Mel's eyebrows lift slightly. "Since the day he got the blood results back. He told me that night and was gone by the next morning." She couldn't stand the silence that would be sure to follow there while Mel groped for the appropriate condolences, so she found herself talking even though there was nothing more to say. "I haven't heard from him since. I have no idea where he is. I don't - I don't think he's coming back, though." She pushed her chin up and made her expression very severe, telling herself that she would sooner shoot herself than be found crying in front of Mel Karnofsky in public.
"I'm sorry," Mel said after a minute, which was of course standard. Less standard was "I suppose this is two things we have in common, then."
Daphne looked at her. She wasn't joking. With an effort, she said "And I suppose you're pleased about it."
"No!" came the quick response, and just as quickly, Daphne believed her. "No. I. like I said, I've moved on in a lot of ways. And after what he's already done to both of us, the last thing I would wish is for him to do anything more to you."
Daphne set down her fork with a small clink. "It all does come back to him, doesn't it?" she said, and sighed. "Sometimes I don't think it's right to hate him this much. But when you think about what he actually did -"
"Anything that gets you through it," Mel said, taking a sip of her own water.
"How can you be that way about it?" Daphne asked, before she could help it. "How can you be so calm? Half the time I want to strangle someone, and the other half -" She stopped, not ready to touch on the subject of her shopping. The other half the time she spent money frantically, living for the high it gave her.
"I don't feel like I'm any 'way' about it," Mel said after a pause, and something about the way her eyes cut away when she said that made Daphne feel certain she did have an answer and was withholding it. She remembered the bit about her "roommate," and wondered, with a surreal sort of antilogic that seemed to fit well with this surreal sort of day, whether Mel hadn't found both happiness and a new kind of serenity with this Kyra woman. Not that it's any of my business, she thought, and put the idea away. "I'm just trying to get through this. Day by day. You know the cliches."
"They don't help much," Daphne said, more bitterly than she would have liked. There was a sudden hot prickle of tears behind her eyes, and she blinked furiously and grabbed for her napkin, stabbing it at her eyes. "This is weird," she said, just to be talking. "Talking to you this way. How does that work, anyway? We haven't exactly had the smoothest of relationships."
"No," Mel answered, fiddling with her own napkin, "but." There was another pause, and Daphne wondered which of them would be the first to say the word AIDS. There was no other answer for any of this, of course, and neither one was saying it. "Of course there's a sort of bond," she finished, lamely. "I can't exactly be angry with you now for taking Niles from me, not since he's left you, and anyway I've found someone else. Besides," she said, quickly enough that it was clear she was trying to slip that "I've found someone else" in without any questions, "even if I were still pining for Niles and he were still with you, there's a sort of bond, naturally, in being -"
"Yes, the two women he infected," Daphne said, saving the pause but still unable to say the dreaded four-letter word. "Hell of a reason to be sitting in an overpriced café drinking three-dollar bottles of water together."
Mel laughed, a sound which startled Daphne, as she hadn't heard it before. "It is," she said, "but if you don't mind I'd rather - address some things more directly." That sounded more like her.
"What things would those be?" Daphne said dryly.
"Well, there are a good deal of practical things to discuss, of course -"
"If you're thinking you're going to sit me down here for a nice chat about medications you can forget it."
"No, of course not. Well, maybe, if that was what you wanted to discuss, but really - can't we just talk?" Mel said, and her eyes were suddenly pleading. "I can talk to Kyra about some of this but it's hard, I keep thinking she can't understand. And there's no one else. And if Niles has left you - oh, I'm sorry." She stopped, seeming to realize there was no reasonable way to restart that.
Daphne sat still, thinking. This whole experience was insane. The idea that she was expected to regard Mel as a normal, decent human being would have been enough to absorb in one conversation. For her to essentially demand that they "talk" - in the sense of "bare their souls", Daphne inferred - was quite obviously sheer lunacy.
But what was the alternative? she thought, letting the silence drag on. She'd go back to her apartment, cavernous now that she had it to herself, and put away all her new purchases, many of which she would never wear, likely. She would walk around touching all her new acquisitions, trying to convince herself they meant something. She'd soak in the tub for hours with a whole host of new bath products, trying to read a new book and reading the same page over and over again. She would try to ignore the fact that she was dying. And like as not she would cry herself to sleep.
"In other words," she began, clearing her throat, "you want us to be friends."
"Well, I don't know if I'd go that far," Mel said, sounding so honestly startled that Daphne laughed before she could help it. She kept laughing, and Mel smiled a little eventually, and when she stopped laughing she impulsively reached across and patted the hand of the woman sitting across from her. Mel looked even more startled.
"Can we get out of this damn café?" Daphne asked. "The atmosphere in here is driving me crazy. Maybe we can 'talk' while I walk you to your car."
"We should probably find Kyra first," Mel said, standing up and moving towards the door. "I have no idea where she'll be by now."
"As long as there actually is a bookstore within ten miles of here, we should probably be okay," Daphne said, following Mel to the door.
For Daphne had made an important discovery. Money was not going to buy her the rest of her life, but it could sure as hell buy her happiness for whatever time she had left. Or so it seemed. With thirty-five years' worth of frugality ingrained in her, it was a swift, heady rush when she realized that she could run up all the bills she wanted. Again, so it seemed. She was dying, wasn't she? Lord knew how much time she had left, especially since (she had a little nagging twinge of conscience about this every now and then) she couldn't bring herself to see a doctor. What difference was it going to make, anyway? It wasn't as if they had a cure. And if they could extend her life significantly, what would that do? She'd spend ten years dying. Who wanted that?
No, it seemed perfectly clear that all she really had to look forward to was a few months. And if that was true, then what difference on earth could it possibly make if she racked up some unpayable VISA bills?
You can't put a car on plastic, of course, so she paid the hefty down payment and the first month's payment out of the joint savings account she and Niles had shared. Taking "shared" in a very loose sense. Of course nine-tenths of what was in there had originally come from Niles and not from her. But, she rationalized, she and Niles had discussed getting her a new car, and that was of course where the money would have come from. Granted, they hadn't really been talking about buying her a brand-new fire- red Corvette convertible. But so what? A car's a car. And that one was quite a good model. Not to mention seriously sexy.
The car was only the beginning. Daphne was discovering that a no-holds- barred shopping spree could be just the thing when reality began to encroach a little too far. And with a VISA with no credit limit (gotten new when she and Niles had combined their bank accounts) and a taste for the expensive that she'd resolutely been denying all these years, she set about indulging herself.
She didn't go halfway. She needed to redecorate the apartment, that was a definite - she couldn't bear living in the atmosphere she and Niles had created any longer. By all rights, she should have found a new apartment, but the market was tight just then. And of course she wanted a new wardrobe. Her old things really were dreadfully tatty. And shoes, well, of course she needed new shoes to go with the new clothes, but in the end, wasn't shopping for shoes an end in and of itself? And then there were new appliances to buy - the coffeemaker, of course that was too reminiscient of Niles, and who knew what wonders could be discovered when you browsed casually through the appliances in Sears? Breadmakers and pastamakers and all sorts of things to make the cooking which the Crane men ridiculed automated. And a new TV. And a new VCR, and a DVD player. And decorative scented soaps for the bathroom. And teddy bears and other stuffed animals - mostly Gund. And.
The list went on, but her favorite item was always clothing. Clothing and shoes. She'd been eating like a horse of late, mostly rich chocolate desserts with about ninety-six grams of fat each; but it hadn't started to show, and when it did, well, she figured there were times when a high thyroid level could be an advantage. That would be dangerous, of course, but what was the worst it could do to her? Kill her?
So she went on buying pile after pile of new clothing, and looking - with the aid of a new hundred-dollar-haircut - better than she'd ever looked in her life. This had the unpleasant side effect of attracting a lot of male attention, which she was in no state to deal with at that point - no relationship could ever be consummated anyway, so what was the point? Was she going to find herself a serious boyfriend only to inform him that it wasn't to go beyond hand-holding? However, on the whole she was pleased with how good she was looking, and all the things she was accruing. It made her feel a little safer. She went right on shopping.
She was in Neiman-Marcus ringing up a three-hundred dollar purchase when she ran into Mel. Actually, she was intent on her purchases, savoring the usual heady rush of having acquired more stuff, when she was startled by a light tap on her elbow. She froze upon seeing who it was, unsure what to do. She had no idea how Mel felt about her at this point, and even less of an idea how she felt about Mel. She'd been accustomed to detesting her for so long that it was difficult to shift all her opinions around, even if she had done so seemingly effortlessly when Niles had first broken the news; that apparent sense of comradery had been, she now realized, born less of any real desire to befriend Mel than of the fact that Niles clearly wanted to forget all about her. But he wasn't around anymore, and she felt no urge to spite his absent image.
At the same time, what she'd said to Niles that last night - "she and I are in this together" - hadn't been totally off the mark, either. The best emotion she could summon for this woman just now seemed to be an unexpected surge of pity; but it was real and true, and it kept her from blowing her off.
While she'd been pondering all this, she'd missed something Mel had said. Asking for a repetition, she discovered it had just been her name. She nodded and realized she was making a distinctly vacuous impression. She cleared her throat, grabbed the bag the clerk had just handed her, and tried to put herself together.
"Well," she said, and realized that didn't do much to diminish the impression of vacuity. Grasping after words, finding them suddenly slippery, she ended up blurting out the first thing that came to her tongue - "This is a little awkward -" which was, of course, wrong. Then again, this was awkward. Mel simply nodded, leaving that where it was. At least she didn't seem annoyed.
The customer next in line tapped Daphne's shoulder gingerly. Jumping again, she got out of the line. The register began clicking again.
"Well!" Mel said, with that little breathy inflection of hers, as she looked Daphne up and down, eyes lingering for a moment over the sales bag. "I didn't expect to run into you here."
"No, I. no," Daphne said, realizing suddenly that Mel was wondering how in hell she was going to afford the purchase she'd just rung up. Since she was wondering the same thing herself, she let it pass. There was a moment of silence which would have become very awkward very quickly, had not a tall woman with ash-blond hair fading to gray breezed up just then.
"Are we about done here?" she said to Mel, then faltered slightly upon seeing Daphne. "Oh, hi," she said, evidently wondering who Daphne was. Mel intervened.
"Um, Daphne," she said, "This is Kyra Malone, my - er - roommate. Kyra, this is Daphne Moon."
Daphne was too hung up on "my - er - roommate" to notice that this Kyra quite clearly recognized her name. She was just deciding that the logical conclusion as to meaning of the stammer, not to mention the out-of-place college-age designation, was absurd when the conversation moved on again in another of those jerky starts.
"Uh, Kyra," Mel said, "I was thinking that while you went to the bookstore like you were hoping to do, Daphne and I might get something to eat. If that's all right," she added, looking at Daphne. Daphne nodded wordlessly, impressed at how quickly Mel had been able to concoct that little scenario, since it was quite clear Kyra had previously had no intention of visiting any bookstore. She was a good sport about it - "I'll occupy myself somehow," were her exact words - and before she knew it Daphne had been more or less propelled toward the local food court, and then propelled right past it towards a ritzier-looking café sort of deal. A more upscale version of Au Bon Pain, it did not look to be the sort of place where you could get an extra-large slice of cheesecake. Daphne sighed.
"So," Daphne said, once they were seated with tiny portions of light, unsatisfying food which made it clear neither of them was really interested in eating. "This isn't how I expected to be spending my afternoon." She hoped that didn't sound as nasty to Mel as it did to her.
"No," Mel said, sitting forward a little. "I'm a little relieved, though. I've thought about calling you a couple of times, actually, but I. well, you know."
"Yes," Daphne said, far more impressed with the beginning of the sentence than with its ending. "I'd thought about giving you a call too, I guess, at first, but I - oh, I don't know." Why was it that she suddenly found herself on the brink of blurting out some home truths? Why was it that she had to actively stop herself from saying that she'd essentially been running from it all for the past two months? She'd never gotten so far as admitting that to herself, and she was on the verge of admitting it to a woman she didn't even like.
"No, it's not exactly easy to deal with," Mel said, with admirable composure. "And it's a difficult situation. If Niles hadn't - if things weren't like this I'd never want to see you again."
Give her credit for honesty, anyway. To her own surprise, Daphne laughed a little. "No, I know what you mean," she said wryly. She took a sip of water. "You know, just before Niles -" she cleared her throat. "Just before he left," she said, hitting the last word too hard, "I said something to him about how we, you and I, were in this together and. what did I say?" she asked, noticing how Mel's eyes had suddenly glazed over.
"Excuse me," Mel said, and coughed. "What was that about his - leaving?"
"Yes," Daphne said, puzzled. "You're not going to tell me you hadn't heard." She realized with a brief flash of regret that there had been an opportunity, there, for her to act her way out of this and leave one more person with a false impression. All this unmitigated honesty was already getting to be difficult.
"No, I - well, I haven't been keeping up with that sort of thing very much," Mel answered, snapping Daphne back to the conversation. "My life's changed a lot over the past few months, and I haven't really been keeping up with - I had no idea." She hesitated, clearly wanting to ask more questions, but unsure about what would be appropriate. Daphne felt an illogical twinge of that same pity again, mostly because she could sense that Mel was genuinely trying to be decent about this, and decided to make things easy on her.
"He's been gone months now," she said, watching one of Mel's eyebrows lift slightly. "Since the day he got the blood results back. He told me that night and was gone by the next morning." She couldn't stand the silence that would be sure to follow there while Mel groped for the appropriate condolences, so she found herself talking even though there was nothing more to say. "I haven't heard from him since. I have no idea where he is. I don't - I don't think he's coming back, though." She pushed her chin up and made her expression very severe, telling herself that she would sooner shoot herself than be found crying in front of Mel Karnofsky in public.
"I'm sorry," Mel said after a minute, which was of course standard. Less standard was "I suppose this is two things we have in common, then."
Daphne looked at her. She wasn't joking. With an effort, she said "And I suppose you're pleased about it."
"No!" came the quick response, and just as quickly, Daphne believed her. "No. I. like I said, I've moved on in a lot of ways. And after what he's already done to both of us, the last thing I would wish is for him to do anything more to you."
Daphne set down her fork with a small clink. "It all does come back to him, doesn't it?" she said, and sighed. "Sometimes I don't think it's right to hate him this much. But when you think about what he actually did -"
"Anything that gets you through it," Mel said, taking a sip of her own water.
"How can you be that way about it?" Daphne asked, before she could help it. "How can you be so calm? Half the time I want to strangle someone, and the other half -" She stopped, not ready to touch on the subject of her shopping. The other half the time she spent money frantically, living for the high it gave her.
"I don't feel like I'm any 'way' about it," Mel said after a pause, and something about the way her eyes cut away when she said that made Daphne feel certain she did have an answer and was withholding it. She remembered the bit about her "roommate," and wondered, with a surreal sort of antilogic that seemed to fit well with this surreal sort of day, whether Mel hadn't found both happiness and a new kind of serenity with this Kyra woman. Not that it's any of my business, she thought, and put the idea away. "I'm just trying to get through this. Day by day. You know the cliches."
"They don't help much," Daphne said, more bitterly than she would have liked. There was a sudden hot prickle of tears behind her eyes, and she blinked furiously and grabbed for her napkin, stabbing it at her eyes. "This is weird," she said, just to be talking. "Talking to you this way. How does that work, anyway? We haven't exactly had the smoothest of relationships."
"No," Mel answered, fiddling with her own napkin, "but." There was another pause, and Daphne wondered which of them would be the first to say the word AIDS. There was no other answer for any of this, of course, and neither one was saying it. "Of course there's a sort of bond," she finished, lamely. "I can't exactly be angry with you now for taking Niles from me, not since he's left you, and anyway I've found someone else. Besides," she said, quickly enough that it was clear she was trying to slip that "I've found someone else" in without any questions, "even if I were still pining for Niles and he were still with you, there's a sort of bond, naturally, in being -"
"Yes, the two women he infected," Daphne said, saving the pause but still unable to say the dreaded four-letter word. "Hell of a reason to be sitting in an overpriced café drinking three-dollar bottles of water together."
Mel laughed, a sound which startled Daphne, as she hadn't heard it before. "It is," she said, "but if you don't mind I'd rather - address some things more directly." That sounded more like her.
"What things would those be?" Daphne said dryly.
"Well, there are a good deal of practical things to discuss, of course -"
"If you're thinking you're going to sit me down here for a nice chat about medications you can forget it."
"No, of course not. Well, maybe, if that was what you wanted to discuss, but really - can't we just talk?" Mel said, and her eyes were suddenly pleading. "I can talk to Kyra about some of this but it's hard, I keep thinking she can't understand. And there's no one else. And if Niles has left you - oh, I'm sorry." She stopped, seeming to realize there was no reasonable way to restart that.
Daphne sat still, thinking. This whole experience was insane. The idea that she was expected to regard Mel as a normal, decent human being would have been enough to absorb in one conversation. For her to essentially demand that they "talk" - in the sense of "bare their souls", Daphne inferred - was quite obviously sheer lunacy.
But what was the alternative? she thought, letting the silence drag on. She'd go back to her apartment, cavernous now that she had it to herself, and put away all her new purchases, many of which she would never wear, likely. She would walk around touching all her new acquisitions, trying to convince herself they meant something. She'd soak in the tub for hours with a whole host of new bath products, trying to read a new book and reading the same page over and over again. She would try to ignore the fact that she was dying. And like as not she would cry herself to sleep.
"In other words," she began, clearing her throat, "you want us to be friends."
"Well, I don't know if I'd go that far," Mel said, sounding so honestly startled that Daphne laughed before she could help it. She kept laughing, and Mel smiled a little eventually, and when she stopped laughing she impulsively reached across and patted the hand of the woman sitting across from her. Mel looked even more startled.
"Can we get out of this damn café?" Daphne asked. "The atmosphere in here is driving me crazy. Maybe we can 'talk' while I walk you to your car."
"We should probably find Kyra first," Mel said, standing up and moving towards the door. "I have no idea where she'll be by now."
"As long as there actually is a bookstore within ten miles of here, we should probably be okay," Daphne said, following Mel to the door.