by Jane Green
“Well, yes, but they’re true stories, and they mostly feature men just like this one. Handsome, educated, well-dressed and impossibly charming. How do you think so many people fall for them? ”
Kit forces a laugh. “Well, if he’s looking to scam me, he won’t get very far. A single mother who’s scraping together a living? ”
“He could be absolutely genuine,” Edie says, softening. “But you need to take it slowly, to try to find out a little more about him before you give your heart away. That’s all I’m saying.”
“I thought you were saying that you didn’t like him and didn’t trust him.”
“Well, yes. That’s true. I’m not sure about him, it’s true. But all I really care about is you. That you’re happy and that you’re treated well. Let’s see how he manages with the tennis game, and let’s see what Rose thinks of him.”
“Why does it matter what Rose thinks? ”
“Because not only is she, as you know, my tennis partner and one of my oldest friends, she also happens to be the best judge of character I have ever come across.”
“Okay. I’ll take it slowly and be careful. But red roses!” Kit sighs, a smile back on her face. “And champagne! No one’s ever bought me red roses and champagne before! ” She turns to Edie, hoping to see Edie’s smile of validation, but Edie’s expression is a frown, and she is staring out of the window.
It is true. Adam was never the romantic type. There were gifts, for birthdays, obviously, but mostly Kit would tell him what she wanted, and in the latter years, would simply go out and buy it for herself, telling him afterward what it was he had bought her.
There were flowers on Valentine’s Day, and she knew he only remembered when he climbed on the train at Grand Central Station, and found every other man holding a bunch of roses; then he would run in to the florist’s, paying outrageous prices for his last-minute romantic gesture.
Kit has always secretly longed to be the type of woman men bought flowers for, and having never been that woman, not really, she is starting to discover just how seductive it is.
Chapter Eleven
“How long, exactly, does it take to find the perfect pumpkin? ” Kit tramps along behind Edie, dragging the wagon as Edie examines every pumpkin she sees, or so it seems.
Kit should be here with the kids, she thinks, seeing the hayride pass every few minutes, piles of children and their grown-ups sitting on hay bales, bumping along the dirt track as they drive slowly past the cows and horses grazing in the field.
There is a stand for food—apple cider, popcorn, caramel apples—and rosy-cheeked children are running up to the barn-yard animals and shrieking with laughter as the cows moo.
Although Kit knows she will come back next weekend with the children, she feels a sharp pang of missing them, of knowing that this would be so much nicer with them here.
“Mom! ” Kit looks up sharply—she is programmed to look up whenever she hears someone shout “Mom! ” and has been known to shout back “Yes? ” no matter whose child it is who is asking.
But this time she sees Buckley—her delicious Buckley!—running through the pumpkins, his eyes wide with delight, and she runs toward him and scoops him up, burying her face in his hair.
“Buck! What are you doing here? ”
“We’re here with Dad! ” Buckley says, flinging his arms around her neck and hugging her tightly, showing her, quite unconsciously, how much he misses her. Most times when he comes back from his father’s he is cool and offhand with her, refuses to kiss or be kissed, wants to be anything other than Mama’s little boy.
But now, when he sees her so unexpectedly, he can’t hide his joy, allows her to cover him with kisses, squeeze him tightly, shower him with love and affection.
“Dad! Tory! Mom’s here!” Buckley shouts over, and both Adam’s and Tory’s faces light up, a fact which surprises Kit, and slightly confuses her.
“Mom! ” Tory comes over and hugs her, which is yet another unexpected surprise, and Adam grins, then both kids run off to see a friend of Tory’s on the other side of the field.
“Hey, Kit. Hi, Edie.” He reaches over and gives Edie a kiss.
Kit is astonished to see Edie practically simper. Why didn’t she react that way with Steve?
“Did you borrow children for the day?” He looks amused; and it’s true, they do seem to be the only adults there without small children.
“Edie is my child for the day.” Kit smiles.
“I’m afraid she’s right. I decorate my house every year, and it’s time for pumpkins. I need big ones for the porch, and a bunch of those little tiny ones to go above the front door. I’m thinking that I might also do a scarecrow this year. I thought Tory and Buckley could help. It would be a fun project.”
“Sounds great,” Kit says.
“Well, Tory’s only going to be interested if the scarecrow’s clothes come from Kool Klothes and it has earrings that come from Claire’s.”
“God, Claire’s.” Kit shakes her head. “What is this obsession with Claire’s? ”
Adam laughs. “Every weekend she’s with me, all she wants to do is have me take her up to Claire’s. I won’t go anymore. Too much sparkly makeup in there. It gives me panic attacks. Last time I dropped her off on Main Street and left her there for an hour and a half. I thought she would have gone to all the stores, but she and Livvy spent the entire time in Claire’s.”
Kit laughs.
“And have you heard the latest?” Kit shakes her head so Adam carries on: “She’s decided she wants her navel pierced.”
Kit gasps in horror. “Not in this lifetime.”
“Her what? ” Edie strains to hear. “What did you just say? ”
“Her navel”—he gestures to his own, nodding—“pierced. Horrendous. I told her she’s welcome to pierce whatever she wants when she’s not living under my roof.”
“Jesus.” Kit whistles under her breath. “Where did my little girl go? What did she say? ”
“She said she lived mostly under your roof.”
“Typically smart-mouthed.”
“So then I said if she did that she’d lose her iPod, her phone and her right to go to any dances for six months. And I said that you agreed with me—hope that’s okay? If I hadn’t said that she would have just presumed she could continue doing everything from your place.”
“No, that’s fine. Absolutely right, in fact. I’m glad you said it. Thanks.”
Kit is grateful. The children have always listened more to Adam. When they were married, the worst punishment she could think of was to say, “Wait until your father gets home.”
The children did seem to be far better behaved when they were married. Everything she has read has said that the transitions are the hardest, and it’s true: when she gets Buckley and Tory back, they both take a while to recover their equilibrium.
Buckley is wild, doesn’t listen to her at all, has a tendency to be sassy with her, and Tory is sullen and resentful, claiming her place as the daddy’s girl she has always been.
Discipline doesn’t seem to stick when it comes out of Kit’s mouth and Adam is not there to back her up, and although they get on well enough for her to be able to invoke him if necessary, she doesn’t want to, doesn’t want to not be able to deal with her own children herself, in her own way.
The latest behavior that Tory is exhibiting is what Kit is calling the “Whatevers.” Kit will be talking to Tory, and in mid-conversation Tory will walk out of the room, muttering, “Whatever. Whatever. Whatever,” as she disappears.
“Don’t you ‘whatever’ me!” Kit has snapped, not knowing how to stop it, no longer knowing how to talk to her daughter. So, at moments like this, when Tory seems to be back to the sweet girl she always has been, Kit prays they will last forever.
“Do you guys want to join us?” Adam gestures over to the kids, busy chatting with some other children they know. “Seems silly for us all to be here and not doing it together.”
Kit loo
ks at Edie who beams at Adam in delight. “Sure! ” she says.
The hayride bumps along with Buckley and Tory sitting in between Adam and Kit. Buckley is holding hands with both of them, across Tory’s lap, and Tory has her hand resting on her mother’s and Buckley’s. Every minute or so, one or other of the children looks first at Kit, then at Adam, the smile on their little faces so wide Kit is concerned she may burst into tears.
At one point she looks over at Buckley, then raises her eyes to find Adam looking at her, and she knows he is thinking the same thing; when she looks away there is a lump in her throat.
She doesn’t know, during moments like this, why it went so terribly wrong, but she knows that she can’t go backward. Too much time has passed, and she can’t go back to being the corporate wife that Adam so badly wanted and needed her to be.
She can’t go back to that life, that lonely life of being a Wall Street widow, with a husband who is barely there during the week, who whisks the children to all the weekend activities because of the guilt, leaving his wife at home to recover from a week of solitary child rearing.
Adam was always like this when he was there. Fun. Involved. Engaged. But he was so rarely there; and then, when he started traveling for work, there were weekends when he was gone too, because he couldn’t get a flight back until Saturday afternoon or late Saturday night.
They were a great family unit, but they were rarely a family unit. And nothing has changed, nothing would be different. Think of how many times Adam changes the schedule, moves things around because of work commitments, knows that it is always fine to change things around because Kit’s life doesn’t matter, Kit’s primary purpose is still to be there for the children.
And in all the time that has passed, Kit has found that she doesn’t look at Adam in the same way. There is a comfort in the familiarity that exists between them, but she doesn’t look at him and find him physically attractive anymore, not in the way she looks at Steve and wants to rip open his shirt and run her hands over his chest.
If anything, looking at Adam now, she wonders how she managed to sleep with him for so long. Not because she is repulsed, far from it, but because the intimacy that grows between married people is sliced away as soon as they divorce, and once the intimacy has gone, however well you may get on, however friendly you may become, it is hard to believe it was ever there.
“Mom? Dad? Can we go to the diner for lunch? ” Tory asks suddenly, as the hayride bounces to a halt. They look at one another and both smile. This was their routine when they were married. Saturday lunches at the diner. Greek salad for Kit, pancakes, scrambled eggs and crispy bacon for Adam, waffles for Buckley and an egg salad sandwich for Tory.
“It’s fine with me,” Adam says. “I don’t know about Mom and Edie. You want to come with us? ”
“Yes? ” Kit isn’t sure.
“The kids would love it.” Adam smiles, and it’s genuine.
“So would we. Edie? ”
Edie nods at her, a mischievous glint in her eye. “We’d love to.”
Chapter Twelve
Kit has never believed in time machines before today but she spends most of this sunny Saturday feeling as if she has stepped back into her life as it was three years ago.
The pumpkin patch with the family—the only addition being Edie, whom she didn’t know when she was married to Adam and living in the big house on the other side of town—then lunch at the diner.
And at the diner they run into Charlie, Keith and the kids, who have just sat down, so they get up and wait for the big table in the middle, and the two couples and their kids chat and laugh, as they have done so many times in the past.
Charlie keeps making googly eyes at Kit across the table, gesturing toward the toilets, and eventually Kit gets up and excuses herself, closely followed by Charlie.
“What’s going on? ” Charlie grins as soon as the door to the ladies room is safely closed.
“What do you mean? We just ran into Adam and the kids at the pumpkin patch and he asked us to join him for lunch. It’s entirely innocent.”
“Right.”
“Not “right.” God, Charlie. It is possible for divorced people to remain friends, you know.”
“I know. It’s just that . . . how come you never were before? ”
“What do you mean? We’ve always been friendly.”
“You mean, always been friendly since you completely hated each other when you were going through the divorce? ”
“Well, yes. Obviously, I mean since then.”
“Okay, it’s true—once you got past the anger you have been friends.” Charlie frowns. “But something’s changed.”
She’s right. Something has. There is a new-found ease between them, an acceptance, both of their divorce and of their right to lead separate lives, and also of the fact that they are both the parents of two children they love, and are standing by their decision to co-parent.
And because of that, there isn’t a negative charge anymore. No anger. No hurt. No pain. Just the ability to finally be friends.
“Nothing’s changed.” Kit smiles. “We’re just in a good place. I think we’ve both truly moved on.”
“Really? ” Charlie’s eyes grow wide. “I’d say the exact opposite. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that seeing you two together, today, seems . . . I don’t know . . . right, I guess. Maybe I shouldn’t say that, but it’s true.”
“Oh Charlie. Of course you can say that, and I totally understand why you feel that. You and Keith were our best friends, and it’s bound to feel great when the four of us get together. And time has a tendency to wipe out all the bad so you just remember the good. Honestly, sometimes I have a hard time remembering what was bad. But, Charlie, remember how lonely I was? Remember how we grew apart? How we ended up barely speaking to each other? ”
“I do.” Charlie nods as she answers. “I just wonder if you maybe didn’t try hard enough to make it work. If maybe Adam had been willing to make changes, get another job, find something closer to home, maybe it could have worked, because seeing how well you two get on now just makes me sad.”
“It makes me sad too, but the thing is that Adam wasn’t willing. He loves his job too much, is too defined by being a successful finance guy to ever give it up. I never cared about that stuff, and that was the biggest problem. That Adam cared too much.”
“Well, given the way the world is going, he may not have a choice. I thought Keith’s career was going fantastically, and then—poof! The world changed. After Lehman and AIG went down, Keith was really worried, and now they’ve just fired seventy-five percent of the department.”
“That’s terrible! Is Keith’s job okay? Why didn’t you say something before? ”
“It is terrible, but we’re hoping that Keith is going to be okay. The worst thing is losing the stock. I know everyone says that you just have to leave alone whatever stock is left and that although it may take years, it will come back again, but we’re literally watching our savings dwindle away to nothing.”
Kit doesn’t know what to say. She thinks of Charlie’s large, beautiful house, her large, beautiful life. Everything you are supposed to have living on Connecticut’s Gold Coast, Charlie has.
It is everything Kit used to have too, but Kit has learned to live without all the accoutrements, and is happier without.
She wonders if Charlie could do the same thing. Live in a small cottage, drive a third-hand Volvo wagon—nothing smart or sexy about it. Shop cautiously and sparingly in the sales, learn the price of milk, of eggs, and learn which grocery stores are cheaper, cutting out the coupons in the free magazines, remembering to bring them with her every time she needs groceries.
Charlie drives the obligatory black Range Rover, and Keith a BMW, 5 series. She shops at Rakers, the designer store in town, without thinking about it.
Kit knows that Charlie doesn’t really care about all this, not deep down, but the problem with living in Highfield is that there are plenty of
women who do care, and while Kit suspects Charlie would be perfectly happy living as Kit does, she would be judged by others if she had to give up these things, would be found wanting.
Already, since the collapse of Wall Street, everyone at the yoga center is talking about it.
“Do you know anyone? ” everyone is asking, meaning anyone who has lost their job, anyone who has lost their house, lost their life.
“There are foreclosures happening all over town,” Edie said yesterday. Now semiretired, she is still keeping a close eye on what is going on. “We’re all being asked to go to conferences on short sales and foreclosures. Nothing whatsoever is moving, and everybody is waiting to see what’s going to happen.”
Like vultures, the people in Highfield are waiting for someone in their circle to have their life circumstances changed, someone to feel sorry for, at the same time as having immense gratitude that they themselves are safe.
Nothing like a hint of schadenfreude to make an insecure wealthy housewife feel better about herself.
“Come on.” Charlie smoothes her hair back in the mirror. “They’ll be wondering where we’ve got to.”
“Charlie”—Kit lays a hand on her arm to stop her just as they’re about to walk over to the table—“I want you to know that whatever happens, I’m here to support you.”
“Thanks, Kit. I know. The only thing I’d ask is that you don’t say anything to anyone. As it is we’re having dinner with Tracy tonight because she’s got some business opportunity she wants to talk to us about.”
“Business opportunity? She didn’t say anything to me.”
“That’s because she’s looking for investors and she wants us to invest.”
“Oh well, I guess that’s why she didn’t come to me.” Kit laughs awkwardly.
“Yeah. I wouldn’t take offense. Alice and Harry, from the Greenhouse, are coming too.”
“As investors? ”
“Yeah. Apparently, Alice’s ex is some super-big big shot on Wall Street and she got a big settlement in the divorce.”