“And someone nominated me? You know I can’t stand that guy.”
They watched each other for a moment, and for the tenth, twentieth, hundredth time that year, she saw her husband make the decision not to ask her how she spent her afternoons, or when she’d last seen Isabel.
“Please get up and get dressed,” she said. “It’s not exactly a clambake.”
FORTY-THREE
Lily had been waiting in the foyer with the boys for almost fifteen minutes. Madison was in the kitchen with a towel thrown around her shoulders like a cashmere wrap, cautiously eating a grapefruit. The adults hadn’t yet shown themselves.
“Why does Madison get to have a snack?” Luke asked.
“Sweetie,” Lily said. “We’ve been over this. You’d make a huge mess. Madison’s older.”
Luke sank to a low step, propping his elbows on his knees, his entire body deflated by the denial of his request. Lily looked nervously, for the third time in as many minutes, up toward the second floor. Isabel’s instructions were to have the twins ready a half hour ago. Here they were, with their gel-tamed hair and their matching tuxedos, their mint green pocket squares, and she could see that all they wanted was for their mother to come coo over their handsomeness.
Matteo walked to the staircase, too, and sat down beside Luke.
And then Isabel was rushing down the stairs in a floor-length black dress, her hand coasting along the banister. She saw the boys and clapped her hands, then turned to Lily.
“Have you seen him?”
Lily shook her head.
“Madison?”
“Kitchen.”
Isabel passed into the kitchen without another word, and moments later Madison came out again. She walked down the hallway to her father’s study. Her face, despite Lily’s efforts, was impossible to read. Since their conversation on the way home from the city, the conversation about Gabe, Madison had provided no clues at all.
The boys were standing now at the foot of the staircase, turning from Lily to their mother and waiting to be told the plan. They’d inched closer so that, even though they weren’t holding hands, their shoulders and arms were pressed together. Lily wanted to cross to them, but she knew that her portion of the evening was fading out, that Isabel and Madison were in charge now. Her services were no longer needed. From now on, it was the D’Amico hour.
Moments later, as if he’d just been waiting for his daughter to fetch him, Bob was coming down the hallway, also clapping his hands, calling for the twins and dropping to one knee to let them tackle him.
“What, is Mom still getting dressed? We’ve gotta get this show on the road!” he yelled meaningfully, looking up at the staircase.
Isabel came out of the kitchen and looked first at him, then at her daughter. No one was looking at Lily anymore. Certainly not the twins, who were tugging at their father’s tie with gusto.
“Boys, enough,” Isabel said, crossing the room to her husband, the skirt of her dress purring as she moved. She held out one hand to her husband, then pulled at his tie with three sharp motions, tucking it back properly beneath the jacket.
Before they’d finished, Madison was at the front door. Lily took Luke’s hand, put her fingers to the back of Matteo’s neck, but Madison was already beckoning them forward to the car waiting outside. Her parents followed her lead.
FORTY-FOUR
Madison had been to parties like this one before. She’d been to so many parties like this one. Parties where her mother or father was a guest of honor, parties where they’d been in some integral way involved with the event’s planning. She’d seen them speak on the stage at the main level of the Intrepid or in the lobby of MoMA, for actual charities, things that were a much bigger deal than this little party at Suzanne Welsh’s house. And still, as the town car crested the top of Wyatt’s front drive, circled the fountain, waited in the line of Range Rovers and Jags and the occasional black town car like theirs, Madison held one wrist with her other hand to keep it from twittering, anxious, in her lap.
The car glided into place. The attendant, a man her father’s age, was suddenly looming at the window.
“We could have just driven ourselves this year,” Isabel said.
“This is important,” her father replied, and Madison saw that this was only the most recent in what must have been a series of barbed exchanges. She saw that these had been resolved not through some harmonious arrival at agreement; they’d just been dropped in attrition, merely abandoned. But wasn’t her father still sleeping downstairs in his study? So when were these minor skirmishes taking place?
The man outside was pulling the door open. He peered into the car, his neck tilted like a jack-in-the-box, then reeled back to urge them forward, to the house.
And then Isabel was gone, already facing the rest of the night with her back to her husband and daughter. She adjusted her stole, then extended a hand for each of the boys. Madison didn’t know why her mother had chosen that wrap to wear. It was too heavy for the breezy night, and her mother’s arms jutted out from the fur at extreme angles, like the legs of a spider.
The twins walked alongside Isabel, flanking her. Only Madison was left behind. Her father clutched her arm, just above the elbow.
“What is the point in coming out here tonight if we’re going to slink in like gate-crashers? Right, Mad?”
She could smell the Laphroaig on his breath and fought a brief spasm of irritation that he hadn’t wanted to talk to her before the party, have a drink alone together.
She winked at her father, and he kissed the top of her head. They followed the rest of their family.
She glanced back once, just before they were swallowed up by the maw of the front door, the house, its second fountain. There was a small, familiar blond woman climbing out of a limousine, two cars behind theirs in the queue. Madison felt her father’s hand stutter against her back, felt him recoil if only for a second, and that was how she knew that he had seen the woman, too. Even if later she would want so badly to tell herself that he’d had no warning.
MINA KEPT THINKING that the house was different. There was a new addition off the old living room, new landscaping. A waterfall, for God’s sake. It all had to be new; surely she would have noticed it, last year. But then, it was so hard to say what this evening would have felt like a year ago.