Margaret answers her own door on Saturday morning, and I’m so caught off guard that for three seconds after she greets me, I just stare.
“Where’s Jodi?” I finally ask when I step inside and slip my shoes off.
“Day off,” Margaret says shortly, and leads me down the hallway. “Too hot to be outside today. Mind if we sit in the living room?”
“Works for me,” I tell her.
We stop by the kitchen first, and she shakes a box of colorful frozen macarons onto a plate. “Coffee? Tea?”
“Coffee,” I say. “But I can get it myself.”
She waves me toward the pot, and I pour myself a mug and find the sugar in a jar beneath the cupboard. “You want one?” I ask.
“Already got mine waiting in there,” she tells me, and I follow her back to the room where we first met. It’s so hot out today that the air-conditioning can’t keep up. The air feels stiff and damp. Even for me, it’s a bit much.
Just not enough to keep me from drinking hot coffee.
I must wince when I taste it, because Margaret laughs. “All right, all right, I don’t usually make the coffee.”
“It’s not that bad,” I say.
I try another gulp. My reaction makes her start laughing again, and it’s contagious. As I rein my giggles in, I set my mug aside and take out my recorder. “So today’s the day.”
“What day is that?” Her silver brows leap upward, but there’s something in her expression that tells me it’s an act. That she’s actually just as excited for today’s interview as I am.
“The day it becomes your story,” I say, hitting the button to start recording and setting the device on the table between us.
She flicks a hand over her shoulder, an unconvincing pishposh. “I told you: It’s all my story. When you come from a family like mine, you’re a part of a whole, like one square in a quilt. Anytime you try to pull in a particular direction, there are hundreds of other squares to resist. To pull you back.”
“I get that,” I say. “But today, try to ignore those squares. I want to know what it was like to be you.”
She smiles wide. “For a time,” she says, “it was pure magic.”
