Chapter 4
A group of college-age girls is assembled around the cash register, trying on bracelets.
“He’ll never call,” one of them says, and I want to walk right over there and say he might.
And then he won’t. And then there will be another guy and another guy and someday your roof will be moldy and you won’t even remember his name.
You need that bracelet more than you need that guy, and you don’t even need the bracelet.
“You look a little crazy.” Naomi appears out of nowhere. “And not just the hair.”
“Well, that tracks,” I say. “I just walked into a whole bunch of crazy. Stewart Whitfield wants me to pretend to be his girlfriend.”
Naomi acts decisively. “Girls! I’m so sorry. I think I smell gas? We’re going to have to close for a bit.”
A woman comes out of the dressing room with a bathing suit and a cover-up in her hands. “I just need to pay for this,” she says.
“Take it,” Naomi says, and ushers her out. She shuts the door, bolts it, and turns the sign to Closed. “Start at the beginning. Do you get to have sex with him? I bet they have the nicest sheets. Ohmygod. Sit.”
We sit on the floor between the checkout counter and the bikini rack, and I fidget with all the colorful strings hanging down.
“I don’t think I told you the part about how someone took our photo yesterday while I was changing his tire, but it’s in the New York Post, the gossip page.
He told them I was his girlfriend and he was teaching me to change a tire. ”
“As if.”
“Right? And now he wants me to pretend I am. To make him not seem like a loser. For sixty grand.”
“What? Wait.” Naomi has both hands on her head and seems dangerously close to pulling her hair out. “What did you just say?”
“It’s what I asked for. The roof plus ten, just in case, we haven’t even gotten an estimate yet. And maybe because somewhere, deep down, I’m greedy. I had no idea. It just came out.”
“Ohmygod. This is just. Wow.”
“It is wow for sure,” I say. “I mean, it’s an answered prayer. We can’t lose that house.”
“The house, yes, of course. But you know he’s a great kisser. That mouth.” She pulls out her phone and starts googling images of Stewart. Charity events, the engagement photo, his corporate headshot. She zooms in on his mouth and holds it up to me. “World-class lips.”
“Okay, stop,” I say. This was not something she needed to make me aware of. “This isn’t Pretty Woman.”
“It’s totally Pretty Woman, Dolly. If it was me, I’d milk this for everything it’s worth. I’d order extra steaks to take home and steal all the little soaps in his bathroom. I bet they’re shaped like acorns.”
“You’d be rich with acorn soap,” I say.
“I would be. Acorn-soap rich.” She’s smiling her biggest, most ecstatic smile. “This is so fun.”
“Maybe?” I say. “What’s Gus going to say?”
“Maybe he’ll appreciate the break from you talking about your parking arbitrage scheme all the time.”
I laugh. “This is almost better than that.”
“Almost,” she says with an eye-roll.
“Do you really think this is a good idea? He’s a Whitfield. Yuck.”
“Just because your mother loved them doesn’t mean you have to hate them.”
“Doesn’t it though?” I smile a pained smile. “And honestly this may be nothing. It was the crazed idea of a man in a panic. And I’m sure he’s forgotten about it already,” I say.
My phone beeps with a text, and it’s an unknown number: This is Stewart, confirming I’m serious. I was wondering if you could come by my office to go through your terms. I am free between 2 and 3 pm tomorrow
I hold my phone up to Naomi and she grabs it, falling backward and kicking her legs up in the air. “You have Stewart Whitfield’s number. In your phone.”
I grab my phone back and respond: Do you mean your office at Eight Oaks?
Stewart: Yes
Me: Then no
“No?” Naomi asks, just as Stewart types: No?
Me: That seems fraught
“Fraught?” Naomi says just as Stewart types: Fraught?
They’re clearly on the same page. I say to Naomi, “I don’t want to show up there and deal with a butler and put on a show before I even know what this is.”
She places a hand on each of my knees and looks me straight in the eye.
“Jimmy Sheffield” is all she says. What she means is that she’s going to handle this in the same way she handled my breakup with Jimmy Sheffield the summer after our sophomore year in college: over text and on my behalf.
I texted him in circles without ever getting to the point of actually breaking up until she took over and just did it. I hand her my phone.
Naomi: Can we meet someplace for dinner?
Stewart: Sure how about Le Forêt at 7
Naomi holds the phone one inch from my nose. “Le Forêt! The caviar train just rolled into town, baby!”
“I know everyone on the waitstaff there. Pick someplace easier, like not in Whitfield.”
Naomi lets out a breath and starts typing. She reads a reply and replies to that. She’s enjoying herself a bit too much.
“What?” I ask.
“You’re meeting tonight in Harvey at that little French restaurant by the train station where people go to have affairs.”
“Bistro Belle Vie? Tonight?”
“Yes, it’s dark and kind of sexy. My idea. It’s perfect.”
I read through their texts, and we both stare at my phone for a minute in case there’s more.
There isn’t. We lie on our backs and run our feet up the side of the checkout counter in exactly the same way we used to lie with our legs straight up against the window seat between Patsy’s bed and mine on Goose Lane.
“This is amazing,” she says. “You should have asked for more. A hundred grand.”
“A jillion,” I say. “I should have asked for a jillion dollars.”
“A jillion dollars and a clothing allowance,” she says. “And regular spa days where you sit in a robe and eat ice cream while quiet people rub your feet and everything smells like eucalyptus.”
“Yes, I’ll ask for that.”
“I’d do this for free, just to smell him up close,” says Naomi. “I mean, if I was single,” she says and laughs. Naomi’s husband, Sully, is her high school sweetheart and the literal best, as are their two girls. “Ride around in limos. Eat complicated food and say ‘bespoke’ a lot?”
“You could use ‘summer’ as a verb and care a lot about tennis,” I say.
“Tennis matters so much,” she says. “Also, figurines. Small animals made of crystal that you can hire people to dust. I’d get a flock of them.”
I’m laughing now, and it releases a little bit of my anxiety around all this.
Naomi will go to the edge of absurd with me.
When I told Niles I was pregnant with Gus and he responded by telling me that he didn’t love me, Naomi drove to Boston and sat in bed with me for the entire weekend.
We watched shows about hoarders and people who can’t stop eating their own hair, and she told me how much better off I was than those people.
She called the cable company and had Niles’s cable turned off, just for fun.
She didn’t ask me what I was going to do, she just sat in my bed, managing take-out containers and reminding me what a good job I was doing not eating my own hair.
She also tried to convince me to move back to Whitfield so that I could raise Gus around family.
It made sense on an emotional level, but practically I didn’t want to walk away from the four years I’d already put into my pension.
We argued about my choosing financial security over the support of the people who love me.
I didn’t feel like I needed help as much as I needed money.
“This is the summer Dolly Brick travels by yacht,” she says, wistful. She takes my hand. “Promise me you’ll go out on one of those yachts and take a selfie of your carelessly sunburned cheeks. Promise me.”
“I promise I’ll try.”
“And I want a photo of the two of you at opposite ends of that twenty-four-person dining table,” she says.
“One of the servants can take it,” I say to the popcorn ceiling.
“His name is Jeeves, which is why he took the job.”
“He had no choice,” I say.