So far, things were incredibly normal, more normal than anyone would have dared even to hope. Her mother had gone to the bar while her father remained with Madison; that was the only appreciable difference from routine, other than the fact that her father was drinking wine. It seemed like things could continue to unfurl. They’d be seated with Mina and Tom. Her mother, through some method, would have seen to that. Suzanne wouldn’t have refused that request.
Mina came over to them, and Madison’s father waved. He was making double gestures, everything exaggerated, as if it were being done underwater and so needed twice as much force to achieve its objectives.
“Can we leave yet?” Mina said, pouting theatrically. “Tom abandoned me as soon as we got here. He’s punishing me for making him attend.”
“He’ll be fine once we get some grub.”
“Oh, Bob, how right you are there.”
“Is Jaime home?” Madison said. Mina paused to take a sip of her wine.
“Too much work,” she replied. “She’s cooped up in her dorm room for their whole spring break, can you believe it? Oh, Madison, she would be so thrilled to get an e-mail from you. Or even just a text to say hi. She hasn’t been home since the summer, can you imagine?”
“We haven’t talked in a while,” Madison said. “But I can—I’ll send her an e-mail.”
She was willing to bet that the only homesickness in this situation was the ache always resident within Mina. But then it meant that the promise cost Madison nothing, it could slip right off her tongue without consequence. If her mother had taught her only one thing, it was how to grant those sorts of promises.
“Have you said hello to Suzanne?” Mina asked Isabel. Bob leaned his head in toward theirs.
“We’re girding our loins,” he said, and Mina threw back her head, laughed. Madison saw her mother’s spine briefly torque, as if stretching a shoulder sore from tennis, before she snapped back to her normal posture.
“Well, you’ll probably get the sanitized greeting,” Mina said. “You should have heard the earful I got. She’s ‘scaled down’ this year because it ‘felt more appropriate.’ She made a speech about how people don’t understand, when they talk downsizing, how many people it takes to keep her house in order and her pool clean. She said that if we scale back, that’s what gets scaled. Those jobs.”
“Well, she may be right, there,” Bob said. “I’m sure she said it for all the wrong reasons, but people who talk about revolutionizing ‘how we live today’ don’t usually understand the first thing about what it would mean.”
Madison saw Amanda and her parents disappear into the crowd near one of the bars. “Mom,” she began, but Isabel set down her wineglass with ostentatious precision, as if afraid she’d break it. She fumbled with the clasp of her clutch, then looked up again.
“What,” Bob said, and turned to follow the path of his wife’s eye.
“Oh,” Mina said. “Oh, God, I should have said something. I saw her but she looks different, no? I couldn’t remember why she looked familiar. She’s put on weight. And her hair, it’s so much longer.”
“Who is that?” Madison said.
They were all looking at a blond woman in the middle of the crowd. She was talking to a short, heavyset man with gray hair, but his face was obscured, at first, by all the other bodies.
“Who is she?” Madison said again. No one replied. They acted as if she hadn’t even spoken. And so, fine, she thought, fine. She left them there. She went to look for Chip, Amanda, anyone.
She had seen the blond woman before, even before she saw her out front. She couldn’t remember where. The man with her was Jim McGinniss, her father’s former right-hand man, which did not make any sense at all.
LILY SPENT THE EARLY EVENING in the kitchen with a celebrity gossip magazine. It could be worse, she thought, she could nanny for one of those poor bastard’s families. She tried and failed not to think about how the party must be going, ignoring the temptation to open a bottle of wine. What would she say if they came home early? It should have been enough, getting caught back in December, Bob’s clear disinterest in ever reminding her that they’d caught each other. His certainty that they’d keep each other’s secrets.
But it wasn’t enough, of course, and that was what the experience had taught her. Misbehavior, wrongdoing, becomes both the appetite and the food; it creates a space for itself and then demands more and more to keep its desires sated.
She’d been thinking this way ever since her conversation with Madison the week before. Whether Bob locked his study when he left for his mystery afternoon “jogs.” Whether Madison had really seen him hide a key to a desk drawer, and whether that meant much of anything.
Her phone danced on the tabletop, jerking over the uneven knots in the wood. It was Jackson, again. She hadn’t spoken to him in several days, but he’d called four times since this morning.
She grabbed her keys from the glass dish on the counter. She wasn’t due to fetch the boys for another hour at least, but she couldn’t sit here alone in the house anymore. Every surface in the house looked like the temptation to touch, open, read, remember. And that wasn’t her choice to make; it was Madison’s.
She went outside and got into the car.
“HOW HAS IT BEEN?” Amanda asked.
“I’m not sure,” Madison said. They were moving through the crowd together, making looping, directionless arcs around the bar. At one point Madison saw Jake and Lori, standing alone at a cocktail table, fretful and conspicuous. She linked Amanda’s pinkie with her own and steered her off into another current through the crowd. Whatever had changed, in the way she felt about Amanda and her abandonment last summer, it felt far too rickety and circumstantial to survive a conversation with Jake Levins. If he was too chicken to apologize to a fifteen-year-old girl, well then, that was fine. He didn’t get a cheek kiss.
Madison briefly cased the bartenders, wondered which one would be likeliest to serve her. All around her, everything looked and sounded only almost like a party. There were peals of laughter that sounded more like shrieks. The lime glow of the pool beckoned, its underwater lights distorted by ripples, the perpetual harassing whisper of its waterfall. The lanterns in the trees and the greenish moon low in the sky, together, cast unnatural shadows on the faces.
Madison wandered, with Amanda, closer to the dinner tables grouped around the dance floor. The microphones up on the dais would later be used to thank everyone for doing the exact same things they’d done last year, and the year before that.
Amanda kept peering furtively at the faces in the crowd; Madison couldn’t imagine why.
The centerpieces were so much simpler than usual that they felt showy. Some general green frippery surrounding what was ultimately just a large glass bowl, deep and round, filled with water and one single floating gardenia. Madison breathed in that smell, the gardenias, felt it settle within her. And so when she saw him it was almost as if she’d summoned him, called him to her with a secret whistle.
Zo? and Allie and Wyatt were moving across the grass, and Chip dawdled behind them, his hands in his pockets, extending his legs slowly with each step. She didn’t think she had ever seen him in a tux before.