“Oh!” said Karen, both gratified and horrified. “Well, it was my pleasure. But how do you—”
“My daughter babysits for a family you might know—the mother’s name is Liz Chang. Just had her third kid. She said you were a genius of subterfuge.” She laughed lightly.
“Oh, right—I do know her,” said Karen, dying on the inside.
“Apparently some of the PTA ladies pushed hard to go to the police, but Liz told me she was the one who advocated letting it drop. Got to hand it to her there!”
“I didn’t know—wow—that was so…nice of her.”
“Not to worry—it’s all between us.” Principal Chambers smiled again.
Karen smiled back even as her stomach was busy twisting itself into a poison pretzel. “I appreciate you keeping it that way. Some people might not—understand.”
“Well, I get it,” she replied.
And that was how Karen Kipple and Regina Chambers became, if not friends, then friendly enough that, by the following fall, Karen felt justified in calling her Regina, just as Lou did.
On occasion, it still made Karen uncomfortable over how few white kids there were in Ruby’s fourth-grade class—at last count, just six. When it came time to apply to middle school, Karen found herself worrying, would it hurt or hinder Ruby to be graduating from such a “marginal” school? But an informal survey of the parents of the new kindergartners suggested that more families from the community were beginning to use the school. And on most days that Karen walked into Betts, she felt proud to be doing her part in pursuit of a more perfect, more unified world. She never felt it more than on the evening of the fourth-grade choral concert. Karen had always considered Whitney Houston’s songs to be saccharine and overwrought. But that evening, at the sight and sound of her daughter and her mostly brown-and black-skinned classmates belting out “‘Who knows what miracles you can achieve / When you believe,’” Karen felt her eyes tearing up and her lower lip beginning to quiver. Whitney suddenly emerged in her mind as a veritable goddess of all things righteous and inspiring. After nearly five years at Betts, it seemed, Karen was finally getting used to being in the minority. She was also starting to see that race was really just a fantasy, like any other.
Like running away in middle age with a hedge-fund billionaire.
Karen never really spoke to Clay again. Nor did he wind up joining HK’s board of directors. Though his LLC did donate another fifty grand at the end of the year. And the two made loaded eye contact across a crowded ballroom during their twenty-fifth college reunion the following June. Karen still found him alluring. But she had no desire to renew their liaison. She couldn’t think what to say to him either. She wondered if he felt the same. Several times throughout the evening, she saw him looking over at her table. Though it was hard to tell if he was looking at Karen or checking out Lydia Glenn, his long-lost crush/red herring (it was never clear which). In any case, Karen had a great time catching up with her old roommate, who—it turned out—was about to direct her first off-Broadway play.
Karen had come to the reunion unaccompanied. But Clay was with his wife, Verdun. There was also a small crowd of people waiting to talk to him at all moments throughout the evening. Even if Karen had hoped to have a private chat, it was unlikely there would have been an opportunity for one. Apparently, all of Karen’s former classmates wanted to be near the Class of ’91’s most successful graduate. In fact, Clay had recently promised to endow his alma mater with a new student center. Karen had read about it in her monthly alumni magazine.
A week after the reunion, Karen had a similarly wordless if far more uncomfortable encounter with her erstwhile Mather friend Liz Chang. By coincidence, they were both in the fruit aisle of Whole Foods, examining organic white peaches—Liz with her adorable toddler in the front seat of her shopping cart, Karen alone. Liz shot Karen a quizzical look and opened her mouth, apparently about to speak. Panicking, Karen fled down the aisle and disappeared into the next one, her heart in her throat.
Karen knew she was lucky not to have been prosecuted for siphoning off PTA funds, and if Regina was to be believed, some of the credit was due to Liz. But ever since a neighborhood mommy blog had published an anonymous account, four months after the fact, of a certain “wannabe Mather Mommy/impostor/swine” who had “lied about where her trough was” and then “helped herself to the PTA teat to the tune of twenty-five thousand dollars,” Karen’s embarrassment over the circumstances surrounding Ruby’s departure from the school had only grown. The final indignity: the article quoted one Mather parent, identified simply as Laura, as saying that it was “past time the school investigate families who don’t belong there and who are ruining it for everyone else.” That line in particular had made Karen’s entire body smart and suffer. What’s more, according to the article, on account of both the overcrowding issue and the embezzlement scandal, Mather administrators had recently introduced “far more stringent address-verifying measures” and were now considering “door-to-door checks for the incoming kindergarten class.” Little wonder that Karen lived in terror of running into anyone from that tumultuous two-month period of her life—anyone except for Ruby and, more recently, Matt.
In the first month or two after her affair with Clay came to light, Karen had felt ambivalent about her marriage. She was tired of saying she was sorry, tired of being on the receiving end of Matt’s hostile and contemptuous gaze. And when Matt moved out of their condo and into his friend Rick’s spare room—at the time, it had seemed, for good—a part of her had felt relieved. She hadn’t missed coming home from work to find dirty socks and empty coffee cups scattered around the house. She didn’t miss Matt passing judgment on her career either.