New England White by Stephen L. Carter

and made her way over to Nadia to offer condolences. The ex-wife had hard golden eyes. Whatever her politics back home, she was exhausted from so much exuberant blackness. Julia perceived at once that the woman did not need another hug, and so shook her hand instead. Nadia, upon hearing the name, grew chilly and dismissive. Kellen and Nadia had not even met back when he had whatever he had with Julia, and yet the woman looked ready to fight. Julia wondered what Kellen had told his wife, and when. A part of his charm in a woman’s life was that you always believed what he said; a part of his terror was that you always knew you shouldn’t.
    Julia spoke briefly to rugged Seth, who asked her to come to the house later on: “I got something Kellen would of wanted you to have.” He gave a ferocious wink that promised to make the visit worth her while. Now she knew where Kellen had learned it. “Dress casual.” Turning, Julia saw Vanessa around the side of the church, laughing easily with a bevy of kids her own age and younger, Nadia’s scrawny son among them. Whatever Vanessa was saying had the boy smiling. Julia smiled, too. People always adored her daughter on first meeting and even second, but that third one could be a mess. Her smile faded as she remembered the precocious child who had loved piano and ballet and Sunday school, who devoured books of word games instead of sweets, whose special smile was reserved for her mother alone. Then, although she tried to resist, her mind skipped to the terrible night last February when Vanessa burned the Mercedes.
    Lemaster had been out of town as usual, and Julia had to face the early hours without him. The first officer on the scene, a baby-faced old man of thirty who had never seen anything like this in his life because the Landing had no crime to speak of, asked Vanessa what she had done and why she did it, not the way the courts prescribe, and surely inadmissible, but never mind, the case would never go to trial. The former straight-A student, by then somewhere in the B-minus range or worse, shrugged her slim shoulders, never quite looking at him, and said, voice dull with lost hope,
Why not?
Then, gazing at the conflagration, blood smudging her wrists, the hint of a smile tugging at her lips, she added,
Isn’t it the most awesome thing?
At the hospital, they strapped her down for two days, trying one sedative after another until they got the dosage right. Waiting for her husband to return, Julia sat in the corridor with a Sister Lady or two, listening as Vanessa begged for somebody, anybody, to please, please come and kill her.
    “Julia?” said a soft voice. “Mrs. Carlyle?”
    Relieved at the distraction, she swung around, and found herself face-to-face with the wild-haired woman who had sat near them in the pew. The anger had vanished, but the redness in the stranger’s sallow cheeks proposed that it was on call twenty-four hours a day. The Hermès scarf was if anything more crooked than before. She looked to be about Julia’s age, and her bearing suggested that she had seen a lot of life.
    “Have we met?” said Julia, with her mother’s hauteur, because strangers had no entitlement to use her first name. “Ms.—uh—”
    “Mallard,” the woman said, and indeed she displayed a birdlike fussiness, mouth flaring as though she might at any moment quack, satiny hand brushing Julia’s like a feather. “Mary Mallard.”
    “How did you know Kellen?”
    “You mean, what am I doing here, given that I’m white?” Julia blushed, and there turned out to be space on Mary Mallard’s ducklike countenance for a smile after all. “I’m not one of his women, if that’s what you’re thinking. No, no, we were working on a project together. We didn’t finish. Too bad.” A lift of the long flat chin. “You missed the wake.”
    “We just flew in this morning,” Julia explained, unexpectedly apologetic. Whatever Mary Mallard’s profession, she excelled at putting people