Chapter 8
Saylor
After dinner, Celeste, who had been debating, decided she didn’t want to drive back to the city after all.
She offered to get Raven a room at a nice hotel, but Raven insisted on driving back to Jersey City before dark settled.
Celeste bit back her concern, but I saw the space between her eyes crinkle in anguish.
Already, she feels protective over this baby. Now, her baby.
Actually, that’s a slight exaggeration. It was two calls.
The first was to her assistant to carry out said task, and when that flopped, Celeste called her contact personally.
Judging by the way Celeste’s nostrils are flaring as she tries to keep calm, her assistant, Margot, needs to be very concerned about her job.
According to Celeste, Margot is getting a six-figure annual salary to consistently drop the ball.
She’s always leaving work early for mental health reasons and even tried to use petty cash for her weekly mani-pedi.
Margot has set very clear boundaries about her work-life balance which apparently is a ninety-ten split the wrong way.
Look, if you’re making six figures to be someone’s right hand, sometimes that hand needs to answer the phone on a Saturday when your boss’s life is imploding.
That’s the job you signed up for. That’s what the extra zero in your paycheck is for.
“Thank you, Dianne. You are so very kind. Please don’t worry about dinner service, we already ate… No need for champagne… Yes, I attended the service, thank you for asking… Flat water is perfectly fine.”
I can only hear Celeste’s part of the conversation, but whoever is on the other end is asking enough questions to renew a passport.
She ends the call and types an address into the GPS which instantly demands I make a U-turn.
We drive in silence for a bit. Through the car window, the Hamptons blur into a mirage of manicured hedges and mansions that probably have names instead of addresses.
I try to enjoy the scenery, but eventually the silence between us stretches thin, pressing against my chest like the last seconds before breaking the surface after diving too deep.
“So, Tidewater House?” I glance at the GPS.
“For privacy. It’s highly unlikely any of the funeral guests are staying there. You’d need a reservation months in advance.”
“How’d we get in with such late notice?”
She bites the inside of her cheek until a small hollow appears beneath her carefully applied blush. “In my world, making a call means pulling a favor. The inn owner’s daughter is an up-and-coming runway model. I might’ve hired for a few shows in exchange for—”
“A room that’s always ready for you.”
Celeste turns her head, looking out the window. “Saylor, can I ask you an honest question? Don’t spare my feelings.”
“This feels like a trap, but I’ll bite. Please continue.”
“I don’t really come off maternal, do I?”
“Sorry?” I steal a glance away from the road to study her face. Nothing there to read. Just the perfect profile of a woman lost in a thought beyond the glass. “What is maternal to you?”
She pauses. “That’s the thing. I don’t really know.
Whit and I were both raised by parents that saw us as investments.
With all the money in the world, they sent us to the best private schools, we had name-brand clothes, got brand-new cars on our sixteenth birthdays.
But none of that felt…warm. And every generous thing they did for us was laced with expectations.
We were dividends yet to be paid out. That’s not the kind of mom Whit wanted to be.
That’s not the kind of mother I want to be.
But how can I be something I’ve never known? ”
The question hangs in the car like smoke from a fire neither of us started but both of us feel responsible for putting out. It’s not the kind of fire you smother right away—the kind you watch to see how long it glows.
I think about Mum. About the way she’d pack my school lunches with little notes folded into the napkin—not inspirational quotes or anything precious, just simple observations.
Thank you for feeding Red this morning. You’re so responsible, Saylor.
I’m proud of you. Thought you should know.
Or: You are so loved, my sweet boy. I’ll have cookies waiting when you come home.
I’d unfold these in the cafeteria and roll my eyes because I was twelve and resisting all forms of affection from your mother was the entire job description.
But the memory has lingered this whole time.
It planted something deep in the chasms of nostalgia, and all these little seeds was my mum planting a happy childhood.
I never felt lonely or lost, even without my dad around. She was my everything.
“You didn’t have to come to this, Celeste,” I say. “Who could possibly hold you accountable?”
“Me.” She turns to look at me. “Of course I had to come. Of course I had to be here. She was my closest friend.”
“Sure, but nobody at the funeral would judge you. You don’t speak to someone for two years, space is natural. Sometimes you can’t go back.”
She’s still not looking at me, but I register her jostling her head in disagreement. “I didn’t do it for the people at the funeral. I did it for Whit. Because I loved her. Love her.”
“I figure that’s motherhood. Loving someone past your own comfort. Showing up even if you’re not sure they’ll see you. Doing the right thing, even if it matters to no one but you and your kid. All the puzzle pieces are there, Celeste. You’re going to make a wonderful mother.”
I can feel her gaze on me now. “Are you sure?”
I keep my eyes on the road because if I look at her right now, I’ll lose the thread.
“Definitely. Maternal isn’t some gene you’re born with.
It’s not a personality type. It’s the willingness to carry something that matters more than you do and try your best even when you’re terrified. You’ve been doing that all day.”
The silence that follows is different from the one before. Warmer. Less pressure. Like the surface broke and we’re both breathing now.
“Whitney used to say I’d be a great mother if I could get out of my own way,” Celeste says quietly. “I told her that was a big ‘if.’”
“Sounds like Whitney knew you better than you know yourself.”
“That was kind of her gift. She’d hold up a mirror and you’d see yourself the way she saw you—which was always more generous than the version you were carrying around.
” Celeste’s voice has the particular quality of someone talking to a memory instead of a person.
Soft at the edges. Present tense slipping into past. “She made people realize themselves.”
Tidewater House rises through the trees like something out of a catalog that Celeste’s company would shoot—stone and cedar, tasteful landscaping, the kind of lighting designed to make you exhale the moment you step out of the car.
The GPS announces our arrival. Once we’re parked, I grab my bag and Celeste’s, refusing her help like the dutiful pack-mule that I am.
The lobby smells like cedarwood and white tea and money that’s been around long enough to stop being loud about it.
A woman at the front desk greets Celeste by name—well, Ms. Prescott, which earns her a pointed look before Celeste clarifies it’s Brinley—and walks us to the suite personally, narrating the amenities like she’s guiding us through a small museum.
The complimentary robe closet. The espresso machine.
The fact that turndown service includes lavender on the pillow, as if the pillow needed a personality.
The suite is absurd.
Not gaudy absurd. Square-footage absurd.
A living room with a sectional that could seat a football team.
A bedroom through French doors with a king bed that looks like a cloud applied for a job in furniture.
A bathroom with a freestanding tub and one of those rain shower heads that makes you feel like you’re being gently baptized.
A kitchenette with a marble countertop and a fresh-fruit bowl which will probably only ever be decoration.
What a waste. I’m eating that papaya before we go.
There’s a balcony overlooking the ocean. The waves are invisible in the dark but I can hear them—steady and stolid, like the sound of the world breathing.
“This is…” I turn a full circle. “More square footage than my apartment, and all of the apartments on my floor. Combined.”
Celeste surveys the suite with the flat appraisal of someone who exists in spaces like this regularly. “It’ll do.” She winks at me. “The couch pulls out into a queen-size. There are extra blankets in the closet if you get chilly.”
I point through the French doors. “Want me to check the closet for monsters first?”
“Cute.”
She snags her luggage from where I set it down and disappears into the bathroom.
The door clicks shut and a moment later I hear the shower start, and beneath the sound of expensive plumbing and old stone walls, the muffled cadence of someone letting the day out in the only private space she has left.
I don’t go to the door. I don’t call out.
Instead, I sit on the sectional and pull out my phone.
Me
Hey. Weekend went well. Long story. How are you feeling?
Mum responds before I’ve set the phone down.
She’s always near it—her portal to the world beyond the apartment that has the nerve to trap her in her home by three flights of daunting, concrete stairs.
I wonder if she’s needing anything right now and refusing to ask for it.
Refusing to bother anyone or take up the space she rightfully deserves.
Mum
I’m fine, love. Callie stopped by for stretches. We watched a cooking show after. How was the event?
Me
You know. Work. Met some interesting people.
Mum
Interesting people or interesting person? Unrelated, I’d love to be a grandmother before I die.