Mary nodded.
“Also, you’re wrong, Mary. I do know. I know.” Mary turned back toward her. “I do. I’ve been where you are now, at almost the same age.”
Mary looked stricken. “And what did you do?”
Eliza sighed and folded her hands on the steering wheel. “Well, I don’t have a nineteen-year-old kid, if that tells you anything.” Mary narrowed her eyes at Eliza and then she nodded slowly and started to back away. Eliza said, “I’ll wait here, until you’re finished with your appointment.”
“Thank you,” Mary said. “Thanks.”
When Mary was gone, Eliza pushed the seat back and stretched her legs in front of her. Rob would have a fit if he knew she was driving around in his billion-dollar car after running and before showering. She should be sitting on an old towel, like a dog. She’d wipe down the seat when she got back to Little Harbor.
She opened the Audi’s sunroof and lifted her face to the glorious summer sun. She tried to keep herself from allowing the ghosts of the past to linger. Rob would also have a fit if he knew she was imagining Zoe seventeen and pregnant. She’d try to stop.
Zoe, whose biggest problem to date was how many people had liked her last Instagram post. Zoe, whose twelve-year molars were not even in yet, even though she was thirteen.
Why was it so easy to get yourself in trouble, if you were a girl?
And why was that the expression, getting yourself in trouble? Like it took only one person, like it took only the girl. What kind of a world was this? Eliza wanted to punch the world square in the mouth. Stupid freaking world.
27
BARTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Rob
Rob had been up with the lark—before the lark, even. Now he was driving down Main Street on his way to pick up bagels for the girls, who were sleeping like a couple of suntanned logs. When he’d checked on his daughters and seen how innocent and vulnerable they’d looked sleeping he’d felt a surge of tenderness for them. Zoe had turned off her iPhone before going to sleep, just the way she was supposed to, and Evie was hugging her giant rabbit like it was a life raft and she a noble drowning girl on the brink of rescue. He’d wanted to do something nice for them. Something parently, something like what Eliza might think to do if she were here. All he could come up with was fresh bagels from the shop downtown. Later that morning, he had to go up to Naples to check out the new floor tile that Mrs. Cabot had chosen, and Judith had a hair appointment she’d made months ago and simply couldn’t cancel. He thought he’d ask the girls to stay home alone rather than make the trip. Bagels might help soothe the desertion.
Eliza might not approve of the desertion—they left the girls alone to go out in town, but she still called a sitter when they ventured beyond Barton. But he couldn’t very well ask Deirdre for help; she might get the wrong idea. Besides, the girls would be fine. He’d be very strict. No swimming. Limited screen time. Three chores each that had to be completed before his return. He’d pay Zoe to babysit Evie, and then, because Evie hated the idea of being babysat by her own sister, he’d pay Evie to obey Zoe. But he wouldn’t tell Zoe about the arrangement with Evie. It was the perfect backroom deal, shady and clever. And there would be the bagels.
Eliza, of course, would do the bagels better. She’d know each of the girls’ favorite kinds and whether they liked them toasted and what they liked on them. But Rob didn’t know any of that. To make up for his ignorance he’d get one of every kind, plus two big tubs of cream cheese, one plain, one flavored. Strawberry.
Wait, what if they both liked the same type of bagel, and he was perceived to be playing favorites by getting only one of that kind? He’d better get two in every flavor. Zoe was so sensitive these days.
It was exhausting, being a single parent. And he felt such a constant ache for Eliza; he wished there were more he could do for her, and for Charlie.
He was so occupied and distracted by his deep and bagely thoughts that he blew through the pedestrian crosswalk on Main Street, completely missing the woman and the black Lab waiting to cross. Pretty much every citizen of Barton had a black Lab—it could have been part of the town’s charter—and he hadn’t gotten a close enough look at the woman to see if he knew her or not. She could have been one of Eliza’s friends, who’d recognize Eliza’s car and slide the story into the Barton gossip wheel: Robert Barnes Almost Ran Over My Dog.
He’d better take it easy, or all sorts of things would start getting back to Eliza.
This is how a life went down, it was a fact: one mistake, which might seem innocuous, followed by another, followed by another, until before you knew it you were running down black Labs and their owners in pedestrian crosswalks and kissing your wife’s friends in dive bars. Most likely Bernie Madoff himself had started off with a single ethical failing, something small and relatively harmless. And from there, well, it was easy to slide. The moral slope was so very, very slippery.
Rob continued down Main until a red light stopped him in front of Barton’s Catholic church, St. Matthew’s. Rob had been raised Protestant, sporadically attending Trinity Church in the Back Bay, but as an architect he appreciated a good, simple house of worship. St. Matthew’s was an eighteenth-century New England church, white, center-steepled, a large gold cross above the narthex. Classic. The landscaping was simple and elegant, well cared for, with a mix of annuals and perennials—daylilies, snapdragons, a neat line of coleus—bordered by a low and tasteful stone wall.
Rob loved a good New England stone wall; he loved the history behind them, which he’d learned about in architecture school. First exposed during frost heaves after rapid deforestation, the stones were cleared from farmland during the early, arduous days of New England farming, often dumped on the edges of the farms. After such an unceremonious dumping, there was real artistry behind the eventual rebuilding. Rob admired people who could look at a pile of rubble and see something beautiful. Mo Francis put up a stone wall anywhere his clients would allow him to, and some places they didn’t.
Rob sat for a moment—there were no other cars on the road—thinking about the landscaping at Cabot Lodge. He would suggest that Mrs. Cabot ask the landscaper to include some daylilies; they really would pop against the blue of the lake. Just then, he saw a familiar figure emerge from the side door of the church and hurry toward the parking lot. The figure, a woman, had her head down as though she didn’t want anyone to see her, but even from a little bit of a distance he recognized the set of the narrow shoulders, the legs.