The Year of Living Famously by Laura Caldwell Page B

as her back became slightly stooped and the wrinkles set into her face with more determination. Now, she walked slowly and cautiously, leaning hard on her cane, and it took us forever to walk the few blocks to the restaurant. Each plodding step seemed a trial for her, but she refused a cab.
    â€œI’m not going to take a taxi around my own neighborhood,” she said proudly.
    I asked Emmie about the woman we had hired to help her around the house since the accident.
    â€œShe wears ponchos, ” Emmie said derisively.
    Other than that, she didn’t talk much on the way to dinner. It was too hard for her to concentrate on her footing and to converse at the same time. The silence was torturous. I became increasingly nervous about delivering my news. With each slow, painful step, I felt more and more like I was abandoning her, although she would probably hate that thought. Emmie hated pity.
    Finally we reached the restaurant and tucked ourselves into a booth, Emmie’s leg raised to the side and propped on a folded towel by the proprietor. We ordered a bottle of champagne, Emmie’s perpetual favorite.
    In my early adulthood, I used to say I hated champagne, refused to drink it, but really it was just a way of establishing my independence. I needn’t have worried. Emmie and I are so very different. She is strong and cheerful to a fault, while I am more moody. Emmie has spent the last few decades free from entanglements with the opposite sex, and yet aside from the few years before Declan, I moved from one man to another.
    I wondered, as I sat across from her, watching her readjust her leg and take a sip of champagne, what my mother would have thought about me moving to L. A. Would she have been supportive? Maybe disapproving and telling me it was my life to ruin? It was a futile exercise, this trying to imagine my parents in the present. I had no groundwork for envisioning myself as an adult in their world. They were forever frozen in their thirties, and when I thought of me with them, I was still eight years old.
    â€œI’m moving in with Declan,” I blurted out.
    Emmie raised the champagne flute to her mouth again, as if she’d heard nothing surprising. Her sapphire ring glittered navy blue with the movement.
    â€œWill you have enough room in that place of yours?” she said.
    â€œI’m moving to L. A.”
    Emmie put her glass down. “Why?”
    â€œHe needs to be there for his acting.” And then, because that wasn’t enough, “I’m in love with him.”
    She took a deep breath. She put a hand to her chest, as if something had caught there.
    â€œAre you all right?” I started to stand from the table.
    â€œOf course, sit down,” she said, irritated. She moved her glass away. She signaled the waiter and asked for another towel to put under her leg. “My, how I hate getting old. It’s making me sentimental.”
    â€œOh, come on,” I said in a kidding tone, hoping to lighten the mood. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    â€œEveryone is leaving me,” she said. Her voice was small. In fact, her whole body had seemed tiny since the accident.
    â€œEmmie.” I reached over to touch her hand.
    She pulled it away and shook her head. “I don’t want sympathy. I’m just stating a fact. I’ve run around my whole life with too many people to see and too many things to do, and now there’s barely anything left. Britton is gone, your parents, most of my writers…now you.”
    â€œI’m not gone in that sense, and hey, you still have the agency.”
    â€œKyra, dear, they keep me on because I helped build that place. They can’t oust me unceremoniously, and I won’t leave. But don’t think they aren’t hoping I’ll die quietly in the middle of the night.”
    â€œIt’s not true.”
    â€œIt is,” she said definitively. She tried not to seem upset by this,