“You know what, Char? Sorry. I know I asked, but I don’t want to know. It doesn’t matter. If it’s not Tayeb whoever, it’ll be something else, and someone else, and I’d always be playing catch-up. I was always playing catch-up.”
Charlotte tipped her head back and closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she asked, “What were you doing, Ev?”
“In New York?”
“In New York. You became sort of a bitch.”
“Tell it like it is, Char.” Evelyn flexed her toes.
“I’m sorry, but it’s kind of true.”
“With Camilla and everything, you mean? I guess it was that scene we were in—”
“I wasn’t really in it, Ev. That was all you.”
“Okay, fine. The scene I was in. It was just so much. The money it took. The competition over the invitations. The parties.” Evelyn ran her hands over the wooden bench, grasping for how to explain this to Charlotte, who wasn’t fazed by this stuff. “It sounds ridiculous, saying it out loud, because it’s just parties, but it mattered to me.” She was starting to sniffle, and wiped her nose and looked in some horror at the trail it left on her sleeve, then laughed. “New York made me crazy. I was just trying to make it.”
“You were trying to make it in Edith Wharton’s New York, Ev. That barely exists anymore. Look at the Times wedding announcements. It’s ‘She works at McKinsey and he’s an economics professor.’ It’s all merit based.”
“It is not, Char. I know the Times wedding announcements, trust me. It’s all ‘He’s a director at Goldman and she’s studying early childhood development at Bank Street School of Education and her father ran asset management at blabbity-blah, and they just bought a house in Cos Cob.’”
“Okay. There are a lot of bankers in there, but society isn’t that closed anymore.”
“Isn’t it? Go to a deb ball and tell me that.”
“Other people are throwing open the doors. The entrepreneurs and the artists and the whatnot—no, you laugh, but they make old money interesting. Why do you think Camilla’s all of a sudden becoming a patron of the arts?”
Evelyn shook her head slightly.
“You wanted so badly to get in, when you should have been trying to get out,” Charlotte said.
Evelyn cast her arm forward, sending the last bit of the croissant into the water, and it plopped with a satisfying splash into the bay. A lone Canada goose quickly honked over, gobbled it up, and flew off. Finally, Evelyn said, “Get out to where?”
“I don’t know, exactly. That whole Upper East Side life, though—it isn’t the only version of life in New York. In Brooklyn, there are all sorts of interesting people, the kind that New York used to have, writers, and graphic designers, and beer makers.…”
“Beer makers?” The raindrops were starting to fatten.
“Ev, I think…” Charlotte looked at the water, searching for the words. “What you were trying to be, wasn’t that all about your mother?”
Evelyn looked down at her feet, taking time to put together her response. “Without my mother to report to, without her ideas of it, I’m not sure it would have been quite as appealing, yeah. But it was me, Char. It wasn’t her up there attending debutante parties and going to benefits and stealing bracelets.”
Charlotte pulled down her lower lip. “You stole a bracelet?”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“I guess not.”
“We don’t even go to Cichetti’s anymore, the grocery store on Main, because my mother is convinced that our fall from grace has tainted the neighbors’ opinion of us so. She doesn’t even see her old friends.” Evelyn looked out across the gray water, which was starting to splash up against the dock.
“What is the plan now, Ev?”
“What, my Gilmore Girls setup with my mom isn’t appealing?”
“I’m serious. You’re young, you’re pretty, you have money—”
“No. I mean, first of all, twenty-seven isn’t exactly ingenue age. But money I do not have. My parents had to pay off the mortgage on the house, and the proceeds from the house sale are tied up in the settlement with Leiberg Channing, and there was a nine-million-dollar restitution to the government plus the legal fees. My mother still finds it uncouth to talk about money, so, trust me, I’ve tried to figure it out, but I don’t think there’s any money, at least not judging from the way she’s barely spending it. I’m on my own.”
“Wow. Well, at least you were down here to help out with the sentencing and all that.”
“I should’ve been down here more. Helping them pack up, and hanging out with my dad, but everything in New York was such a mess and it seemed like if I could just get a little more time there—” Her voice broke, and she felt tears coming, and as she started to blink them back reflexively, she wondered why. So she allowed them to roll, hot relief down her cheeks.
“Hey. Hey.” Charlotte threw an arm around her. “You’re still here, kid.”
“I’m in Bibville,” Evelyn said as she took a big, snotty inhale.