by Kate Jacobs
But she hadn’t forgotten her inspiration for the store. Set off to one side of the room was a beautiful golden knitted gown on a mannequin, protected and preserved inside a clear display case. In fact, the only sign in the store at all was a tiny cream-colored card with “Not for Sale” written in calligraphy and set at the foot of the gorgeous handmade dress. A gold plaque on the case revealed the name of the gown’s designer.
“Georgia Walker,” it read. “Designer and founding member of the Friday Night Knitting Club.”
Sometimes, out of admiration or longing or simply in the course of making chitchat, customers would inquire as to the cost of the dress or whether they could have something less ornate made by Georgia Walker for themselves.
“No,” Catherine would say. “That’s simply not possible.” And that was all. She never explained further. Never told them that her best friend was dead. The few times she’d said anything, people screwed up their faces as though tasting something unpleasant. A cup of mortal-i-tea. It’s difficult to fake empathy for a stranger. To express concern when none is there.
Unfinished. Adrift. That’s how she felt. But who cared? Instead, she’d remember to smile and show them a hundred-year-old teapot with hand-painted birds flying around the spout, distract them with some Art Deco pottery.
On the wall behind the case was a nearly life-size painting of Catherine Anderson wearing the creation, from a time when she was still known to many as socialite Cat Phillips. When she publicly pretended that her marriage was a happy one and her days were filled with shopping. It was a commanding portrait, her brown eyes staring down observers, daring their eyes to dart down the bodice hugging her chest and follow the line of her hips below the generous flowing skirt. Her hair, as sleek and golden as the dress itself, was piled high on her head like a halo. The picture, unlike the outfit, was available. For the right price. To the right buyer.
Catherine was as much part of the entertainment as the wines and furnishings in The Phoenix. There was nothing understated about the blonde, with her large rings and her designer clothes (black on black with touches of black topped off with an unexpected splash of color in the form of a lime bag or red shoes), her honeyed voice and her little flirtations with the handsome husbands of her shoppers. She often wore a diamond D around her neck and loved to explain it stood not for her name, but for “divorcée.”
Her days were a wonderful challenge, seeing how long she could charm someone into staying at the store. Selling bric-a-brac was quite secondary. Catherine was visibly delighted by every customer who came through the door—especially people she’d never seen previously—and loved to chat them up about every piece on sale. For if Catherine was anything, she was a serious student of art history and antiques: she’d majored in art history at Dartmouth, though she’d also spent a good portion of her college years chasing the man who became her husband. Each table or armoire captured her eye, romanced her a little with its beauty, and then broke her heart by simply selling itself to the highest bidder and moving on to its perfect family. That was how she thought of herself: as a sort of foster mother for items beautiful and tarnished, helping them find a permanent home. It was a skill for which she charged handsomely.
The wine? That was all about the fun.
Catherine needed attention like the average woman needed oxygen, and every detail—from the way her hips swayed slightly as she walked, to the blouses that never seemed tight and yet hugged every curve of her well-endowed frame—was designed to catch eyes.
“Just because a girl moves on from being a trophy wife doesn’t mean she leaves her assets behind,” Catherine had said more than once to Georgia’s daughter, Dakota. Though Dakota lived with her father, James, the two still enjoyed regular Sunday afternoon hang-out sessions. And, of course, they saw each other whenever the club got together. So life should have been just right. Catherine Anderson was very popular in Cold Spring. And not merely because she ran the most darling little shop this side of New York City.
No, she’d earned her reputation as a colorful character the old-fashioned way: she created fodder for the town gossips. Catherine made repeated relationship snafus soon after starting the business—bedding the hunky cheesemaker down the road, as well as an amusing weekender who’d turned out to have forgotten to mention a wife in the city, and even the fellow who sold her business insurance and who had provided a heady diversion before she discovered she abhorred everything he had to say and that they disagreed on everything from politics to ice cream flavors. She’d even considered trying to heat up a flirtation with a twenty-year-old college student working in the corner bistro. But it struck her as a lot of potential agita for a romp likely to be athletic yet hardly satisfying. Not to mention she’d realized that, as she neared forty-three, she happened to be the same age as the young man’s mother.
And all of it was better than her fifteen years married to the insensitive Adam Phillips. Oh, he liked sex well enough: Adam always made sure to have a string of girlfriends in addition to Catherine. And his focus was always about him, him, him. Theirs had been a lonely marriage, and once free of it all, Catherine delighted in discovering that there were many men willing to help her make up for lost time. Men who found her charming. Men who liked her. Men who were . . . generous. And yet nothing quite took.
She wasn’t entirely certain what she’d expected by now—wisdom? calm? contentment?—but each day she felt surprised anew that she was unattached. It seemed disloyal, somehow, to her sense of herself as an independent woman to be happy. But she’d always anticipated being married. Becoming a mom. And while she was certainly damn good-looking, and well aware of it, Catherine felt short of breath and panicky whenever she thought about her private life. Her parents had died years before and she’d been distant from her siblings for so long that her sincere overtures about visiting were met with such mild interest that she eventually cut back to random e-mails and the occasional holiday meal.
All she had was an excess of lack. Lack of love. Lack of family. Lack of friends? Catherine wondered about that, too. It was impossible to shake, this nagging sense that she didn’t quite belong anywhere. After all this time, Catherine still couldn’t let go of the sense she was an impostor. Of being foisted upon the members of the Friday Night Knitting Club by Georgia. That out of respect for Georgia’s memory they had let her continue to hang around. After all, if Georgia thought there was something redeeming about her, there had to be, right?
But what if Georgia’s confidence was misplaced?
Only in her own shop, when she’d settled into her latest bravura performance of the bon vivant divorcée, did she feel properly hidden and, therefore, safe.
There was something tremendously annoying about a fortysomething woman appearing needy, thought Catherine. Easy to reject somehow because she was old enough to know better. To be better. And so she strived to be great fun when she popped into Georgia’s old knitting shop in the city. She still, after all these years, very much wanted to be liked. Just liked.
It was something she’d have found very useful to discuss with Georgia. It remained difficult for her to accept that her old friend had died so soon after they’d reconnected. She preferred, on some days, to pretend that they’d never gotten back in touch, that the twenty years they didn’t speak had never been bridged, that way she could fantasize that Georgia was still working in her store and living her life and sometime in the future, a day yet to come, Catherine would contact her and they’d renew their acquaintance. There were moments when she made it all about her, when she felt as though she’d been punished by her mistakes and forced—by God? by the universe?—to experience what it felt like to be left behind and bewildered. To have so many questions and not know who to ask.
Most days, though, she simply gave up trying to understand. She read a book on grief and did the first thing on the list: find a hobby. She took up an interest in wine, sometimes sampled a bit too much. Just every now and again.
The wine sid
e of the business sprung naturally when Catherine decided to try living part of the week in Cold Spring. It was an experiment, of sorts, in commitment.
“You might get to work on time if you didn’t have to commute so far,” Anita had suggested, not unkindly. Technically speaking, Anita was also her landlady, because Catherine had moved into Anita’s oversized San Remo apartment years ago when the widow moved out to live with Marty. Much to the horror of Anita’s three adult sons, who’d been unhappy not only with the appearance of Marty but also with the thought of Catherine in the family apartment.
At first, Catherine assumed that Anita wanted to chase her out of the place.
“You are still going to stay at the San Remo whenever you want, or all the time if it doesn’t work out,” said Anita before Catherine had even responded. Just the right thing always seemed to bubble out of her. “I just worry you are going to spend all your time on the train and not enough time enjoying yourself.”
And so Catherine had found a little bungalow—and, with trepidation, purchased it—which she’d promptly gutted to the studs and combined two tiny bedrooms to make one massive room, adding on a deluxe en suite bath and refurbishing the entire house with cherry floors and white wainscoting. The bright red front door stood out in the short walkway, framed by a path of pansies. The house was, it turned out, the perfect spot for Catherine’s various rendezvous. Not to mention she felt at home, decorating with pieces from The Phoenix and selling them when she got bored.
And once she realized the wine selection was so limited in Cold Spring, she simply spent enough money to convince the store next to her to move across the street and rented out the space for her wineshop. It was the culmination of turning The Phoenix into what Catherine now described as a “wonderful things” boutique.
And yet she wondered, often, what Georgia would think of it all. What she’d think of the store. Of Catherine. And of her strong and powerful connection with James.
seven
He’d been waiting in the restaurant for a while, Catherine guessed, as she caught sight of James’s hunched shoulders through the window. She strode in, bells on the door ringing to announce the arrival of yet another customer on a busy Friday night, and lay a hand lightly on his back as she came up to the table.
“The usual?” asked a tiny Asian waitress, balancing a tray of bright red drinks with tiny paper parasols on her shoulder. Behind her, a loud group of young professionals waited eagerly to get bevved.
“Yes, please,” said Catherine, undoing the knotted tie around the waist of her microfiber camel trench coat as James stood up and pulled out her chair. He was always a gentleman, Mr. Manners, even when he was preoccupied. Another reason why not pursuing the college kid up in Cold Spring was a good idea: that young man had had no sense of etiquette other than the wheres and whys of text messaging. Though she hadn’t really been looking to have heart-to-hearts with him, if she was being honest with herself.
Catherine sat down and laid the paper napkin over her dark trousers. The table, she could see clearly, was set for three.
“We’ve been talking,” he said, motioning across the tablecloth. “Waiting for you to get here. You’re always late, you know that?”
“I know, sweetie,” said Catherine, laying a hand over James’s and patting gently. “It’s a lifetime of trying to make an entrance. Hard to shake.” She nodded across the table and took a few sips of water.
“Upset?”
Catherine shrugged.
“Was Dakota having a good time?”
“Not sure,” Catherine admitted. “She’s a little nonplussed about the changes to the shop, not that she wants to fess up. But overall the meeting was good. Darwin was surprised. Really tickled, I think.”
“It’s good you all have each other,” said James, noticing Catherine’s raised eyebrow. “It’s important for Dakota.”
The waitress glided efficiently up to the table and placed a Scotch above each plate. James and Catherine each took a sip, then another.
“And your guest? Should we wait or order now?” asked the server. Her expression was calm and pleasant and she waited as the duo seemed to consider her question.
“We’ll order,” boomed James, a bit too loudly. “We’re never really sure if she shows up, anyway.” He smiled at the waitress, who pulled out a pad of paper from her apron and dutifully wrote as James asked her opinion about the freshness of the asparagus and if they could make General Tso’s chicken extra spicy. In all the years they’d been coming, the waitress had only once tried to take away the third place setting. After surviving Catherine’s wrath, she let it be, and ever after asked if their friend was coming, never seemed fazed when they ordered enough food for three people. Just in case. In return, the waitress pocketed a handsome tip. What did she care if the two of them were clearly nuts?
Of course it was crazy. Between the two of them, they’d agreed to stop meeting at the little hole-in-the-wall a million times. But it felt better to meet up at the dinky little Asian-fusion joint a few blocks from Walker and Daughter, ordering the sushi rolls and chicken satay that Georgia had loved. It felt like some sort of link to another time, to each food she’d enjoyed, to talk about her without having to be measured and mature.
Sometimes, after a drink or two, they would even address a few sentences to the empty plate. They were long past any sense of embarrassment, had made plain to each other their need to imagine, if only for a few hours, that Georgia was around, somewhere. Somehow.
An hour and many bites later and Catherine was feeling much, much better. She’d needed some food in her stomach, she guessed, something other than the sweet stuff at Darwin’s shower. Of course, it wasn’t just the food that made her feel better. It was the pretending. The fantasy that they were simply waiting.
“We enable each other, you know,” she said to James as she sipped at her green tea. “We’re off in the head. I mean, who would you tell about this, right?”
It had started, naturally enough, a few months after the funeral. She and James met up for coffee, as they had begun to do a few times when Georgia was seriously ill, on the sly. Away from the shop and from Dakota or anyone else who might see them and get suspicious. Wonder what the svelte blonde and the tall, handsome man were doing, their heads close together, and their conversation furtive. They wondered about it themselves, recognizing in each other a kindred spirit. James and Catherine became each other’s confessors, able to reveal the ways they’d hurt Georgia and to offer some sort of absolution.
From one regretful guilty party to another.
Because they really were the only two people on the planet who could truly understand each other, who could say the words they needed someone else to hear without seeming as though they were self-absorbed narcissists.
“I feel like I’m being punished,” he had told Catherine over a steaming mug all those years ago. “It’s divine payback. I get to see her, touch her, win her—and then my karma catches up with me, makes me pay for everything I did wrong by letting me see her and touch her and then it’s just all gone.”
“You took responsibility,” Catherine had pointed out. “You said you did wrong.”
“And this is what I get in return,” he said, crunching his paper napkin in his hand. “She goes off and dies.”
“Right when it’s getting good,” said Catherine. “Right when it’s going to be all right. Right when you need her most.”
“I’m so pissed off.” James had raised his voice loudly enough to attract the attention of the other patrons. Dropping his tone, he continued: “I wanted a life with Georgia and our daughter and instead I get to live her life as a single parent. Alone. Lonely. Confused.”
He hadn’t taken one sip of his drink. “You think I’m a self-pitying jerk?” His eyes met Catherine’s in challenge.
“Pretty much,” Catherine had said, meeting his gaze. “But then I’m no better.”
And that’s what made the ritual such a relief. The ground rules
were out there from the very beginning: They could say anything. No judgments. And it never left the room. After all, it wasn’t . . . typical.
The coffee meetings turned into dinner when Catherine mentioned an article she’d read about setting out a place for the deceased on holidays.
“It’s supposed to be cathartic,” she said days before the first anniversary of Georgia’s death. “Wanna try it?”
“That’s stupid,” said James, stuffing napkins into untouched coffee. “Let’s go to the Asian place she liked,” he’d mumbled into the cup without looking up.
Sometimes they went to the restaurant often, such as Octobers when the anniversary of Georgia’s death came, and at other times they waited months, hoping to let go and then feeling a need build up and take over and push them, as if on autopilot, to drinking Scotch and crunching egg rolls in the name of Georgia.
“She’s my only real friend,” admitted Catherine, who often talked about Georgia in the present tense. “Everyone else tolerates me because of her. But Georgia likes me, really likes me. She sees the good.”
“Exactly,” James had said. “She’s a people whisperer. Makes you better than you are.”
“She can be bitchy, though,” Catherine reminded him.