Lily held herself still, wondering if she had been truly forgotten, but then Isabel spoke.
“She wouldn’t have left the house if you hadn’t intervened,” she said quietly, staring ahead.
“I doubt that’s true,” Lily said. “Besides, we could always have called Mina for help.”
Isabel didn’t take the bait.
“You could have just explained it to her,” Lily said. “Whatever has you so hell-bent on trotting her out to watch the game. You could have been honest with her. She’s not a baby.”
Still Isabel said nothing, and Lily turned toward the field. Her eye sought out Matteo and Luke, standing—as always—somewhat apart from the others, their little robber-baron stances. Sometimes, waiting for them at the school gates, she caught sight of them walking toward her before her brain recognized them as her own charges, these little boys and no other. That oscillation between disinterested observation and ferocious recognition, the recognition of your own kin.
But they weren’t. They weren’t her kin, not at all.
“Look at her,” Isabel said. Madison was climbing the bleachers now, shouldering the Vineyard Vines bag she’d brought along. It was stuffed so full that it sagged theatrically on her shoulder. “I forget that she’s half D’Amico. Look at her, she looks like some Neapolitan washerwoman who’s never had a day’s rest in her whole life. That’s pure Nonna martyrdom.”
When Madison reached the bleachers a few rows up, where the mothers were clustered, she kept climbing. They watched her as she climbed to the very top row and then edged her way along one bleacher to the far corner, where one man sat alone, folded over himself, a Brooklyn Dodgers cap jammed low on his head.
“He’s lost weight, hasn’t he,” Isabel said.
“Well, he was never overweight.”
“No, that’s what I mean. He’s just missing, you know. His bulk.”
And she was right. He was missing muscle, health, the occupied space of a man who had once successfully asserted himself in the world of his choosing.
Isabel watched her daughter, and Lily watched them both. Madison came to stand beside Bob, and after a few seconds he looked up. She sat down beside him.
“Are you going to ask her, later, what she meant by that?” Lily said.
“Which part?” Isabel said.
“I think you know which part,” Lily said. “She’s talking about it like she knows secrets that other people don’t. That doesn’t worry you?”
Isabel squinted at the field, still not turning back to face Lily. “Lily, you’ve seen him yourself. He’s haunting the halls. He hasn’t spoken to anyone in months; you think he’s debriefing his teenage daughter on his company’s bankruptcy?”
“Are you going to ask her what she meant?”
Isabel sprang forward, clicking out of her seat belt and slamming the driver’s-side door without saying a word. Lily locked the car and followed.
“The boys look good,” someone said as they took their seats. Everyone said hello, and Lily saw that no one would mention Isabel’s husband, sitting alone up in his corner. As they sat down, Isabel put her hand to Lily’s, touched the knuckles.
“Thank you for being here,” she said quietly, during a home run that elicited noisy outbursts from the other mothers.
Lily put two fingers to her mouth and whistled, quite aware that several of the women sitting in front of her winced noticeably, before she replied.
“You pay me more money than my own father makes, pay for my health insurance, and fly me around the world with you twice a year. To be here.”
“You know that’s not true,” Isabel said.
“No,” Lily said. “It actually is.” They were murmuring, not looking away from the field.
“I’m sorry if you disapprove,” Isabel said, “of how I handled her this morning. But she is not the only variable in my life right now, Lily. I have other things on my mind.”
“Right,” Lily said, “of course,” and she knew right away that she’d let too much of her opinion drip into the words.
Isabel stood up. The thick heels of her boots chirped against the corrugated metal bleachers as she moved, shaking the entire row. She sat down with a cluster of women a few bleachers closer to the field. Lily could see her ease herself in with small talk, could see that she had manufactured some reason for relocating. But she could also see that Isabel’s movements had that jittery, fragile quality of someone who was trying hard to conceal her anger, who was smiling to soothe an eruption. And it was satisfying, to see that.
Once or twice, she looked back over her shoulder. Bob sat in total silence, hunched and gray, his chin resting on one fist. He hadn’t shaved in a few days. Madison sat silently beside him, her history textbook propped on her knees, chewing the end of the highlighter she held in one hand. They looked, Lily thought, like partners. Conspirators, even.
That was how she would remember the morning, much later. Bob and Madison in silent communion up behind her, Isabel chatting up strangers down below. And Lily, left alone on the cold metal between them.
THIRTY-EIGHT
When Amanda turned from the cash register, her Pinkberry in hand, Madison was standing at the end of the line. It had been so long since they’d interacted beyond brief encounters in the hallway at school, eyebrows raised in vague distaste. The way you’d lock eyes with another pedestrian if you passed a patch of vomit on the sidewalk, or something. Amanda had accepted this back in October; she had been relieved of her job, whatever that job had been.
But now, she saw Madison before Madison saw her. Alone, without the boys or Lily or even her mother, Madison projected an uneasy alloy of steeliness and grace. You could see the grated vulnerability of her knowledge that if you forced her to meet your eye, then she’d have to respond with avidity and warmth. She looked like she was trying to keep herself locked away without claiming any physical space for herself.
When she finally saw Amanda, they stepped out of line together. Amanda kept her back resolutely to the other women there, but she saw Madison’s eyes flicker.
“Hey,” she said.
Madison smiled, and this in itself was so surprising that Amanda felt emboldened, safe.
Her father had gone quiet for a while, but the past few weeks had been every bit as bad as October. Jake had written about Madison’s father, either indirectly or by name, for his past five columns.
“I was just killing some time while Lori runs errands, I didn’t want to sit at home alone. Do you want to walk around?”
“Sure,” Madison said. “Isabel is with the twins, at Le Pain. I told them I wanted yogurt instead, but I probably don’t have to go back right away. Isabel got stuck talking to a bunch of other women there.”
“Yogurt?”
“No, let’s just leave. I’m not even hungry.”
“You don’t really get hungry for frozen yogurt,” Amanda said, swirling her spoon into the creamy peak she’d dotted with yogurt chips and graham cracker crumbs.
“Well,” Madison said, “that’s dessert. So don’t delude yourself.”