In any case, after a few weeks, he’d stopped talking about buying a house in Massachusetts, and somehow this was Mina’s doing.
“We really have to do this?” Tom said, just once, before they hung up. “It means so much to her that we go to some high school orchestra concert?”
Mina pressed her fist to her mouth, biting down on her knuckles.
“Yes,” she said. “What with all that’s been going on, I really do think it’ll be nice for her to see our faces in the crowd. Reassuring, maybe. Do you disagree?”
He hung up without another word.
“You didn’t even take her up at the end of the summer. You sent her in a car,” Mina said to no one, her voice ringing clear against the marble floors in a way that it couldn’t have when her husband was still on the line.
She should have known that Tom wouldn’t allow himself to consider the possibility that his daughter was watching the news, interpreting the streams of jargon as indicators of her father’s failure. Mina realized that this was how she’d been picturing Tom, in his office all these days. That same gaping mouth, the frozen quality to his face that took over whenever Jaime squinted at him briefly and then composed her own face into a smile, to thank him for the misguided gift or the foolish suggestion or whatever else her father had done to confirm that he did not know her at all.
Mina wondered whether Jaime had been watching the news. Did her daughter watch the news? She couldn’t remember, but then Jaime had been fourteen when she left for boarding school, and hadn’t spent more than a week at a time in Greenwich since. Did any fourteen-year-olds watch the news, really? Or were they all just getting that new thing on their phones, Twitter. Everyone striving to be as arch as possible, too witty to live.
She shook her head clean and went back upstairs to pack Tom’s overnight bag.
THEY STOPPED AT RAJIV’S KITCHEN in Wellesley for an early dinner. Tom liked to drive up here several times each year, usually, but they hadn’t been since the previous winter; the impending panic all summer had cut these small extravagances of time from their joint schedule, and dinners at Raj’s restaurant had been one casualty among many.
Tom slid the car backward into a spot on the street and then parked with a jerk, cutting the engine so suddenly she was worried he’d do actual damage. He crossed the street just two steps ahead of her, so that she had to trot in a pair of already uncomfortable kitten heels just to reach the entrance beside him, rather than several paces behind him. She clutched vaguely at his arm as he shoved into the restaurant. She was well aware that Raj was probably on the floor, greeting patrons, that he might have seen them approaching through the restaurant’s broad picture windows. That even before they crossed the threshold they would once again be in public. That might mean nothing to Tom, but then, that’s why he needed her. She knew what it meant to rely on looking like someone other than who you were.
He shook his arm once, dislodging her hesitant fingers. I don’t care, she said to herself. I can take it all, just so long as he’s over it by the time Jaime sees us.
They were shown to their table by a tanned hostess with freakishly long, ropy limbs. Tom’s eyes barely even skimmed her shoulders, her cleavage. No sooner had the gazelle deposited their menus than he bolted for the bathroom, knocking the table with his knee and nearly upsetting Mina’s water. She cupped the cool glass and practiced breathing—four counts in, six counts out. It was just this dinner, really. Once they were at the inn, once he could sleep, things would look very different.
They would be late checking in, so she called ahead. “Why don’t we just say we’ll be there by midnight,” she told an exasperated employee on the phone, some teenage girl chewing her gum loudly into the receiver. They were still a new family; nobody knew them yet at the Andover Inn.
When her husband slid back into his seat opposite hers, emitting the growl mixed with a sigh that was his usual sign-off each night when he finally climbed into bed beside her, Mina felt such relief, such longing that she was almost embarrassed, as she so often was by her private thoughts. She leaned across the table, mindful of their water glasses, and reached to cradle Tom’s head with her hand, brushing her fingers through his close-cropped hair. She’d always loved that he kept it short, loved the way it sprung back at her touch like fresh-cut grass.
“How are you feeling?” she said. “I’ve got Advil if you need it?”
“No,” he said, “I’m sorry I’ve been like this. I promise once I’ve got some dinner in me I’ll be improved.”
“Well, it’s nice to see you, improvement or no,” she said, stroking his hands with her thumbs.
“Min, I tried to explain last night, if you knew what hell on earth it’s been in that office this month—”
She shook her head, careful to keep a certain look on her face, something like tender dismissal.
“I wasn’t,” she said. “I was just being honest. It’s so good to see you. We can go right to sleep, just the second we get to the inn. Once we’ve got a good meal in you. But I really do worry about you.”
He nodded and drew his hand back. They opened their menus.
“Fuck me, Dawes, it isn’t fair. What, do you have a painting of yourself crammed in a closet somewhere back at the manse, aging for you?”
Mina winced, still unaccustomed to the way Rajiv Dhalwala, the silver-tongued owner of the restaurant, seemed to cast aside his gracious front-of-house demeanor as soon as he spotted her husband. They’d rowed crew together at Princeton and trained side by side at Goldman until Raj had decided finance wasn’t for him, and they still spoke to each other as though they were pumping up for a race, or goading each other into one more shot at some bar on Stone Street. Usually, Tom loved it—loved being called an asshole from across a genteel Wellesley dining room, loved the way forks paused for a moment before the general music of the restaurant resumed when people realized that the disruption had come from the owner himself. But tonight, she saw her own exhaustion mirrored as Tom’s eyes widened and then adjusted. She smiled at him, and he nodded.
“Raj, my brother,” Tom said, standing to shake his friend’s hand. “I see you’re still conning people into eating this crap.”