“About what?”
“There was a heavy Peter Pan phase. We had a small dog costume, so you were usually Nana the sheepdog.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“You were so young. You’d kind of wander around the stage. She did the whole production, soup to nuts.” She leaned forward and sipped through her straw. Daintily, but this was always her Achilles’ heel—it was nearly impossible to channel period fine dining while using a plastic straw. “She’s a creative soul, your sister.”
“To me, she seemed kind of weird. I mean, I know she’s your prodigal daughter and all, but . . .” I laughed, and she didn’t join in.
“I’m sure it was hard for her. To be out of touch for so long and then just come back in. We don’t even know what she’s been through.”
I nodded. “Of course.”
“I know”—our eyes met—“that this is an upset. Be welcoming, though, tomorrow at breakfast? I think it will go a long way. She really wants to spend time with you.”
“Okay.”
“You’re my good egg, you know?” She cupped my jaw with her hand, and I leaned into it. “My easy breezy.”
“Mom, remember when you gave me those boxes? When you moved?”
“Sure.”
“How carefully did you pack them?”
“I don’t think I did. I think Betty handled your bedroom and the hall closet, all that stuff.”
“Yeah, because I went through them yesterday morning when I was clearing out the closets for the renovation.” I felt clunky, but I was desperate to edge us closer to talking about what she’d written. “I found my journal from Dr. Pressman.”
My mom sipped again. “He was pretty good, actually. You never knew what to write, though. You were always asking me.”
“Well, apparently you didn’t give me a good answer. I skimmed through, and if you didn’t know what they were for, you’d think the big issue in my life was whether or not I’d get a part in A Chorus Line.”
“I don’t remember that.” She frowned. “I don’t remember you trying out for A Chorus Line in sixth grade. Isn’t there a lot of talk about tits and ass in that?”
“We sang it as ‘pride and class.’”
“I guess that works.”
“Ridiculously. Pressman had you guys do it too, right?”
She arched one eyebrow. “Do you really believe that Dad wrote letters to himself in a journal? It was all I could do to make him go to the sessions.”
“But you wrote them?”
She shook her head. I don’t remember. I could tell from the shift in her eye that we were about to loop the conversational cul-de-sac.
“Did you write about your father?”
She looked down and stirred her shake with the straw. “Probably.”
“What was his name?”
“Paige?” She let go of the straw and put her hand over mine. “We don’t need to keep his memory alive.”
“Do you know where they are?”
“Know where what are?”
“The journals.”
“No.” She said this with finality—her mouth shutting as soon as it possibly could in a way that settled it for me: if I wanted to learn more about the lost years, I was on my own.
“I don’t really remember anything from that year,” I said.
“Good. It’s better that way.”
“I don’t remember Sloane much at all. What was she like as a kid, aside from those bursts of creativity?”
My mother sighed. “Serious. Focused.”
“Give me more examples.”
“Listen, the best thing we can all do is get to know her again. It’s a blessing, Paige, to not remember the bad. I wish I didn’t.”
“That dark, huh?”
She was silent.
“Why?”
She didn’t say anything, just pretended to admire the yellow bag of the woman at an adjacent table. “Do you like that one, the maize?” She pointed her head toward the table.
It was the same ugly color we’d seen in the shoes, and I frowned in its direction and shook my head.
The front door slammed behind me, and as I put down the shopping bags in the hall, Dave emerged from his office. “I just had a great talk with Herb. I feel good.” He indicated the shopping bags. “Whoa. You did some damage.”
“It’s for you, actually. For back-to-work when it happens.” He bent down and peered in the bags, holding the sides apart with his fingertips. “All shirts and ties.”
He slipped his hand inside the neck of his shirt and mimed a beating heart—thump, thump. “No one’s sweeter than you.”
“So, what’s the latest?”
“Herb told me they’re not concerned anymore. It’s almost over.”
“That’s great.” The phone rang and I ran to check the caller ID. “It’s Lucy. Did he say anything else?”
“No. Go ahead—take it.”
“Do you mind? We’ve been playing phone tag.”
“It’s fine. I’ll finish up my stuff.” He went back to his office, leaving the bags in the hall, and I picked up the phone.
“Hi, Lucy.”
“So, when are you coming out?” she said.
“Ha-ha.”
“You sound so far away,” she said. “Oh wait—I have to give Antonio directions. Sorry, I’ll call right back.”
“Who’s Antonio?” In that moment before she hung up, I heard a splash and a peel of laughter, and I pictured her outside by her parents’ pool. I could be there now, sunbathing on one of the landscaped rocks, its warmth soaking through my towel, my toes dipped into the water. I’d visited her there every summer since college until this one.
When the phone rang again, I raced to pick it up. “Who on earth is Antonio?”
Silence.
“Luce?”
Pause. “Is this Paige?”
“Yes.”
“Hi, it’s Brian Lochlyn. From Dave’s office. We met at that dinner last year? The one honoring female corporate lawyers?”
“Oh yes. Brian.” What I mostly remembered was that more than half of the speakers had been men, but I could conjure a vague recollection of a pale associate at our table with a bright green bow tie, talking earnestly about the firm’s “mommy tracking” options. “Sorry. I was expecting another call.”
“From Luce,” he said helpfully. “I gathered. Am I tying up the phone?”
“Not at all. How are you? Happy belated Fourth of July.” I walked the phone down the hallway to Dave’s office door.
“To you too, you too. Is Dave there? I just missed his call, but his message said he was at home.”
“He is. I’ll get him.”
“So, how’s he doing? Is he hanging in there?”
“Yeah, he is. He seems to be working very hard, getting a lot done.”
“And you? Are you holding up?” Brian, I could tell—by the paste of empathy squirted on top of his words like a line of mustard on a hot dog—had probably been one of those student-counselor types in college.
“I’m fine.” Why wouldn’t I be fine, Brian?
“The allegations are crazy. It’s just a matter of clearing them up. Sitting tight until then.” Brian was undeterred by my silence. “Everyone who knows Dave knows he’d never do anything like that.”
“Do anything like what?”
Brian paused, then gulped audibly. “Like, just, I mean, anything to get suspended. He’s so ethical! I mean—”
I heard the creak of Dave’s office door swinging open and muted the phone. “It’s Brian Lochlyn,” I said. He reached for the phone, and I held it just out of reach. “You guys close?”
“Not especially.”
“So why
’s he calling?” He reached again for the phone, and I clutched it to my chest and stepped back.
“What are you doing, Paige?” He moved toward me. I again moved just out of reach, and then he raked his fingers through his hair and frowned to show his frustration. “He’s my liaison. I’m supposed to run things through him during the suspension, you know, when I have to keep a low profile, and if you don’t give me the phone, I swear I’m going to flip. There’s a deadline, and I know you’re just trying to be funny, but, Paige, this is not the time—”
I held up the phone and he snatched it out of my hand, shutting the door behind him. I sat there, on the floor in front of his door, trying to listen to his conversation, but all I could hear was the low rumbling of his voice, measured and professional.
chapter fourteen
THE CONVERSATION AT our second family breakfast was gunning and stalling like a driver learning stick shift. “So,” Sloane said, breaking an especially awkward pause, “how was shopping?”
“We wish you’d come with us.” My mom gave me a pointed look.
I chimed in. “Next time. For sure.” I supposed it was strange—my mom and I hanging out together yesterday while Sloane had been only blocks away.
Sloane stood up abruptly. “I’ve got to smoke.”
We all stared for a minute, unprepared for such urgency, especially surrounding a habit that had been shunned at all Reinhardt events since Great Uncle Richie’s death from lung cancer fifteen years ago. Had I made a similar announcement, my mom would have brained me, but she just smiled apologetically and asked, as though it were a huge imposition, “Do you mind doing it on the patio?” Sloane shrugged and slid open the door, and my mom spun toward me. “Go keep her company.”
“Aren’t you worried that I’ll breathe in her secondhand smoke?”
“Just stay, you know, to her side.”
“Okay,” I said, incredulous. “Here goes your little sacrificial lamb.”
Their patio—one thousand feet of outdoor space—was large for New York standards, and it took me a while to spot Sloane, sitting in the shade with her legs tucked under her, using a crumpled tissue as an ashtray.
I walked slowly to her bench. “Is it okay if I sit here?”
“Of course,” she said. “Wait. You want the shade?”
“Thanks.”
“I know it’s insane to add more heat to this situation. But, you know . . . addictions. So”—she inhaled and exhaled, shooting the smoke out of the side of her mouth away from me—“when do I get to meet Dave?”
“I don’t know. My mom—I mean, Mom—thought it might be nice to just have us four at first. Is that why you’re not including Giovanni in any of this?”
“Um, no. I didn’t want to expose him.”
“We wouldn’t hurt him, you know.”
Sloane yawned and ran one hand through her hair by way of response. “So where is your husband now?”
“Working.”
“What’s he like? Tell me everything.” Her words were flat as dehydrated fruit, all the juice sucked out.
I was trying not to think about Dave, because doing so launched a jittery little twinge right in my gut. Last night, I’d waited outside his office. When he hung up with Brian, I’d knocked on his door and blurted out what Brian had told me—“those crazy allegations.” “What did that mean?” I’d asked.
“I have no idea,” Dave had said.
I had persisted, and Dave kept repeating that he had no godly clue. Who knew why Brian Lochlyn did any of the strange things he did? Brian was not someone to take seriously. Didn’t I remember that awful dinner we went to a couple years ago—the one honoring attorneys of color? We had that important black judge at our table, and everyone was so busy sucking up to him, except for good ol’ Brian, who just wouldn’t shut up about his thoughts on affirmative action. It sounded vaguely familiar, jibing enough with the memory of the women’s dinner to lead me to conclude that Brian was the firm’s most socially awkward associate, if not the world’s. Still, even if I could accept that Brian had misunderstood those crazy allegations, I didn’t like how the facts were emerging piecemeal, as if Dave were showing me an impressionist painting dot by single dot. I should have understood the big picture by now—seen how the random dabs of color were actually water lilies.
On the other hand, I was grateful for Dave’s steady reemergence. That night in bed, his hands reached out, pulling gently at my pajama bottoms before snapping, a little urgently, where the waistband met my skin. I’d turned toward him, trying not to act as grateful as I felt. It was the first time we’d been together since the suspension, and I’d hoped sex would cement our connection, or at least make things feel normal.
Back to that other hand, though, it hadn’t.
I turned my head away from the smoke. “It’s boring.”
“Boring?” Sloane cupped the edges of a crumpled tissue and tapped some ash into it. “Harsh.”
“Wrong word. It’s just hard to describe the person you know better than anyone. I can’t sum him up with pithiness.”
“How long have you been married?”
“Two years.”
“And what’s he do?”
“He’s a lawyer.”
“Like Dad.”
“He’s so not like Dad.” I stared her down. “In a thousand different ways he’s not like Dad.”
“What does that mean?”
I couldn’t help but smile. “For one, he emotes.”
She laughed. “I see. How else?”
I nibbled at the rough edge of a fingernail. Dave was the original man with a plan. Of course we’ll be together, he’d said, both explicitly and through his actions when we started dating. Why bother with games or courtship? I’d been wary, wondering to Lucy if he was as deluded as the naked emperor who’d believed he was clothed in gorgeous thread. He wasn’t. He was just mature.
I kept quiet. Never in my life—not even before that year—had Sloane ever shown this much interest in me.
“You always were kind of shy, huh?” I bit off the edge of the nail. I was not particularly shy. It was just that her questions felt like fingertips drumming on a bruise. “You look different, though. You’re all, like—polished.”
“Um, thanks.”
“It was a compliment. I mean, it probably came out wrong, but it’s good on you.”
“Thanks.”
She breathed out smoke again, nostrils flared, and but for the slightest bit of concern in her eye, she looked just like a dragon.
After breakfast, as I walked to work, Brian’s phrase repeated in my mind in a deranged parrot’s voice: Crazy allegations, squawk, those crazy allegations, squawk! I tried to ignore it as it hummed during my single session of the day (the Hoestlers) and again when it popped up as I fine-tuned the bookcase organizing. I tried to beat it out of my head as I ran the park loop after work, but I couldn’t.
Determined, I knocked on Dave’s door as soon as I got home. He raised his head and asked, eyes imploring, “Do you know how hard it is to do a closing from outside of the office?”
“I don’t.”
“It’s like trying to juggle while handcuffed. Like trying to peel a grapefruit with your freaking toes.”
So I let Dave work, reassuring myself that I would find a better time to talk to him soon, and drowned out the chanting—crazy allegations—by blaring a reality show about therapists and their screwed-up personal lives. Halfway through it, I drifted off to sleep.
Scott Jacoby alternated between jumping up and sitting down in my office, making quite a scene. “She got suspended.” He leapt to his feet. “Suspended! For insider trading!”
Helene had also gotten suspended? She sat on the couch next to Scott, her feet resting rather calmly on the carpet. My eyes were too heavy to drag up
to her face. How could I help the Jacobys if I couldn’t make eye contact? Should I address the woman’s feet?
I recognized her flats, tasteful black napa leather with a peep toe large enough to showcase her two biggest toes, which were painted with a very familiar glossy oxblood polish. My eyes yanked up, and my mother smiled at me, somewhat pityingly. Where was Helene? “Where’s Helene?” I said.
“Don’t worry about it, hon,” my mom said.
“ShamWow!” Scott jumped higher. “ShamWow! ShamWow! ShamWow!” He screamed it louder and louder until his voice swallowed up the room.
My eyes sprang open. “ShamWow is for the house, the boat, the car, the wet sweater, the dog. No other towel’s gonna do that. See what I mean? All I can say is ShamWow!” The TV flashed light across the dark room: infomercial hour or, as the clock read, two thirty in the morning.
My throat was parched, and my heart pounded in that way it does in the aftermath of vivid dreams. Dave wasn’t in our bedroom, so I got out and walked to his office, opening the door without knocking. His back was to me, his leg jiggling up and down as he focused on the screen, editing a document.
“Are you suspended for insider trading?”
“What?” He looked amused as he turned around to peer at me.
“Have you done anything illegal?”
“No.”
“You swear?”
He glanced back at the computer screen for a second, then at me. “No.”
“You don’t swear?”
“I meant no, I have not done anything illegal. What is this?”
“The Brian thing is bugging me.”
He sighed. I explained the Brian thing.
“I don’t think you’ve ever fully told me what happened.”
“Probably not. I don’t really know what happened, Paige.”
I’d been leaning against the door, but I stepped into the room then. “Just tell me about that morning. Walk me through it.” He turned back toward his computer screen as if he were watching a star-crossed lover board a departing train: There’s a place for us . . . somewhere a place for us. “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”
The Never Never Sisters Page 9