“No,” I said. “I had to work.”
She nodded. “My parents weren’t footing the bill either.”
I already knew this about Dawn. Our lower-middle-class origins were what brought us together, though I was from Kansas and she New Jersey. “We had to wait for our chance,” she said. “Which is what I was saying to Tori last night. God, I hate to walk past first class and see kids sitting there. I feel sorry for them. They’ve got nothing to dream about.”
I nodded in agreement. Neither Dawn nor I had children yet and we were both without jobs. Dawn was a nurse, but quit after she had a miscarriage during an overnight shift. I’d been fired from the City of Chicago for reallocating funds earmarked for the pet projects of a powerful alderman. Lately, I’d felt an odd distance from the stream of events occurring moment to moment around me. When the alderman called, fuming and threatening my job, I’d laughed.
“At least these girls want to see some culture,” I said, gesturing toward their backs. “And we don’t know anything about them, really.”
“I know they’re not worried about being homeless and unemployed when they get back,” Dawn said. “But maybe that’s what it’s like to live in a socialist country.”
The line moved slowly, but I didn’t care. I was killing time, if I was honest about it, waiting to dump Dawn and the rest of the corporate wives and hop a plane to San Sebastian with Matteo. He and I had stayed there the previous year in an old-fashioned hotel across the street from a bay that opened into the Atlantic. The hotel was overly formal and smelled of cleaning fluids. We left the windows open all night so we tasted like sea salt when we licked each other’s bodies in the morning.
A choir began singing. The backpackers turned to us and asked in perfect English if we would hold their place in line while they went to listen.
“Of course!” Dawn said, smiling.
When they didn’t return for forty minutes, she began to huff.
“What if we wanted to go listen? Or use the bathroom? It’s not our job to wait in line for them.”
I watched her cross into the basilica and disappear into the crowd. When she came out, she was in a heated discussion with the pixie-cut backpacker. She still had the votive in her hand and gestured with the stump of it. She returned with the girls trailing several yards behind.