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gold sprinkles baked into it and aluminum legs and trim, which is either authentic fifties or else a reproduction. She’s got them a bottle of white wine already, and a bottle of Evian water. She sees them and smiles, and airy kisses go round the table.
    Today Charis is wearing a sagging mauve cotton jersey dress, with a fuzzy grey cardigan over top and an orange-and-aqua scarf with a design of meadow flowers draped around her neck. Her long straight hair is grey-blonde and parted in the middle; she has her reading glasses stuck up on top of her head. Her peach lipstick could be her real lips. She resembles a slightly faded advertisement for herbal shampoo – healthful, but verging on the antique. WhatOphelia would have looked like if she’d lived, or the Virgin Mary when middle-aged – earnest and distracted, and with an inner light. It’s the inner light that gets her in trouble.
    Roz is packed into a suit that Tony recognizes from the window of one of the more expensive designer stores on Bloor. She shops munificently and with gusto, but often on the run. The jacket is electric blue, the skirt is tight. Her face is carefully air-brushed, and her hair has just been re-coloured. This time it’s auburn. Her mouth is raspberry.
    Her face doesn’t go with the outfit. It isn’t insouciant and lean, but plump, with cushiony pink milkmaid’s cheeks and dimples when she smiles. Her eyes, intelligent, compassionate, and bleak, seem to belong to some other face, a thinner one; thinner, and more hardened.
    Tony settles into her chair, parking her big tote bag under it where she can use it as a footstool. Short kings once had special foot cushions so their legs wouldn’t dangle as they sat on their thrones. Tony sympathizes.
    “So,” says Roz after the preliminaries, “we’re all in our places, with bright shiny faces. What’s new? Tony, I saw the cutest outfit in Holt’s, it would be so good for you. A mandarin collar – mandarin collars are back! – and brass buttons down the front.” She lights her usual cigarette, and Charis gives her usual tiny cough. This part of the Toxique is not a smoke-free zone.
    “I’d look like a bellhop,” says Tony. “Anyway, it wouldn’t fit.”
    “You ever consider spike heels?” says Roz. “You’d add four inches.”
    “Be serious,” says Tony. “I want to be able to walk.”
    “You could get a leg implant,” says Roz. “A leg
enhancement
. Well, why not? They’re doing everything else.”
    “I think Tony’s body is appropriate the way it is,” says Charis.
    “I’m not talking about her body, I’m talking about her wardrobe,” says Roz.
    “As usual,” says Tony. They all laugh, a little boisterously. The wine bottle’s now half empty. Tony’s had only a few squirts of wine, mixed with Evian water. She’s wary of alcohol in any form.
    The three of them have lunch once a month. They’ve come to depend on it. They don’t have much in common except the catastrophe that brought them together, if Zenia can be called a catastrophe; but over time they’ve developed a loyalty to one another, an
esprit de corps
. Tony has come to like these women; she’s come to consider them close friends, or the next thing to it. They have gallantry, they have battle scars, they’ve been through fire; and each of them knows things about the others, by now, that nobody else does.
    So they’ve continued to meet regularly, like war widows or aging vets, or the wives of those missing in action. As with such groups, there are more people present around the table than can be accounted for.
    They don’t talk about Zenia, though. Not any more, not since they buried her. As Charis says, talking about her might hold her on this earth. As Tony says, she’s bad for the digestion. And as Roz says, why give her the air time?
    She’s here at the table all the same, thinks Tony. She’s here, we’re holding her, we’re giving her the air time. We can’t let her go.
    The waitress comes