The Lovers by Vendela Vida Page A

do, your childrens?” Deniz asked.
    “My son is…he’s about to get a job at a restaurant. He’s a good cook, but he wants to manage restaurants. He’s getting married next year.”
    “Next year is a giant year for him,” Deniz said. Yvonne nodded. She didn’t offer that every year for Matthew was a big one, full of accomplishments and celebrations. Peter had often listed them: National Merit Scholarship, early acceptance to Penn, second place in the regional lacrosse tournament, a pretty fiancée who had proposed to him, an offer—at age twenty-four—to be assistant manager of a restaurant that was booked two weeks in advance. If Matthew hadn’t been her son, she would have thought life was too easy for him. Actually, she still believed that. Sometimes she feared he had received so many accolades, so much external affirmation, that he had been depleted and dulled on the inside. He rarely said anything that one wouldn’t expect him to say.
    “And your daughter?” Deniz asked. “Is she beautiful like her mother?”
    It was, Yvonne knew, the kind of compliment you received when you weren’t in fact beautiful. “Thank you,” she said, smiling. “We look similar, but she’s much prettier.”
    Yvonne had spent a great deal of time assuring her daughter of her beauty. She had started when Aurelia was young, and people smiled briefly at her before their gazes landed on her twin brother, whose perpetually distracted eyes and slightly smug mouth lent him the air of someone who possessed a secret you wanted to know. The twins had the same nose, and on Matthew it appeared tough and authoritative while on Aurelia it looked indelicate, broken. Throughout their lives, Yvonne had made sure there were more pictures of Aurelia than Matthew on display on the fireplace mantel, in photo albums, and on holiday cards. Aurelia never commented on the disparity, but Yvonne was sure she noticed. Aurelia noticed everything.
    “What does she do, your daughter?” Deniz asked.
    “Well…” Yvonne started. She had long avoided questions about Aurelia—she and Peter both had. It had almost become a reflex. Galip interrupted then with a question, and, thankfully, Deniz turned her attention to him.
    The first time Aurelia went to rehab, everyone asked, “What’s your daughter up to?” because they didn’t know. By her third stay in rehab, though, word had gotten around, and when people asked how Aurelia was, they were asking because they wanted to have the update for the next dinnerparty, the sort of parties that Yvonne and Peter had stopped going to. At a certain point Peter had found ways to avoid saying Aurelia’s name.
    When Deniz turned back to Yvonne, she had forgotten the topic of their conversation. “Your husband is on the beach?” She looked to shore, as though she might be able to spot him herself.
    “I’m a widow,” Yvonne said. She wasn’t sure she had ever phrased it this way. Usually she just said her husband had passed away.
    “What does that mean?”
    “He’s dead,” Yvonne said, surprising herself. The words came too easily.
    “I am sorry,” Deniz said. She lifted her hand to her head, as though trying to imagine the pain, and fingered her head scarf. “I don’t know I am still wearing this,” she said, and removed it and folded it into a small rectangle. “I wear it when I cook. Some people on boat thinks it is for religion.”
    “Oh,” said Yvonne. She’d assumed this too. “So you’re not Muslim?”
    “I am, but I pray in own way. I don’t need to show my religion. You know how wife of Turkish president wears a head scarf?”
    Yvonne shook her head.
    “It’s terrible. In this country Ataturk worked so hard for no religion in government, and now wife of Turkish president wears head scarf. Big problem. More iced tea?”
    Deniz refilled her glass, and they sat in silence lookingout at the water. “I think it is responsibility of spouse to watch what husband or wife does,” Deniz said.