“How was the meeting?” he asks.
She hears the boys happily roughhousing out in the hallway.
“Fine,” she says.
Patrick leans farther in and kisses nearly the exact spot by Jennifer’s ear that Coke bit. Jennifer tries not to cringe. She likes to tell Patrick everything—or nearly everything—but she knows there is no way to share this story without ruining the night and creating a scene. It will be beyond a scene, as two issues are at stake: Jennifer’s honor, for one, and the lost money, for another. Jennifer can easily imagine Patrick deciding to walk over to Millennium Tower with a baseball bat, prepared to threaten Grayson Coker. And what if Jennifer takes partial responsibility? What if she shows Patrick what she was wearing?
“I Googled the guy,” Patrick says. “He’s the sixth-richest man in Boston.”
“I’m not sure it’s the right project for me,” Jennifer says.
“I thought we went over this,” Patrick says. “If you don’t stretch, you won’t grow. It’ll be good for you to try something different.”
Jennifer can’t find the words to refute him, and so she hugs Patrick close and nods against his chest. She’s going to have to tell him the job is gone, but she won’t do it tonight.
“I’m going downstairs,” she says. “I need to make the lunches.”
The next morning, despite a slight hangover from the scotch, Jennifer decides to meet Leanne at barre class. She needs to pulse out her anxiety. She thinks she might even tell Leanne what happened with Grayson Coker and ask her advice about how to handle it with Patrick. What Jennifer needs is a friend, a confidante.
What she needs, she thinks, is an Ativan.
She’s crossing the Public Garden when her phone pings. She gets a funny feeling and thinks: It’s Grayson Coker, apologizing. But when she sees the alert, she stops in her tracks.
It’s a text from Norah Vale.
It’s as if Norah Vale has read her mind or sensed that this morning of all mornings is when Jennifer is at her most vulnerable.
Jennifer plops down on the nearest park bench. She should delete the text without reading it, she thinks. Because what could it possibly say?
Well, Jennifer reasons, it doesn’t automatically have to be about drugs. Jennifer hasn’t seen or heard from Norah since the previous Christmas, when Norah kindly switched ferry tickets with Jennifer so that Jennifer, Paddy, and the boys could get to Nantucket in time for Kevin’s wedding. Kevin’s second wedding—because Kevin’s first wedding had been to Norah herself. Norah Vale should have been the last person to offer to help, but she did so anyway.
Curiosity gets the best of Jennifer. She opens the text. It says: Something I want to talk to u about. Will u be on Nantucket anytime soon?
Jennifer freezes and scans her surroundings, as though she’s worried Norah is somewhere in the Public Garden watching her.
Something I want to talk to u about.
Wait! Jennifer thinks. Norah asked her for a letter of recommendation last year because she was applying to business school. So maybe Norah wants to use Jennifer’s interior decorating business as one of her case studies. There’s no reason why Jennifer should automatically assume the worst. Norah is a person who has made authentic changes in her life.
Will u be on Nantucket anytime soon?
This seems odd, right? Because if Norah merely wanted to talk, they could do so over the phone. Very few topics require an in-person conversation… unless it’s something too sensitive for the phone.
Such as the pills.
Jennifer’s legs are shaky when she stands up. She needs to get a grip; she needs to get to barre class. She needs to put her eyes on Leanne’s placid face and hear about Leanne and Derek’s latest heavenly dinner at Giulia.
As Jennifer walks down the footpath in the middle of Comm. Ave., she realizes that she will be on Nantucket soon—next week, for Bart’s birthday party. It’s on a Tuesday and therefore wildly inconvenient, but Patrick’s former secretary, Alyssa, volunteered to stay overnight with the boys and even take Pierce and Jaime trick-or-treating. Both Jennifer and Patrick realize how important it is to Mitzi that they attend.
Has Norah somehow found out about the party? Is this text just her angling for an invite? Jennifer knows that Norah harbors some regret about no longer being a part of the Quinn family. Jennifer doesn’t think she longs for Kevin, exactly; it’s more that she wants to be included in—or perhaps forgiven by—the larger family.
As Jennifer turns left onto Clarendon, she sees Leanne waiting for her outside the barre studio, and her anxiety diminishes just a little. Jennifer waves.
Be present, she tells herself. She will think about Grayson Coker and Norah Vale later.
AVA
She stands at the entrance of the Museum of Natural History at five minutes to eleven, waiting for Potter and PJ to emerge from the subway. Potter called the night before, saying that PJ had fallen asleep in the taxi. “I think his overreaction was due to exhaustion,” Potter said. “It’s harder to fly east than fly west.”
“Is it?” Ava said.
“Jet lag is a real thing!” Potter said defensively.
Potter’s plan today was to let PJ sleep in, then take him for a big breakfast at Tom’s Restaurant, and then they would fulfill PJ’s fervent wish to ride the subway. PJ’s enthusiasm to ride the subway has been fueled in part by Potter’s ex-wife, Trish, who said that under no circumstances was PJ to ride the subway.
Ava takes a deep breath of crisp October air. They will spend the afternoon at the museum, capping off their visit with the Hayden Planetarium, and then they will go for a late lunch. There’s a great banh mi shop down the street, or if PJ is amenable, they can sit outside at Cafe Luxembourg, where Ava and Potter can split a bottle of Sancerre and PJ can eat frites out of a paper cone.
And then tonight… what will they do tonight? An IMAX movie? A trip to the top of the Empire State Building? The ghost tour of Greenwich Village? The possibilities are endless.
Ava loves New York!
Ava’s reverie is disrupted by the sight of Potter’s head. They are so connected that Ava sometimes feels his presence before she actually sees him. A few seconds later PJ appears. Potter has PJ by one hand, but in PJ’s other hand is a device that has captured his attention. At least he’s not resisting, shrieking, or throwing a tantrum.
Ava waves to Potter, and he waves back and cuts a diagonal across the street, pulling PJ along.
“Hey there,” Potter says. His demeanor is unruffled. Ava decides to proceed as though last night never happened.
“Hey there yourself,” Ava says. She refrains from kissing Potter in front of PJ, although it’s difficult. Tread lightly, she thinks. They can act as though they’re friends who have randomly met up on the street. “Hey there, PJ. I’m Ava.”
PJ doesn’t respond. He doesn’t even look up. He’s absorbed in his game. He’s playing it on an iPhone 7, which is a nicer phone than either Ava or Potter has. Where did he get it? Does it belong to Trish? Certainly it’s not his—he’s only seven years old.
“Put the phone down, buddy, and say hello to Ava,” Potter says.
PJ doesn’t respond. His fingers are skating across the screen.
“What game are you playing?” Ava asks.
PJ doesn’t answer.
“Minecraft,” Potter says.
Ah, Minecraft. Ava has long listened to the people she knows with children complain about Minecraft. Apparently, it’s the bane of every parent’s existence. Even Ava’s sister-in-law Jennifer complains about it. But now Ava wishes she had been paying closer attention about what Minecraft is exactly. If she knew the details, she might be able to bond with PJ over the mines or the crafts.
“Shall we go in?” Ava asks. She leads the way through the entrance and waits while Potter gets tickets for the three of them, then they glide into the museum.
Ava hasn’t set foot in this museum since she was a child herself, but all the memories come rushing back. She recalls school field trips—brown bag lunches, the buddy system, worksheets to fill out in each wing—as well as the rainy weekends after Ava’s parents split. Ava and Patrick and Kevin used to spend the week with Margaret in the brownstone on East Eighty-Eighth Street, and the weekends with Kelley in his sleek, new high-rise down in the financial district. Kelley was a lost soul in those days. Ava wasn’t old enough to understand it then, though it’s clear to her now. Kelley’s brother, Avery, was dying of AIDS down in Greenwich Village, and so Kelley was adamant about spending his weekends with the kids uptown. Patrick and Kevin were teenagers, so they had friends and sports to use as excuses to escape the sad, desperate weekends with Kelley. But Ava was stuck. In clement weather she and Kelley went to Central Park, where they watched the roller skaters or threw stones in the Lake. When it was cold or raining, they came here.