Breakfast at Stephanie's by Sue Margolis

Author:Sue Margolis
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780440335016
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Estelle was on the phone first thing, to find out how the audition had gone.

“He wants you? Oh, darling, that’s wonderful. Hang on, let me tell your father . . . Harry!” Stephanie jerked the phone from her ear a moment too late. “He can’t hear me. He’s on the other line talking to the people at London Online. He came home last night to nineteen junk e-mails, ten of them asking if he wanted his septic tank overhauled. Harry! Harry! You off the phone yet?” Stephanie winced and changed ears for a second time. “Harry! . . . He still can’t hear me. Harry! It’s great news. He wants her . . . What do you mean, ‘Who wants her?’ Sidney Doucette wants Stephanie . . . Your dad says brilliant and well done. You know, sweetie, we’re so proud of you. So, come on, what is it he has in mind for you, this Ossie?”

Stephanie explained how he’d left the Blues Café before she’d had a chance to ask. “But how could you have let him go without telling you?” Estelle said in that familiar reproachful tone of hers. “You should have pinned him down, made him tell you what he has in mind.”

Stephanie said everything had happened so fast. “One minute he was there, the next he was walking away.”

“This would never have happened if your father and I had been there. I knew we should have come.”

Stephanie took a deep breath and did her best to visualize her floaty ball. “So,” she said, forcing a smile because she’d read in some magazine that “forcing the smile helps you feel the smile,” “how was the Masonic do?”

Estelle said it had been a complete bore. The tedium had only been relieved by the grand master’s tiddly wife—“You remember Sylvia Epstein, chin so pointed, she could use it to get pickles out of a jar”—crumbling Valium onto her crème caramel to give it some crunch.

“So,” her mother went on, “did you manage to get anything out of your grandma yet, about this man she’s been seeing?”

Tactfully avoiding the fuck-buddy issue, she explained that Lilly had dumped him. “But there’s somebody else. Her teacher from tai chi.”

Estelle was aghast. “What, some lad?” Stephanie explained that he was in his seventies. Estelle said that was all right, then. “When you think about it—teacher and pupil—it’s all rather sweet, really.”

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