“No, it’ll be fine,” Denise said, dropping the idea of Tom as abruptly as she’d raised it. But Mina wasn’t even irked; it was so remarkably soothing to hear her sister say that, just as she’d been saying since they were teenagers. Nothing else filled Denise with supreme confidence like other people’s fear, coupled with an ignorant certainty that she knew they’d be all right.
Mina wandered into the den and curled up on the window seat that looked out over the front yard, the slope that led up from the gate at the bottom of the drive. She watched the gardener move across the flat lawn at the base of the hill. He’ll be gathering the leaves soon, she thought. Everything about the outdoors was still summer, the dampness between her breasts as soon as she left the house, the weight of the air around her. But soon, that would be gone, and they’d forget, even, how it felt. She closed her eyes again and thought of being out with Denise, when they were teenagers. Taking the train into the city and sharing a fifth of rum they’d chase with cans of Diet Coke, and the way her sister always knew who at the bar to flirt with to get cocaine, and the way she’d grab Mina’s arm when they were dancing and say, Let’s do some more, it won’t kill us.
“Say that again,” Mina murmured.
“Say what again?” Her sister had kept talking, but Mina hadn’t been listening.
“Nothing,” Mina said. “Nothing. Anyway, I’ve got to head back over to Isabel’s. I’m trying to check in every afternoon.”
“You didn’t answer me earlier,” Denise reminded her. “It’s been a few days. She’s, what, sleeping all day? Screaming? Breaking the china, throwing his clothes out the bedroom window and into the pool? Inquiring minds, Min.”
Mina waited, for a moment, but by then she figured she’d so completely transgressed the borders of loyalty to Isabel that confiding one last detail couldn’t hurt.
“Sleeping pills,” she said. “Sobbing, and then almost catatonic, and then sleeping pills ever since. But I should take her something else today, right? She can’t just sleep forever. She’s got to be able to stay awake without losing it.”
“That poor woman.” When she heard a faint sucking sound, Mina realized that her sister had lit a cigarette on the other end of the line. “That poor, poor woman. What a scumbag, leaving her out there all alone. He’s probably holed up in their apartment with some twenty-three-year-old who takes turns between tonguing his balls and pouring vodka over his chest and telling him he did nothing wrong. Men are shit.”
“All right,” Mina said, her mind already darting ahead. She’d gotten a strange phone call from Suzanne Welsh, something about lunch later, but first she had to stop by to see Isabel. She tried again to decide whether she should take food or magazines or only Xanax.
“YOU KNOW, MINA, I hadn’t even thought of doing this today, but since we’re out! It’ll just take one quick second, and then I’ll run you right home.”
Suzanne Welsh stood in the street beside her car, pivoting twice before reaching into the backseat and pulling out a large bag. She clicked her key fob four times before rejoining Mina on the sidewalk.
The bag seemed to indicate some errand to run at Saks Fifth Avenue, where they’d parked, but Mina remained baffled—as she had all afternoon—as to why on earth Suzanne had been so insistent they have lunch today.
Technically speaking, she and Suzanne were friendly. Wyatt was older than Jaime, though, so they’d never had much reason to deal with each other vis-à-vis their kids. Suzanne’s husband had once worked with Bob D’Amico in some capacity, until Brad left to start his own fund, and so—despite Isabel’s contempt for the woman’s constant monitoring of every aesthetic, culinary, or social decision made by every single one of her peers—the Welshes were nominally included in many of Isabel’s larger-scale events.
And it was true that, despite Suzanne’s best efforts to conceal her discomfort, she came from a world much more like Mina’s old life than Isabel’s. Her father had made money, gobs of money. A department store he’d founded in Brooklyn, a beach house when Suzanne was a teenager, no doubt a small trust fund by the time she married Bill. But that had all only been cemented when Suzanne was a child, too recent to feel safe, and she was still ruled by a girlish terror Mina recognized all too well. That she was the only woman in town, maybe, who hadn’t figured out yet how she was supposed to act while she spent her money.
Suzanne was above all petrified by Isabel, and this, too, Mina understood. Despite her exasperation every time she got one of Suzanne’s famous rambling phone calls, ostensibly social but ultimately because she wanted to ask Mina whether she knew where Isabel bought Madison’s shoes, or if she knew whether Madison’s most recent Disney costume had been homemade. Despite the tiring charade of these phone calls, the presumptuous nerve of sucking up hours of Mina’s day just because she existed in close proximity to Isabel—despite all that, Mina understood Suzanne, in a way.
But this, Mina would not call it a friendship. They rarely met for lunch alone. She’d had the thought that Wyatt might be applying early to Princeton, and that Suzanne might be angling for some sort of advice or even—could she be this brazen, though?—a recommendation from Tom. But this theory had been squelched over lunch, when Suzanne complained at length about the brusque treatment they’d received from the alumni development officer assigned to Bill on their recent weekend visit to Dartmouth. They were preparing for a big ask, something on the level of a new squash center, and apparently Suzanne had expected a thicker red carpet for the visit.
Besides, Mina thought now, Tom wasn’t even that active an alum. If Suzanne wanted an ally, she would have known she had better options.
Isabel’s name hadn’t so much as haunted the fringes of any of Suzanne’s inane stories. Which was just as well.
Mina followed her new gal pal into the store. Suzanne moved with purpose through the ground-floor displays—perfume counters, jewelry cases, fur-lined hats—all patrolled by middle-aged women in black suits who stood with their hands clasped in front of their bodies and had applied their foundation and their lipstick with too little care. Mina saw the way each woman leaned her torso forward as Suzanne passed; an afternoon torpor had settled over Saks, and until the very last possible second, they each hoped she might be the one commission to free them from it.
They arrived at a counter buried back in a deep, silence-cushioned corner of the second floor, the evening department. A woman whose cheekbones could have cut steak rose to greet Suzanne, removing the glasses that hung from a beaded string around her neck.
“Deborah,” Suzanne said, “I know I’m a bit earlier than we’d said.”
“Don’t mention it,” Deborah replied. Mina smiled at the thick Queens accent. If only we had a sign, she thought, something we could all flash one another in solidarity. Girls who don’t belong here.
Suzanne slid a large, wrapped box from the shopping bag.