A waiter removed our plates, checked to see if we wanted dessert, and brought us coffee. “Who’s the new, younger man?” Frances asked.

“His name is Berry West. I don’t know him.”

Frances was stirring Sweet ’n Low in her coffee and looked up in surprise. “Oh, I do. His wife was a friend of my ex brother-in-law’s ex sister-in-law. He designs those old-fashioned communities. You know, Patricia Anne, like Seaside and Blount Springs where you can walk to everything and you sit on the porch with your neighbors. Tin roofs. That kind of thing.”

I didn’t even try to figure out the relationship. “He designed Blount Springs and Seaside?”

“No, but that’s the kind of thing he does.” Frances picked up her coffee and took a sip. “Berry West. How about that. Did Mary Alice have a good time on their date?”

“I haven’t talked to her today.”

“Oh.” Frances put her cup down, sloshing the coffee slightly in the saucer. Most of her gestures are so graceful, I looked up in surprise. Her hands were shaking, and she pressed them against her cheeks.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, alarmed at her sudden change of mood. “Are you sick?”

“Oh, Patricia Anne. I wasn’t going to talk about this at lunch, but it’s all I can think about. David’s been transferred to London. He and Sharon were married last week at the courthouse and they’re leaving for London Saturday. They’ll be there at least three years.”

“Oh, Frances, I’m so sorry,” David is Frances’s only child. She and his father were divorced and then the father was killed in an automobile accident when David was a child. Frances and her son have always been very close. David had even chosen to live at home and go to college at the University of Alabama at Birmingham rather than leave home. And now he had married a girl whom Frances didn’t care for (she had confided that to me weeks before) and was going to live in a foreign country.

I reached over and took her hand. “You should have told me right away, not let me babble on about Haley and Mary Alice.”

“It was good for me to hear you talk. I’m ashamed of my reaction, to tell you the truth.” She shrugged. “My son has married a girl he loves, he’s healthy, and he’s got a good job with a promotion. What’s sad about that?”

She was asking me what was sad about that? I hadn’t even been able to take my kids to college, I was so upset at their leaving home. I was grieved that two of them lived 150 miles away in Atlanta. And she was asking me? Bad choice.