“But aren’t you tired, Amy?” Peggy protested. “You’ve been standing here all morning.”
Amy laughed her tinkling, infectious laugh. “After a year of looking for work in New York,” she said, “my feet are used to it.” She wedged between Peggy and Randy, took both of them by the arm, and swung down the street toward Broadway. “Come on, you all,” she said cheerfully. “I want to hear everything that happened....”
At six o’clock that evening, the three of them were sitting in Tony’s Place, a postage stamp-sized restaurant near the Gramercy Arms that specialized in heaping plates of spaghetti, smothered with rich, aromatic meat sauce. The spaghetti was ordered and on its way. Meanwhile, they were munching on crusty Italian bread with sweet butter.
“Whew!” Amy exclaimed wearily, as she speared a pat of butter from the iced butter dish in the center of the table. “It sure is good to sit down. What did you think of the play?”
Peggy shook her head enviously. “Diana Peters was awfully good, wasn’t she? The way she played that scene with the old grandfather, you could tell what she was thinking and what she was feeling every minute. I don’t think I could ever do that—”
“Oh, don’t talk silly,” Amy said, biting into a piece of bread. “That’s exactly the kind of part you can play.”
“I don’t know,” Peggy replied dubiously. “What do you think, Randy?”
Randy had been absorbed in thought ever since they left the matinee. At that moment, he was chewing moodily on a crisp stalk of green celery. “I wouldn’t worry about that scene too much,” he said. “You just said yourself you knew what she was thinking and feeling every minute.”
“Yes, but—”
Randy leaned forward, jabbing the stalk of celery in Peggy’s direction. “What was she thinking?” he queried. “That girl in the play. Now don’t forget, she’s in New York for the first time. She doesn’t know her mother very well and she’s never even met her grandmother. What’s she looking for?”