“Let me call you a car,” Isabel said, her voice entirely without affect. Concetta ignored her.
“I’ll walk you to the elevator,” Madison said, wringing her hand away from Luke’s and ignoring her mother’s scrutiny.
Her grandmother stood, abandoning her napkin with a great flourish, and stared down at her daughter-in-law.
“I hope you’re right,” she said. “I hope you’re damn confident about his priorities. Because the boy I know is not going down for this. And it might surprise you, what he’ll do. You’ve never seen him really get to be scrappy, not in years and years. But then, of course, I’m not saying things you don’t know. Or I shouldn’t be. You’re his wife, aren’t you.”
Madison followed her grandmother as she stalked out of the dining room, catching up with her in the small foyer by the elevators. They stood, side by side, waiting.
Her grandmother turned to look at her, squinting as if through a thick fog.
“Don’t let your mother make it his fault,” she said. “He’s one man and it’s a big country out there. He wouldn’t have gambled with you, or the boys, not on his life. And he’s not going to hang his head now as if he did. She’s always wanted him to be ashamed of what he has. At least when she thinks someone’s watching. Don’t let her fall in line with everyone else.”
“I won’t,” Madison said. “I haven’t.”
Concetta took her by the shoulders and pressed their bodies together, some more militant version of a hug.
“You taking care of my son?” she said, and Madison nodded. The elevator dinged, and then Concetta was gone.
TWENTY-FOUR
Lily was racing through her afternoon, performing her errands at double their usual speeds. It was a bright white day, not too chilled for the middle of December. She was only a few minutes from the house, and there was still time to strategize.
The boys had a playdate planned for after school and Madison had told her that morning, without even a nod toward performing it as a request for permission, that she’d be going over to that Allison girl’s house to kick off their winter break. So Lily had time to figure out what to do when her boyfriend arrived.
Jackson, on an express train that at that moment was probably slicing through Mamaroneck.
He hadn’t sounded dangerous on the phone, exactly, because he hadn’t seemed at all on edge or upset. But he was being unreliable, definitely. She didn’t trust him not to do something crazy, actually just show up at the door. And while it was unlikely Isabel would suddenly start answering her own door again today, Lily still needed to get home before there was any chance of Jackson arriving.
Bob might be home, as well. Thanksgiving had come and gone without even a symbolic appearance; at that point she’d assumed he was still sleeping in his study, but now that they were staring down Christmas, she wasn’t so sure. The small noises, the occasional untidiness, all the unconcealed clues that had been her guides back in October: somebody was watching them now, keeping them concealed.
Apparently there had been some sort of unpleasantness in the city, with Concetta. Isabel had mentioned it in only a slanting way—“Lily, if you see Bob this afternoon, let him know that we saw his mother on Friday and she’s waiting for a return on her last call”—and Madison had just fled the room at the mention of her grandmother’s name.
But that had been weeks ago now, and on this particular afternoon Lily’s problem was her boyfriend.
Jackson had called the night before, drunk, from some grimy bar at the nexus of Greenpoint, Williamsburg, and Queens. He’d shouted the name a few times, but she had all she needed to know from his thick, rounded speech—Jameson and beers—and the music blaring in the background. You could hear the way his sneakers must be sticking to the spill-coated floors.
He’d been with his friend Gabe, the one he was always name-dropping even though she absolutely refused to be baited into showing interest. The one who’d just started his own website. She assumed Jackson wanted Gabe to bring him in on the new project, but she’d never asked for any more details.
But last night they’d both been there together, howling into the phone.
“I’m coming out there tomorrow,” Jackson had said.
“Okay,” she droned, lying on her bed paging through a copy of New York, one eye on the magazine to see if Bob was mentioned anywhere and the other on her picture window, where she kept the curtains open so she could see the house right up until she went to sleep.
“You’re not taking seriously,” Jackson had said. “ME seriously. She never takes me seriously!” She could hear him turning to someone else, a leering Gabe sitting next to him on the pockmarked wooden banquette, probably.
“Go home,” she’d said. “Come on, Jackson, get a cab.”
“You can’t tell me I can’t see my girlfriend,” he’d bellowed.
“Sure.”
“I’m coming up there TOMORROW.”
“Okay.”
She hadn’t called him that morning, annoyed not just by his behavior but also by the fact that he had a point about one thing, at least. When he wasn’t allowed to see her for weeks at a time, to press her against the back walls of bars and elevators and stairwells, to wake her up by kissing her hip bones, then she liked him a hell of a lot less. It was true that all the best parts of dating Jackson required that your bodies be very, very close together.
She had assumed, when they didn’t speak all morning, that he’d forgotten their phone call. And then, an hour ago, he’d called her from Grand Central, about to hop on the 2:37.
“There’s a bar car on this one,” he had said. “Score.”
He told her she couldn’t stop him, he was going to sneak over to the house for the night, and when she exploded, he backtracked.
“Okay, well, I still think sneaking over to make out with the babysitter is very hot, but I can wait for you. Pick a bar! I’ll meet you there later tonight, whenever. I’ve got a deadline, I could use a quiet afternoon out of the city to get some work done. It’s like I’m meeting you at our country house, except the house doesn’t belong to you and I’m not allowed over.”
She parked the car and let herself in through the mud room. The house was silent, sealed. She tried to listen to see if Isabel was upstairs, but then told herself that it didn’t matter. There was no way she’d bring him back here. She’d be firm. He didn’t know that her authority was currently being performed behind a blackout curtain, that no one who mattered was listening to Lily anymore. She’d tell him he couldn’t come here.
And then, as if on cue, she heard Isabel’s car start up outside. She must have already been sitting out there, in the driveway, when Lily drove into the garage. She must have waited, not wanting to be watched as she drove away from the house.
The station was better, Lily decided. She’d meet Jackson directly at the station and put him on the first train back to the city, which meant she had only fifteen minutes to get back down there.
She left without taking the time to walk to the end of Bob’s hallway, without listening to see.