His eyes roamed across her face, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. He looked like she’d just made a joke, and she saw with uneasy certainty that he felt in some way insulted, or dismissed. She hated when her father’s friends looked at her this way, like her face was one of those brain-teaser paintings, and they were waiting for the hidden image of her true opinion to emerge. This man (What was his name? Which bank? Or maybe he was a client?) had ruddy, mottled skin, like he’d been standing in the wind and the sun for hours. His hair was gray in a way that was really almost white, unlike her father’s, and there was a significant growth of stubble on his chin and cheeks. His fingers were clasped so tight around the bleacher bars that his thumbnails were the pale, nauseous yellow of lemon pith.
She saw, then, that the man standing off to one side was with him, that they were both looking at her intently. This other man was much, much younger, closer even to her own age. He had chunky-frame glasses and the sort of thick, dark hair that looks like it could be used to sweep a kitchen floor, and he’d given up any pretense of trying to control the hair other than keeping it more close-cut at the sides and around his ears than it was on top, where it flapped a bit in the breeze. His nose and mouth both protruded, in a way, came to a point beneath his glasses, which gave him an air of being constantly curious, of listening very closely. He was dressed too warmly for the weather, like a teenage boy who’d been dragged to an afternoon occasion of some kind with his parents. A forest green sweater over a shirt and a ruby red tie—had it honestly not occurred to him that he was wearing Christmas colors?—and khakis that had once been pressed but had been rumpled since, as if someone had tried to erase the crease along the front leg. This man stood rolling back and forth on the balls of his feet, his hands in his pockets, giving the unmistakable impression that he had them there to keep himself reined in, on his best behavior.
“Just saying hello, sweetheart. You tell Bob I sent him my best. Tell him I said hang in there. Stick to his guns. It’s just a waiting game. That place has ridden out far worse than this.”
“Of course,” she said, refusing to look wildly around her to see who was watching. She could feel, of course, Zo?’s focus next to her, emitting its own heat. And somewhere beyond her, Allie—more ambivalent and conflicted about whether it was rude to listen, but equally intrigued. “I’ll do that. He’ll be so happy to hear you said hello.”
He works at Goldman Sachs, she thought, the final pieces of the memory returning. It was right, she was pretty sure, that she had initially met him at a museum event, with her parents. But the facts surfacing now came from a conversation she’d overheard another time. She was remembering gossip from Mina Dawes, Isabel’s occasional best friend—he must know Mina’s husband, Tom, that would make sense. She thought she remembered something about Le Rosey. This man had a daughter a few years older than her, but Mina had talked about them when her own daughter, Jaime, decided to leave for Andover. His kids had left America altogether, he’d “parked them”—Mina’s phrase—at Le Rosey, in Switzerland. So why was he here now, on this campus?
“I wouldn’t worry,” the man said to her. His hands were still gripping the bleachers. She told herself that it was silly to think that they might reach through the bars, try to touch her hands, her wrists. “Your dad’s a tough one. He’s scrappy. But I don’t need to tell you that, do I?”
“Sure,” she said, still grinning like a maniac. The man pressed even closer, his cheeks now touching the metal.
“I don’t need to tell his daughter, I’m sure, how skilled that man is. When it comes to getting off the hook,” he said. “You know. Blameless. Untouchable. That’s your dad.”
She waited for a moment, looking back toward the football field, as if she had all the time in the world. Then she swallowed and turned back to look the man squarely in his weatherbeaten face.
“He’ll be so thrilled,” she said, “to hear that you came over to say hello. That you came all the way over here, and interrupted the game, just to make sure I’d seen you.”
His face twisted into something ugly, but it snapped back so quickly that by the time she felt the first shiver of real fear course through her body, he was smiling again. He reached one meaty finger through the bleachers, and tapped it against her knee.
“Have a good weekend, sweetheart,” he said. And then he’d turned away, to walk back across the field. The younger man seemed to want to say something, in that first second before they left, but the older one made a movement of his head, abrupt, and they’d said nothing. They walked side by side, still not seeming to talk, until she could no longer see them at the edges of her vision.
Madison turned back to Zo? and Allie, who were chattering at each other in a blissful, unabated stream. She willed herself not to look at any of the adults. Chip was jogging back toward the fifty-yard line, tugging his helmet on. She wondered how long he’d stood near her before returning to the field. Everything now was just as it had been, the man’s appearance at her shoulder an uninvited, insignificant dream.
AFTER THE GAME, Madison stood in the senior parking lot, the trees darkening against the sky as it faded from stone gray to violet. She’d texted Lily earlier, hoping her mother would have conveniently forgotten that Madison had promised to find a ride home. She wasn’t sure that Allie or Zo? were really her friends, that she could yet do something as casually presumptuous as asking one of their mothers to drive her home.
She didn’t feel, just now, that she wanted to be in a car with a woman she’d never met before. Someone who didn’t know her parents well. That seemed unwise.
Even before it happened, Madison felt that he was going to walk up behind her. She felt it with the confident knowledge that so often accompanied the inevitable, for her. It was like the moments of her childhood just before her father laughed at something she said and picked her up at the waist, held her high in the air. The moments just before she entered her bedroom to find her mother waiting for her, eager to point to some error or shortcoming. A stain undisclosed, a low grade she’d hidden away in a drawer, some public moment when she’d slouched. She always knew these things were coming; it was one of the things that made her feel like a spy in her own house. If you knew what was around the corner, eventually you began to feel like you could move through walls.
“Hey,” Chip said, at her elbow. She turned to him—and she was so thrilled by this later, when she analyzed her own behavior—very slowly, with only a mild displayed interest in who was standing next to her.
“Hi,” she said. “Nice game.”
“You need a ride?”
“Do you drive?”
“No,” he said, chuckling, and ducked his head, brushing one thumb to the cleft in his chin. This is a gesture I will memorize, she thought. I bet he does that all the time. When he’s nervous, maybe.
“No,” he said, “I meant, my mom could drive you.”
“No no no,” she said quickly, immediately mortified by the triple negative. “I’m just waiting for my mom. I got the timing wrong.”
And of course, as she said this, there was Mina Dawes, someone who was decidedly not Madison’s mother, careening into the lot in her inexplicable SUV. The woman had no children living in this state. She only ever had herself to drive around their relatively small portion of Connecticut.
“Oh,” Madison said. “Family friend. I have to go.”