“I know you’re nervous about our houseguest, and she rattled you with that Elizabeth bullshit on her voice mail message,” he said as he crouched down to tie the laces of his boot. “But trust me, she’s not going to inspect the shower grout.”
“Yeah, right, Caroline would never do that,” she said. Then you don’t know Caroline.
Betsy had been in New York for seven years before she heard from Caroline. She had called Betsy’s mom to get her phone number, and when she played and replayed Caroline’s voice mail, it became clear that Kathy had informed Caroline of her professional name change.
“Why hello there, Elizabeth, sophisticated woman in New York. It’s Caroline.” Betsy stood dumbstruck, holding the receiver as the voice registered in her ear. “I’m looking for my friend Betsy. Perhaps you remember her? One time, we wore fake grass skirts and bikinis to a luau-themed fraternity party in January. Of course, you would never do something like that, Elizabeth. If you see Betsy, tell her to give me a call. I’m coming to New York, or The City, as I’m sure you call it now. I’ll be there next Friday.”
Betsy wrote her number, with a Miami area code, on the palm of her hand and then replayed the message three times. They exchanged a couple more messages and finally connected by email. Caroline’s writing style had always been terse, stingy with details, and in this medium especially, it came off as especially cold. The gist of it was that Caroline was now a real estate agent in Miami, working with her mother.
Betsy had seen Caroline only once since she left Gainesville, at Teddy’s wedding in 1996. He married Melanie, a serious and quiet sorority sister whom Betsy couldn’t remember, even after she saw her photo. As the best man, Gavin flew down to Palm Beach on Thursday and the plan was for Betsy to meet him there Saturday morning. She claimed that she couldn’t get the time off of work, but the truth was that she was crippled with anxiety about the wedding, knowing how many ghosts would be lurking there, all of those uncomfortable blasts from the past. Betsy bought her ticket using her coworker Shana’s ninety-nine-dollar Delta flight coupon from Amex, and then had a fake I.D. made in some back alley on the Lower East Side with her name on it in case anyone checked, which they didn’t. She didn’t want to spend money she didn’t have on cab fare, so she took a bus to LaGuardia and missed her flight, despite the fact that an airline employee threw her garment bag over his shoulder and sprinted through the airport with her to the gate. She sat waiting for the next flight to Palm Beach International, listening for them to call her alias when they found her a seat. Six hours later, she was changing into a black thrift store cocktail dress in the ladies’ room at the airport. She hailed a cab and made it in time to snag the last remaining place card at the Everglades Club. She ordered a martini, dirty but dry with three olives, at the bar, and wove her way to her seat through the maze of tables just in time to hear Gavin’s speech. She scanned the crowd of four hundred faces in the dimly lit ballroom looking for Caroline. Word had traveled fast about Caroline’s first job out of school as a pharmaceutical sales rep. She’d aced the recruitment process, beating out hundreds of other recent graduates from Southeastern Conference schools like Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana State that churned out pretty, well-spoken girls with big smiles who could sell Lipitor with their eyes closed. It was a coveted job with a decent starting salary, plus commission, in a part of the world where the average resident—median age in Coral Gables, sixty-two—choked down six prescriptions a day.
“Teddy’s a man of unwavering loyalty,” said Gavin from the stage, with a barely perceptible slur of his words, collar unbuttoned, holding a microphone in front of the twenty-piece big band onstage. “Once he commits to something, whether it’s the sartorial style of the mid-1980s, or the unbearable music of the, ahem, Grateful Dead, if Teddy decides to love something, he will love it a lot, and he will love it forever. So Melanie, you poor thing, it looks like you’re stuck with this guy for life.”
A wave of “Awwww”s rippled through the crowd. Betsy felt someone’s breath on the back of her neck and a shock ran down her spine.