“You write lyrics?” Even Stacey can’t maintain glum apathy.
Jules is the kind of person who takes a room like a storm and whose presence likely lingers like receding thunder after she’s moved on.
“A long time ago. What can I get you all to drink? Beer, seltzer, red, white, pink?”
“Pink?” Piper echoes. “I love pink. I’ll try that.”
Again, Jules laughs heartily. “Sorry, baby girl, it’s wine. Rosé.”
“Oh . . . I thought it was seltzer.”
“And now she’s pink,” Jules says as Piper blushes.
Heather is back, so light on her bare feet that she didn’t make a sound descending the stairs.
A young teenage girl slips into the room just behind her.
Courtney is a fair and freckled strawberry blonde who resembles neither of her mothers. She does, however, share their good-natured confidence, greeting the visitors with an easygoing grin and firm handshakes all around and asking the girls which schools they’ll be attending.
“We’re both going to Notre Dame. It’s in Greenwich Village.” Piper’s pronunciation is self-conscious, but she says it like a local, as Keith had taught her—not “green-which” but “gren-itch.”
“Nobody calls it that,” a male voice says, and a young man enters the room.
Lanky and towering over even six-foot-tall Keith, he has an angular face, intense eyes, and a pile of shaggy dark hair. He, too, is dressed in black, more mood than fashion statement.
“Nobody calls it Gren-itch?” Piper echoes. “Wait, so it is Green-witch?”
“No! Geez. It’s just the Village, unless you’re a tourist. Which you are, so I guess . . .”
“She’s not a tourist, she lives here now,” Courtney says. “And you’re a jackass.”
“Guys! Cut it out!” Jules snaps. “Lennon, introduce yourself!”
He shakes hands all around as politely as his sister had, but without smiling.
Nora’s hand feels clammy in his cold, firm grasp, and she pushes back the memory of a young man she’d once known. He’d looked nothing like Lennon. But there’s something about this kid, an intensity to his presence, that throws her back to an interlude she’s spent all of her adult life trying to forget.
Jules asks, “How did you guys pull off this amazing feat—landing two daughters in a decent high school at the last minute?”
“It wasn’t easy,” Keith says. “My old college roommate is married to a woman with friends in high places. I called him the second we knew we were moving, and she pulled some strings.”
“And waved a magic wand, apparently,” Heather says. “Wow. Do you know how lucky you are?”
They do. Some New York City parents begin laying the groundwork for secondary education while their children are in diapers. Public high schools depend not on neighborhoods, but on entrance exams and advance applications. Acceptance decisions are made long before the previous school year ends, and the best schools have long waiting lists. The same is true of private schools, and they come with an astronomical price tag.
“We were on pins and needles for about a month, but it all worked out,” Nora says, and turns to Lennon and Courtney. “Where do you go to school?”
Heather answers for them, like a passenger grabbing the wheel to avoid a swerve. “Courtney’s at Brooklyn Friends, and Lennon goes to Collegiate. That’s in Manhattan, so he can take the subway with your girls.”
“Um, they’re in the Village, and I’m on the Upper West Side.” His response isn’t a blatant protest, but the message is clear, and received.
Stacey lifts her chin. “No worries. We know how to get there.”
“Yeah, we practiced yesterday with our dad.”
Piper’s comment brings a glint of amusement to Lennon’s eyes, but he says nothing.
After silence that goes on a split second too long, Jules says, “Let’s go into the kitchen.”
They follow her through the archway into a dining room painted in high-gloss rainbow stripes and clearly not used for dining. There’s no table, and the corner hutch is filled with books instead of dishes. They’re arranged in haphazard fashion, some sideways, others vertical, many with bookmarks poking above the pages as if no one has ever bothered to finish reading them. A large electronic keyboard and full percussion set take up most of the room, along with an enormous tank filled with tropical fish that match the walls.
“Is that a gold record?” Keith indicates a large plaque propped on the mantel.
“Uh-huh. Mine.”
“Congratulations! That’s amazing!”
“I know, right?” Jules grins.
Heather rolls her eyes. “No false modesty there.”
“Hey, if I had one of those, you’d have heard about it the second we met,” Keith says.
“Oh, I’ll be happy to tell you all about it, and then some. Come on into the kitchen.”
Trailing Jules over the threshold, Nora stops short, and Heather bumps her from behind. “Sorry—you okay?”
“Yes, just . . . wow. I was expecting it to be . . . uh, modern, I guess, like the rest of the house.”
Like her own kitchen, completely renovated in neutral shades with glass-fronted cabinets and sleek modern appliances.
Here, the Formica counters and ceramic tile floor are speckled beige, the stove and fridge olive green. The busy wallpaper isn’t just citrus fruit colored, it depicts them. The cabinets are knotty pine, with vintage monkey figurines on an open triangular shelf tucked alongside the sink window.
All around the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel . . .
The ice cream truck tune dribbles into Nora’s head as Jules lowers the volume on a Bluetooth speaker tucked beside a row of old-fashioned ceramic cannisters. A memory flutters at the edges of Nora’s mind like curtains in a gusty chill.
Jules is talking. “Every time we think about remodeling, we decide the retro look is still kind of cool. That, and we’re always too broke to do it right.”
“I like it. It looks exactly like my parents’ kitchen in Kansas when I was growing up,” Keith tells her.
“This is my parents’ kitchen when I was growing up.”
“I think everyone had this kitchen,” Nora murmurs, running a fingertip over a familiar black iron drawer pull.
“No, Jules means that literally,” Heather says. “She grew up here. We bought it from her parents when they retired. She was pregnant with Lennon at the time.”
Her son cracks a grin at last, and it’s a sardonic one, aimed at her. “Hey, Nora? News bulletin—a woman doesn’t need a husband to have a baby.”
Jules, stirring a bubbling pot on the stove, tosses the metal spoon aside with a clatter and spatter. “Lennon!”
“Look at her! She’s acting all shell-shocked, like someone just told her I was hatched out of a giant dinosaur egg.”
Nora tries to explain. “That’s not what I was surprised about. I . . . I was just caught off guard by the kitchen—that it’s so retro. But I’m sorry if it seemed like I was—”
“Whoa, no apologies necessary from you,” Heather assures her, and levels a look at her son. “Lennon?”
“Sorry. I didn’t realize that people in Kansas don’t know about the miracles of modern medicine.”