“Not if she’s here on a legal visa and he marries her.”
“But it doesn’t strike you as odd? She meets him over there and just decides to chuck her life aside and join him in America, a country she’s never seen where people speak a language she doesn’t know?”
He gave it some thought. “You’ve got a point. What’s your theory then?”
“Internet-order bride?”
“Don’t they all come from the Philippines and Vietnam?”
“Not all.”
“Huh.” Brian said. “Internet-order bride. The more I think of it, I wouldn’t put it past him. We’re back to my point—Caleb’s not mature enough for marriage. So he picks someone he barely knows who can barely communicate.”
“Love’s love,” she said, throwing one of his own preferred bromides back at him.
He grimaced. “Love’s love until you toss kids into the mix. Then it becomes a business partnership with guaranteed economic instability.”
It wasn’t that he didn’t have a point, but she did wonder if he was talking about himself in those moments, about his fears regarding the fragility of their own relationship and the potential calamity that could be wrought by bringing a child into it.
An icy thought slid through her before she could stop it: Oh, Brian, have I ever really known you?
Caleb was giving her a curious smile from the other side of the table, as if to ask, Where did you go?
Her phone vibrated on the table. Brian. She resisted the childish impulse to ignore it.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” he said warmly. “Sorry about earlier. Friggin’ thing just died. Then I was worried I’d forgotten my adapters. But I did not, my wife. And here we are.”
She got out of the booth, moved a few feet away. “Here we are.”
“Where you at?”
“Grendel’s.”
“Where?”
“That college bar by your office.”
“I know it, I just can’t figure out how you turned up there.”
“I’m with Caleb.”
“Uh, okay. Help me out here. What’s going on?”
“Nothing’s going on. Why would something be going on? It’s raining like holy hell but otherwise just grabbing a drink with your partner.”
“Well, that’s great. What brought you over to Harvard Square?”
“A wild hair. It had been a while. I got an urge to visit some bookstores. I went with it. Where you staying this time? I forgot.”
“Covent Garden. You said it looked like a place Graham Greene would have liked.”
“When did I say that?”
“When I sent you a picture last time. No, two times ago.”
“Send me one now.” As soon as the words left her mouth, adrenaline flooded her blood as if poured from a bucket.
“What?”
“A picture.”
“It’s ten o’clock at night.”
“A selfie from the lobby then.”
“Hmm?”
“Just send me a picture of you.” Another sunburst of adrenaline exploded at the center of her. “I miss you.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll do that?”
“Yeah, sure.” A pause and then: “Everything okay?”
She laughed and it sounded shrill to her own ears. “Everything is fine. Perfectly fine. Why do you keep asking?”
“You just sound funny.”
“Tired, I guess,” she said. “All this rain.”
“So we’ll talk in the morning, then.”
“Sounds great.”
“Love you.”
“Love you too.”
She hung up and went back to the booth. Caleb looked up as she sat, his thumb working his cell phone keypad as he gave her a smile. She was a little amazed at people who could do the talk-with-one-person-text-with-another trick. It was usually computer geeks and tech nerds like, well, Caleb.
“How’s he doing?”
“He sounded good. Tired but good. Do you ever go on any of these trips?”
Caleb shook his head and continued tapping away on his phone. “He’s the voice of the company. Him and his old man. He also has the business acumen. I just keep the trains running on time.”
“Are you demurring?”
“Hell, no.” After a few more distracted seconds, he pocketed his phone. He folded his hands on the table, looked at her to let her know she had his full attention again. “Without me and people like me in the here and now, that two-hundred-year-old lumber firm wouldn’t last six more months. Sometimes—not every day but sometimes—the speed of a transaction can save a couple, three million dollars. It’s that fluid out there.” He waved his fingers at the global “there.”
The waitress returned and they ordered another round.
Caleb opened the menu. “Do you mind if I eat? I walked in the office at ten this morning and didn’t get up from my desk again until I walked out at five.”
“Sure.”
“You?”
“I could eat.”
The waitress returned with their drinks and took their orders. As she left, Rachel noticed a man around the same age as Brian, forty or so, sitting with an older woman who gave off a stylish professorial air. She could have been sixty, yet it was a sexy-as-hell sixty. Normally Rachel would have studied her to see what about her gave off that impression so forcefully—was it her clothes, the way she sat, the cut of her hair, the intelligence in her face?—but instead Rachel focused on the man. He had sandy blond hair going gray over the ears and hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. He drank a beer and sported a gold wedding band. He also wore exactly what her husband had worn this morning, sans the raincoat—blue jeans, white T-shirt, black pullover sweater with an upturned collar.
Was this what she’d missed being holed up so much of her time? It wasn’t like she didn’t get out, but she certainly didn’t get out much. Maybe she’d overlooked the prevalence of some styles. When had all men decided, for example, to stop shaving until every third or fourth day? When had half-fedoras and porkpie hats come back into style? Where did the brightly colored tennis shoe spring from? When was the moment all casual bicyclists decided they should dress in skintight spandex, replete with brand names all over the shirts and leggings, as if they required corporate sponsorship to pedal to Starbucks?
Back when Rachel had been in college, hadn’t every third boy worn a plaid shirt, V-neck tee, and ripped jeans? If she went to the hotel bars frequented by middle-aged Republican salesmen right now, how many would be dressed in light blue oxford shirts and tan pants? So, by that metric, wasn’t it entirely possible that the combination of dark pullover, white T-shirt, and blue jeans—which had probably never gone fully in or out of style, basic as it was—could be worn by three men in Boston-Cambridge on the same day? If she walked through a mall right now, she’d probably see it on a couple more, not to mention on the mannequins fronting the J. Crew and Vince stores.