She and Shelley entered through an echoing foyer that could have easily served a boutique hotel. A grand arrangement of fall-colored blooms, leaves, and branches stood on the polished wooden table in the center of its black-and-white marble floor. Other than that, the room was empty, save for a fleet of wheeled and pushable vehicles, scooters and strollers, a tricycle and even a skateboard, lined up along the wall. A toddler-sized pink helmet hung from the scooter’s handlebars.
Past the foyer and down a hall was the kitchen, which stretched the length of the back of the house. A table for twelve stood beneath a slanted glass ceiling, the baby’s high chair sat at the outermost curve of the marble island, and Kim, with the baby in her arms, was standing by the farmhouse-style sink, conferring with three uniformed caterers. “Mom!” she said, shifting the baby to her hip. “Shelley!” Kim had Jo’s dark hair and olive skin, Dave’s emphatic brows and rounded chin, and a curvy build more like Bethie’s than Jo’s own rangy frame. Her hair had been blown out smooth, and she’d done her makeup and dressed up in brown tweed wool pants and a wine-colored sweater. Jo wrapped her arms around her daughter and the baby, holding them for as long as Kim would let her. “It’s good to see you,” Kim said, kissing Jo’s cheek and disengaging from her embrace. She gave Shelley an air kiss and whirled away. “I’m just going to make sure the table’s set!”
Of course the table is set, Jo thought. Kim had probably done that over the weekend, in between making the carrot mousse, ironing the napkins, and shifting the organic heirloom turkey from the wet brine to the dry rub. Her oldest daughter had always been a perfectionist, she thought, as a tiny voice shouted, “Grandma!” and her elder granddaughter raced into the room and launched herself at Jo’s midsection. Flora wore a blue velvet jumper, with a round-collared white shirt and white tights underneath, and patent-leather Mary Janes. The bulky appearance of Flora’s backside would have let her know, even if Kim hadn’t told her, that Flora had experienced a setback in her toilet training after the new baby’s arrival.
“Hello, sweetheart.” Jo scooped Flora into her arms. The little girl had big brown eyes and wavy brown hair and deliciously chubby pink cheeks.
“Granny!” Flora crowed. She let Jo kiss her, then held out her arms so that Shelley could take her. When Kim had announced her pregnancy, she’d asked Jo what she wanted her grandkids to call her, and Jo, who hadn’t given a single second’s worth of thought to the question, said, “Oh, I don’t care. Whatever you want is fine with me.”
Kim had rolled her eyes. “Matt’s mom is going to be Mimi.”
“Oh?” said Jo. She knew, from friends and from her own intuition, that bashing her son-in-law or his family was a sure route to trouble, so she kept quiet whenever the subject came up.
“When we told her we were having a baby, I told her she could be Bubbe,” Kim said.
“How’d that go over?” Jo asked, and Kim had snorted and said, “About as well as you’d expect.” Jo had wanted to ask Kim what, if anything, her children would call Nonie. It turned out that the answer was Nonie. So she was Grandma, Shelley was Granny, and Matt’s mother, whose name was Sandra and who, Jo suspected, would sooner be shot with poison-tipped arrows than voluntarily assume any title that even whispered of old age, was Mimi.
“Incoming,” Shelley murmured. Jo heard the front door open and close, then Matt’s booming bass voice, welcoming his mother.
“Incoming!” Flora repeated. “Incoming! What is incoming?”
“Oh, it’s just a way of saying, Look who’s here!” Jo gave Shelley a stern look, then smiled as Sandra swept into the room. Ropes of seed pearls wrapped around her neck, disguising any droop, and a massive diamond glittered on her left hand. Her slim-cut navy pantsuit was immaculate, and her high-heeled shoes clicked against the tiled floors as she approached her granddaughter, arms extended, smiling as widely as the injectable fillers allowed. She reminded Jo of Shelley’s mother, who still looked forty from a distance and older the closer you got.
“Flora, kiss your Mimi,” she ordered, bending down to greet the little girl. “No, not too hard, you don’t want to smear Mimi’s makeup. HelloJoShelleyhowareyou? Flora, do you want to see the present Mimi brought you?” Sandra extended her hand, Flora took it, and Jo and Shelley exchanged a look. Most of the people they knew were welcoming or, at least, tolerant of the two of them as a couple. Sandra Grissom was the exception. She acted as if Jo and Shelley disgusted her, and she made no attempt to disguise her disdain. Jo had learned, years after Matt and Kim’s wedding, that Sandra told her son that if the plan was for Shelley to walk Kim down the aisle, or play any kind of role in the ceremony, she, Sandra, would consider it a travesty and would stay home. Jo had decided that Sandra was a monster, and Sandra had never given her a reason to change her mind.
Jo waited until the caterers were occupied before sliding her Jell-O mold into the refrigerator and washing her hands at the kitchen sink. “Kim, what can I do?”
“I think we’re all set.” Kim pulled a BlackBerry out of her pocket and scrolled through what was undoubtedly one of her checklists. “The turkey’s coming out of the oven in an hour, the wine’s chilling, the side dishes are heating up.”
“Can I bring anything to the table? Light the candles?” As soon as Jo had asked the questions, two caterers bustled by, one carrying a cut-glass bowl of cranberry relish, the other holding a long electric lighter.
“How about the baby?” Kim said. Smiling, Jo stretched out her arms and accepted the sleepy, warm weight of her granddaughter. Leonie’s such an easy baby, Kim had told her, with her voice full of wonder. She actually nurses, Kim had said. No nipple shields! No bad latch! It’s nothing like it was with Flora.
“Lucky you,” Jo had said. When Flora had been born, Jo had offered to stay and help for as long as Kim needed her. As a substitute teacher, Jo had a flexible schedule, and she’d invested the money she’d won from Dave with care, waiting for the day that she became a grandmother. Her plan had always been to take a few months off and help when her daughters had babies. She’d nursed all three of them, even before nursing was fashionable, so she could have helped Kim figure out how to do it, even though Jo didn’t remember breastfeeding as being especially tricky or difficult. Girls today, Judy Pressman had told her. They act like they’re the first ones to have done any of this. They’ve got to reinvent the wheel, and make everything ten times harder than it has to be.
Kim and Matt had still been living in Manhattan when Flora was born, but their apartment had a guest room, with its own bathroom attached. Jo had offered to come and stay, or even rent her own place. I can be there as much or as little as you need me, she’d said. I’ll do whatever needs doing. She’d made her offer in the hospital, the day Flora was born, and Kim, who’d had a C-section and still had an IV poked into the back of her hand, had eagerly agreed, until Matt had crossed the hospital room to stand behind his wife, giving her shoulders a squeeze.
“We’ve got that baby nurse, remember?” he said. “And the lactation consultant.”
Lactation consultant? Jo thought, and made a mental note to ask Judy what on earth that was.
“Right,” Kim had said, “but that’s just for, what, a week or two?”
Jo had watched Matt’s hands tighten on Kim’s shoulders. “We can keep her as long as you need her,” he’d said, before looking at Jo. “And my mom’s right around the corner.”
Jo had driven back to Connecticut and tried not to feel slighted. Kim had called her every day to describe Flora’s struggles to nurse, Kim’s worries about whether she was making enough milk, how Flora wasn’t gaining weight or sleeping more than ninety minutes at a stretch, and how Sandra seemed to expect the baby nurse to wait on her. “She’ll say, ‘Oh, let me hold the baby,’ but she’ll be all dressed up in, like, a cashmere twinset, and even though she’ll have a burp cloth on her shoulder, Flora always manages to puke on her somewhere.”
Good for Flora, Jo thought.
“And San
dra asks Marisol to get her coffee, or a snack. She calls her ‘the girl,’ ” Kim reported. She sniffled, and Jo wondered if Kim was crying. “Like, ‘The girl can go pick up a few things at the drugstore.’ Except she can’t. It’s part of her contract. No housekeeping, no errands, just baby stuff.”
“Honey, if you need extra hands, I can be there in two hours,” Jo said, and Kim paused, then sighed. “No. No, thanks. We’ll figure it out.”
The year of Flora’s birth, Matt had gotten an annual bonus even more obscene than usual (Jo wondered if the mortgages his bank had given to people who couldn’t make their payments was the reason). He’d put their apartment on the market, made a profit, and moved his wife and daughter from Manhattan to Fort Lee, where many of his fellow masters of the universe laid their heads. They’d hired a full-time nanny, and when Flora was three months old, Kim had gone back to work. “It’s awful,” she’d told Jo during her lunch break her first day back. “I don’t miss her at all,” Kim said, her voice cracking. “I was so relieved to hand her off to someone else. I’m so happy to be back.” She paused, inhaling. “I’m a terrible mother.”
“Oh, no, you are not. That’s normal!” Without thinking, Jo had dropped her voice into its lowest, calmest register, the tone she took to let her students know that what she was discussing was important, that yes, it would be on the test. “Every new mom feels exactly the way you’re feeling.”
There was a pause. “Is that how you felt?” Kim asked.
“You were an easier baby than Flora,” Jo said. “And there weren’t as many options back then. None of us had jobs to go back to.”
“I want to really be there for Flora. Really be present for her, you know?” Kim had said. Jo had murmured assent, wondering if there was a critique hidden in that assertion, if Kim thought that Jo hadn’t been present for her. “But, my God, I was so bored!”
“It can be boring,” Jo said. That part she remembered very clearly, the gray sameness all the days had, the endless, repetitive rounds of chores. Mashing bananas, mixing water into rice cereal, walking a screaming baby back and forth through the house, or scraping shit off cloth diapers into the toilet before tossing them into the diaper pail. Jo thought her daughter was lucky, to be able to enjoy Flora for part of the day, then pass her off to competent, capable help. She thought it was, as they said, the best of both worlds.
Jo settled Leonie against her and walked back through the house, looking for Flora. She was halfway down the hall when she heard the quick taps of Kim’s heels.
“What?” asked Jo, when she saw the expression on Kim’s face. “What is it?”
Kim pulled Jo into the dining room, where, of course, the table was perfect, draped in a pressed white cloth, with an arrangement of miniature pumpkins and branches of bittersweet in the center. The room, the paintings on the walls, the silver and crystal and Kim’s wedding china, all glowed with a mellow patina that spoke of money, comfort, ease.
“It’s Lila,” Kim whispered.
“Ah,” said Jo. It was always Lila.
“I don’t want to worry you,” Kim began.
“I’m a mother,” Jo said. “Worrying is what I do.”
Kim gave a brief smile. “Lila stayed over last Saturday night. I was in her room—I’d lent her some earrings, and I went to get them back, and I swear I wasn’t snooping, but she left her laptop open, and she was on this website,” she whispered.
“What?” Jo asked.
“It was a website for sugar daddies. You know. Rich guys who want to spoil young girls.”
“By ‘spoil,’ do you mean . . .” Jo let her voice trail off, unwilling to complete the sentence, unwilling to say the words pay them for sex.
“I don’t know,” Kim said, shaking her head. “I don’t know how it works. I don’t even know if she’s, you know, registered or whatever. And if she has, I don’t know if she’s met anyone, or what she’s doing with him. All that stuff gets negotiated in private.”
“How can that be legal?” Jo asked.
“Because it’s technically offering companionship, not sex. But I think someone needs to talk to her.”
Jo knew, of course, that she’d be that someone. She wondered what she’d say . . . and also exactly what else Lila was qualified to do that could earn money . . . which was probably the exact thought process that had led Lila to Sugardaddies.com, or whatever it was.
“I wish she hadn’t left the way she did,” Kim said, sounding wistful. “She was terrific with Flora.” Lila had spent part of the previous summer taking care of Flora and helping with the new baby. Jo remembered that most of Lila’s moments of competence and kindness had been reserved for the Maderer kids who lived down the street. She’d been their regular sitter, starting when she turned thirteen and continuing through high school. Even when most of her weekends were devoted to parties, she’d sometimes forfeit a Saturday night out to go stay with Taylor, Alexa, and Zach. At first, Jo had been anxious about the idea of Lila caring for anything more fragile than a goldfish, but Lila had surprised her. She was patient with baby Taylor, who was only six months old when she started, and inventive with Alexa, who was four. She’d make up elaborate games, pretending they were pioneers crossing the country in a covered wagon, or she’d turn the Maderer kitchen into a restaurant, and Zach, the oldest, would help her take the orders. She’d even, on her own, earned her Red Cross certification in first aid and infant CPR. Jo had told her more than once that if college wasn’t for her, there was no shame in being a nanny or working at a nursery school or a day care. Lila had always answered by turning up her refurbished nose, shaking her gorgeous mane of hair, and asking, You think that’s all I’m capable of doing? Thanks a lot, Jo.
Jo had hoped that when Kim had hired her to help with Flora, Lila would rediscover her love of little ones and maybe make that her career. At first, Lila had been just as great with Flora as she’d been with the little Maderers. But eventually, she started spending more time in Manhattan. After too many late nights, followed by too many mornings when she slept through the alarm clock and missed Flora’s drop-off at preschool, Kim had told her that it wasn’t going to work, and Lila had packed up her stuff and moved to New York, where Missy had gotten her a temp job with Lester Shaub.
“I’ll talk to her,” said Jo.
Kim went back to the kitchen, and Jo walked to the foyer, where she found Flora riding a scooter made of purple and pink plastic that picked up momentum as Flora wriggled and shifted her weight.
“What’s that?” Jo asked.
“Plasma car!” Flora said. Her eyebrows were drawn, her little face was intent, and she looked just like her mother had when she’d been little, sawing away at her violin.
“And where are you going?” Jo asked.
Flora looked at her like she was crazy. “To over there,” she said, and pointed.
“Oh,” said Jo. “I thought, because it was a plasma car, you might be driving it to outer space.” For years, Jo had offered to host Flora in Connecticut. I’ll come down and pick her up. You can put the car seat in my car. Shelley and I would love to spend some time with her. Kim always had an excuse. Flora was sick, or was just getting over being sick, or she was starting some new playgroup or class that she couldn’t miss. “It’s not like they’re grading her,” Jo finally said, kidding but not-kidding, when Kim said that Flora couldn’t skip Music Together. “Let me take her. You and Matt can have a break.”
Kim’s response had been cool. “I work so much. When I’m here, I really want to be here. I don’t want a break. And I love being with her. Honestly, I do.”
“I don’t get it. Nobody loves being with a baby every minute of every day,” Jo had told Shelley. Shelley had been in the dining room, working on one of her thousand-piece puzzles, and she’d answered without looking up.
“I bet they think we’re recruiting.”
At first, Jo hadn’t known what Shelley meant, and when she figured it out, she’d said, “Oh, no.” Shelley had gi
ven Jo a cynical smile, saying, “Maybe Kim doesn’t think it, but I’ll bet Matt and that mother of his do.”
Jo didn’t believe that Kim was keeping Flora home because she thought that Jo and Shelley would send her home in a onesie decorated with rainbow triangles, or with a special affinity for the girl babies in her Tumblin’ Tots class. What she actually thought was worse: Kim was spending as much time as she could with her daughter because she was trying to make up for Jo’s deficiencies. Kim was determined to give her daughter the focused, loving attention that she’d decided she’d never received . . . and the truth was, her daughter wasn’t entirely wrong. Jo hadn’t been entirely engaged in Kim’s childhood. She’d been exhausted, she’d been bored, she’d been frantic for just thirty seconds by herself in the bathroom, without the knocks and cries of Mommy, Mommy, just so that she could change her tampon and wash her hands. Dave had been good with the girls, even if he’d called it babysitting, but Dave had been at work five days a week, and there were no extra hands for Kim and Missy, no one to say, Oh, let me take them, you go take a shower, or a nap. That house, that life, that husband, none of it had been what she’d really wanted, and Kim must have sensed that somehow.
Jo turned as she heard the door open. “Aunt Bethie!” Flora said, and began wiggling toward the door. Bethie’s brown hair was styled in layers, with blond highlights around her face. She wore a plum-colored wrap dress, black suede boots, a single gold cuff on her right wrist, and her wedding and engagement rings. Harold stood behind her in a sport coat and sweater, flannel pants, and polished cordovan loafers. He’d gotten broader in the chest as the years had passed, and his hair had turned a distinguished silver, but his smile, warm and welcoming, was just the way Jo remembered it. She felt tears prickling her eyes as Harold hugged her.
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