As in:
Carole said she’d given up smoking. But because she still liked to accommodate her relapses, she persuaded Zoe and Flossy (whose proper name was Florence) to sit for lunch on the patio at Paretta’s. Every Thursday. Theirs was the back table between a potted Norfolk pine and three enormous, blue-green, Japanese fishing buoys. It was reserved for them by general understanding, approved by Mrs. Paretta’s knowing smile and outfitted with a complimentary basket of bruschetta topped with chopped roma tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella. That plus a pewter ashtray for Carole.
“Oh, the pleasures of vice and seniority,” Carole had once remarked.
It was true they both missed Flossy, today, but it was also an unspoken relief to be able to get through one lunch without a briefing about Flossy’s latest procedure. She’d had an unusual run of bad luck the past year and a half, beginning with planter fasciitis, through eczema, and now toward ocular degeneration. Nothing unheard of, but because Flossy absorbed every detail as if it might hold the answer to unlocking a cure for all of humanity’s ills, it was hard sometimes to transition to other subjects, such as whether it would be fun to try tennis again, or go fishing just once.
So, today it was just the two of them and Carole wanted to vent, some, about her son Ivan, who’s failure to relocate himself, now that he was 23 and conspicuously uninterested in taking flight, was of increasing concern. To her.
“What happened to Miss Vicky?” Zoe asked, about Ivan’s latest girlfriend.
“Oh, she’s still very much in the picture,” Carole said. “But no help at all. It’s as though she accepts that Ivan in his little burrow is part of an accepted business model.”
Amidst this problem the tortilla soup and mixed greens with the gorgonzola dressing were delivered perfectly and free of all complications.
“You know I think I’d feel better if I could just persuade myself that he was becoming more epiphytic and less parasitic.”
Zoe nearly spat into her wine glass.
“Oh God,” she laughed. “You plant people crack me up. That reminds me, can you watch my bromeliads while I’m away next month?”
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