“Do you want to talk about this now?” she said. “Then fine, let’s go. I’m listening.” And then, to Amanda’s silence: “That’s what I figured. So then why are you here?”
Madison stood up and went over to talk to Chip. Amanda felt an actual twisted pride, watching her do that. She walked all the way across the room, in front of those boys, and started talking to this guy she worshipped. She could do that now, when before—only a few months ago—she couldn’t. Whatever was happening, had been happening, it was at least making her different, somehow. She was learning something.
Amanda waited for Zo? and Allie to come back with that senior, Jared Rodrick, and then slipped out the front door. Wyatt, thankfully, didn’t seem to have set any alarm. She called her father on his home office line and waited by the fountain outside for what felt like hours, until she saw his car crest the hill.
SEVENTEEN
Mina was trying to remember, in chronological order, every single one of Jaime’s Halloween costumes. She knew the first one had been a teapot, when Jaime was not even three months old. Mina had been frantic to find a costume that wouldn’t broadcast to the entire party, a Manhattan event thrown by one of the older wives at the bank, how long it was taking her to lose the baby weight.
She’d been younger, then; she hadn’t yet discovered her panoply of options, the mixing and matching of the other wives’ weekly fitness regimens.
In the end she’d had a yellow dress made, cut low to expose her breast-feeding cleavage and with a high-waisted ball-gown skirt to cover her tummy. It seemed so perfect, for the bank, Beauty and the Beast, and a little teapot in tow. But of course it ended up being one of those things where kids had only been invited in spirit, and the “nursery” was the apartment’s abandoned third story and a housekeeper who had clearly been asked last minute to work overtime, and Mina had been one of only two or three clueless women who’d shown up with a kid. And Tom seemed more embarrassed by her idea of a little joke, painting his nose black and putting a fake lion’s mane over his suit, than she’d expected.
She trotted into the foyer now to fetch the giant plastic pumpkin filled with miniature Vosges boxes, their purple edges protruding from the pumpkin’s maw like facets from a geode. It was so typical, that she’d been trying to remember her daughter’s cutest looks and had instead wandered into a memory of recrimination and pain. She had to get a better handle on that. She knew why it was happening—any holiday was a spotlight shone on Jaime’s absence, and Tom was stewing in the den tonight, annoyed that they had to deal with trick-or-treaters. It was all right to feel a bit off. But this constant wallowing—enough was enough.
“Oh my goodness,” she cooed at the door, dropping a box of chocolates into the bejeweled handbag of a small girl who couldn’t be much older than ten. She was wearing a face full of makeup and a dazzling outfit, one of the ones where flesh-colored nylon is sewed in place to make a young child look like she’s baring skin, wearing something risqué. It had to be that she was dressed up as a pop star, or something, God knows it went right over Mina’s head. The older your kids got, the less you were expected to keep up with whatever celebrity had them in raptures. And when your kid decamped for boarding school, you were almost completely off the hook.
She hovered in the kitchen for a few minutes after the latest batch of kids wandered back down the driveway—one reason Tom hated this process was that it required them to leave the front gate open, trusting that no one would trespass without candy-seeking kids in tow—before deciding that they might be reaching the dregs of the evening, that it might be late enough to call it a night.
Tom had been the sort of dad who cashes in on his daughter’s Halloween haul. He had always tried to bargain with Jaime for her Snickers. I’ll drive you to school, he’d say, and she’d squeal with laughter. I’ll buy you some dinner. I’ll take you into the city to see the whale on the ceiling at the museum. When we visit your Grandma Gennaro out on Long Island, I’ll let you pile your food on my plate and if she asks, I’ll say I took seconds, because it’s not your fault you got the one Italian grandma who’s a terrible cook. I’ll do it for you! I’ll do anything, anything. Just give me those Snickers bars.
They were all things he already did for her, things any daughter could expect from her father. They were the wages of love as they already existed, the parameters of Jaime’s relationship with him as she’d been taught to understand it. That was the joke; he was offering her nothing at all. And their daughter had laughed and laughed, her giggles accelerating into near hyperventilation, her hands at her little protruding stomach, as if to hold her together so she didn’t shatter from the hilarity.
That was another Halloween memory.
Mina topped off her glass of wine and poured a fresh scotch for Tom and carried both glasses into the den. He was in his chair, a CIA mystery propped open on his knees. He read paperbacks when they traveled, for the convenience, but at home he always preferred hardcovers from the library. He wasn’t looking down at the book, or at the NBA season opener he had playing, muted, on the television. He was looking out the French windows, toward the swimming pool that would be visible if it weren’t already dark.
“Honey?” she said.
He snapped to attention and considered her for a moment before closing the book and patting the wide wooden arm of his chair. She tiptoed across the room to curl up beside him. She caught his head in her arm and guided it toward her chest, and they both cradled their drinks in their free hands.
“Do you think she really won’t come home for Thanksgiving?” Mina asked quietly.
“It’s a long trip,” he said.
“I’d go to pick her up,” she said. “She knows that.”
“It’s good that she’s made friends, Min. You’d hate thinking of her up there, alone in the room after that dingbat roommate left school. No one to talk to. You’d be so miserable if you thought that was the case. You were so worried about her, back in October. And it’s nice that she’ll have a family Thanksgiving.”
“It’s not her family.”
“Sure,” he said. “But it’ll work.”
Mina lifted her glass, but she realized that what she wanted wasn’t really a drink, it was some Halloween candy. And not what they had in the hall; real candy bars. She wanted KitKats. She should have gotten Tom some Snickers bars, brought them in to him without warning. But then if he hadn’t remembered, she’d have felt guilty for implying that he should remember.
“We could go away,” he said now. “We could close up the house for the winter and go somewhere warm.”
“No,” she said. “She’ll still come for Christmas, come on. And you need to be here.”