“The grass growing part.”
Rob could have hugged Evie for liking the waffles and giving him an injection of confidence at just the right time. “It’s an expression,” he said. “It means, don’t waste time.” He detached the second batch of waffles and loaded up Zoe’s plate. Eliza would be proud: he was feeding their teenager!
Eliza. His heart hurt.
He’d better call back Christine Cabot. He said, “Going up to the office!” to the three females in his kitchen. Judith was deep into the first and only section of The Barton Examiner, and Zoe was tapping on her phone, her food untouched. Only Evie answered: “Okay, Daddy! When you come back, can I have another waffle?”
On the way up the stairs, Rob dusted off some memories of an Eastern Philosophy class he’d taken at Brown. They’d learned all sorts of things in that class—Confucianism, Taoism, Shinto—but the tenet that stuck with him was the most basic, the most unremarkable, the most applicable of all of these, and it came from the great Buddha himself. Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment. At certain times in his life—when Zoe was born early, that time he navigated the Hinckley through pea-soup fog—he had leaned on those words, and he leaned on them again now. Yes! That was the answer to it all, that’s what he would do: he would live in the moment.
In his office he braced himself, and dialed.
“Rob!” said Christine Cabot. “I’m so glad you called me back! I assume you got my message?” She sounded preternaturally happy—almost exultant. Maybe she’d also taken an Ambien and clocked a solid ten hours of sleep. Maybe Rob should take an Ambien. He might, tonight, if his mother would share.
“Nope,” he said. “No, I didn’t. I missed your call, so I called you right back.”
His eyes scanned the office and fell upon the stack of papers from Phineas Tarbox, the papers that Eliza hadn’t (wouldn’t) sign. She was going to leave him, that was why she wouldn’t sign the papers? He’d wondered about that before, but now he was certain.
“I’ve been trying to reach you, Rob. I left you messages last evening.”
“I’m sorry,” said Rob. “My mother’s been visiting, we’ve had some things with the girls going on, and Eliza has had to go back up to help her dad…” Also, Mrs. Cabot, I got drunk and got improperly kissed at The Wharf Rat last night.
“Right,” she said. “Your mother has told me about Eliza’s dad and I’m very sorry to hear about it.” Being sorry, he noticed, didn’t stop Mrs. Cabot from skipping merrily ahead to her next thought. “But anyway, I called you because I’ve got to tell you about something I found, for the house. Something wonderful.”
Rob said, “Yes?” Though on the inside he was screaming No! No! No! A client finding something for the house at this stage was rarely a good thing. Scratch that. It was never a good thing. Just ask Mo Francis. Ask any architect! A gentle thudding along the edges of his rib cage prevented him from speaking.
“Floor tile!” said Mrs. Cabot.
Deep breath. Deeper.
Mrs. Cabot said, “Anyone there? Are we still connected, Rob?”
“Now, Mrs. Cabot—you know you’ve already picked out the floors.” He waited for affirmation, but none came, so he went on. “Hand-scraped hardwood everywhere but the kitchen, then tumbled crystal white for the kitchen. Those are the floors that we’ve ordered. Those are the floors that should be here any day now.”
Rob stared hard out the third-floor window. The Cavanaughs’ peonies had stopped blooming, and then drooped, and then they’d been summarily deadheaded. A stunning display of tiger lilies had taken their place.
“I know I picked out floors already, Robbie. But this tile,” she said. “This tile is absolutely gorgeous, this tile is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I went with my dear friend Marianne Foley—you know Marianne, your mother and I are on the hospital board with her—to an architectural restoration place up in Vermont. Well, Marianne was looking for a particular kind of faucet, and I wasn’t looking for a blessed thing, but they had just gotten this tile in, and I fell in love with it. I fell absolutely in love.”
Rob considered interrupting this monologue, but he chose instead to lean his weary head against the windowpane and let the words wash over him. The tile had come from a historic castle in the north of England, and this fact spoke directly—directly!—to Mrs. Cabot’s English roots.
“It’s gorgeous,” Mrs. Cabot said again. “Thick.”
Rob swallowed and whispered, “Thick?”
“Gorgeous and thick. I bought it all! Everything they had. I want to install it throughout, if there’s enough of it, kitchen, living room, everywhere. I’m not sure if there is enough, but it seemed to me like quite a lot of tile.”
Rob summoned an inner reserve of patience and said, “How thick?”
“How thick?”
“Mrs. Cabot? Do you have the tile in front of you?”
“Not all of it, of course. They’re delivering it directly to the site.”
Oh, God.
“Any of it? Do you have any of it?”
“I do, I took a square with me, to show Jonathan. Not that he cares a nickel about any of this. Do you know that last week he—”
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” said Rob. “But this is important. I need you to find a measuring tape, and I need you to measure the thickness of the tile you have. Not the length or the width, but the thickness. Do you understand?”
“Certainly,” said Mrs. Cabot. “I know perfectly well what thickness means. Just hang on a minute, Robbie, let’s see…looks like one and—well, let me see here, the tape measure just slipped. Okay, I’ve got it again. It looks like one and three-quarter inches.”
Was it too early to start drinking? Another deep breath. “Okay,” he said. “Here’s the thing. I’m sure the tile you have there is beautiful, and I appreciate the connection to your roots, the English castle and all that, and I like an English castle as much as the next guy, but I have to tell you that one and three-quarter inches is not a standard thickness, not for floors. A standard thickness for floors is a half inch.”
“And?”