Markie came across as more school ambassador than employee. Surely a woman who dressed like her, who lived where she lived, who danced like that with a man that handsome didn’t actually need the job but only wanted to find a way to put her university degree, along with her considerable social skills, to good use. It wasn’t true. They were private-school parents only because of the work ethic of Markie’s grandfather, who had died when Jesse was four, leaving a sum large enough to send him to Saint Mark’s and then to the private college of his choice. The bequest would pay for Jesse’s education, but nothing else—the Bryants’ mortgage and car payments and everything else counted on two full-time salaries.
Markie would never forgive herself for the fact that, at the time of her grandfather’s death, she was more irritated with her father than she was grateful for her son’s inheritance. “I want your word you’ll put it into a separate account, marked specifically for Jesse’s education, so . . . nothing can happen to it,” Clayton whispered to her inside the lawyer’s office. Had he followed with “Cough, cough—Kyle—cough, cough,” his meaning would not have been more clear.
Surely this was one of those occasions a psychologist would have a field day with, where a child cringes at a parent’s observation not because it is unfair and untrue, but because it is precisely the opposite. In the end, it turned out Clayton had given his son-in-law too much credit, not too little. He thought the fact the money was in an account expressly named “for the benefit of Jesse Clayton Bryant” would keep Kyle from pilfering it.
While Clayton and Lydia held their son-in-law solely accountable for his family’s downfall, Markie refused to let herself off that easily. Kyle’s conduct was reprehensible, but she had sins of her own. She had never set out to collect cars, real estate, and couture the way some of the members of the Saint Mark’s Mothers’ Club did, but she did make sure she had the basic possessions required to back up their membership in the private-school social circle her grandfather’s gift had gained them entry into: a vaulted-ceilinged house in the right neighborhood, a car with an acceptable hood ornament, and a few expensive suits and pairs of shoes.
She wasn’t greedy about it, and she didn’t fund any of it with a single cent of her son’s money. But she used “My son attends Saint Mark’s” to buy her way in, and once she was there, she did what it took to stay. When she figured out people thought she had taken the development job as a means of keeping herself busy rather than paying the bills, she chose not to correct them. She liked having people believe she had the portfolio to be one of the idle rich but the work ethic to forbid herself such sloth. It made her seem that much more principled.
It made her marriage that much more enviable. Sexy, good-looking men like Kyle were even sexier and better looking when people assumed they were single-handedly providing the luxury cars and designer wardrobes and monthly highlights their wives were able to take for granted. Markie had never been the kind of head-turner Kyle was, but in the golden glow of his presumed success, she felt taller, slimmer, more attractive.
She rode so high on her artificial, installment-plan-purchased Golden Couple reputation that she couldn’t see—she chose not to see—that the footing underneath had become unstable. But who would want to face the truth? The divorcing couple around the block, the older pair up the street who had run into financial trouble and now had to put off retirement—those weren’t the people at the top of the invitation list for the best dinner parties in the Bryants’ exclusive neighborhood. They were the ones whispered about at those gatherings, with words that claimed sympathy but eyes that said something less charitable.
So what if the hostess at every party flirted with Kyle when she thought Markie wasn’t looking? So what if he flirted back? Wasn’t that simply good manners? “My wife is in the other room” could be enough to get them stricken from the list when it was time for the next event. And surely Kyle would never do anything to embarrass her in their own town.
Chapter Seven
In April, Markie ran into a group of school mothers having lunch at one of the exposed-pipe-and-brick-wall wine bar/bistro places that dotted the upscale streets at the tasteful commercial edge of their neighborhood, a few blocks from Saint Mark’s. She was there to meet a donor; they were there to kill the hours between their post-school-drop-off Pilates session and their before-school-pickup fair-trade coffee klatch in the school’s courtyard.
There were five of them at a table with six chairs, all huddled over a cell phone. One of them saw Markie and nudged the one beside her, who looked up and nudged the next, and so on, like a group of living, bleached-blonde-and-Botoxed dominoes. In each of their expressions, pity jostled for position with scorn, and when the first one said, “Oh, hey there, Markie,” it was in the tone of a doctor about to deliver the news that the chemo hadn’t worked.
“Ladies!” Markie said, taking her time to reach them while she ran a few speeches over in her mind to address whatever it was they were so ineffectively trying to pretend they hadn’t been discussing: Jesse would never cheat on a test/steal a classmate’s phone/break into one of your liquor cabinets/sell pot during lunch hour. I’m sure it’s a mistake. If he confessed, he’s covering for someone else—one of your boys, perhaps.
She inclined her chin toward the phone, covered now with a diamond-adorned hand. “What’s this?” They exchanged glances, and she could hear the telepathic debate: We can’t show her. / Well, we can’t very well not show her now—she knows it has to do with her. / I don’t want to be the one to do it. / Fine, hand it to me and I will.
Finally, one of them offered her the phone, swiping it as she raised it toward Markie. “I’m trying to get back to the first one,” she said, as a series of photos carouselled across the screen. Markie thrust her hand toward the phone, but the other woman held the device out of her reach and kept swiping. “I really think it’s easier to take if you start from the first one and work your way—”
Markie snatched it from her. If her child was about to be expelled—
But the pictures didn’t show Jesse sliding a baggie to a classmate over the lunch table. Or angling his head to see the answers on someone else’s test paper. Or chugging a bottle of Chivas in the butler’s pantry of one of their houses.
They showed Kyle. In a bathing suit. On a beach framed by palm trees. Standing behind a woman wearing only the bottom of her bikini, her big, bare breasts spared from total exposure only by his widespread hands. The woman’s arm reached out, presumably holding the phone and snapping the selfie as she tilted her head back and grinned up at him. Kyle’s mouth formed a Cheshire cat’s smile, and his eyes, half-closed, completed the expression that any adult would immediately recognize as the contented fatigue of a man who had just gotten laid.