“Does that help?” Deirdre asked as she fluffed up her hair with nimble pinches.
“Yes, thank you.” I nibbled thoughtfully on a cracker. “Virginia told me she’d had a daughter once, but she died. I wonder what her name was.”
“You could always ask her,” Paul suggested.
“That would be insensitive.”
“I’ll bet LouElla knows,” offered Deirdre. “She knows everything.”
I remembered LouElla’s dining room lookout post and was sure she knew a lot about a lot of things. The problem was sifting the truth out of the fantasy. I sat there in a haze listening to the banter going on around me — the subject had shifted to Super Bowl XXXIV — but I couldn’t have cared less about the Rams or the Titans. In my right ear, Ruth’s voice was insisting that the Rams were from Los Angeles and on my left Paul was s
