Chapter 2
CORA
Nobody will eat the chocolate chip pancakes, but they complete the breakfast table.
If I take the yolks out of the egg bake, then it will make up for pancake calories.
Nobody will drink the orange juice either, but it looks nice in tiny glass cups next to the coffee, and it’s Sunday, damn it, so everything should look nice, even if it’s just the three of us and I’m the only one who cares.
It’s the same thing as making your bed in the morning.
You don’t leave it messy like a slob just because it will only get used again that night.
You make it so when you pass by the room, everything looks tidy and put together and right.
When Mia trudges into the kitchen wearing flannel pajama pants, she grabs a piece of toast and keeps walking toward the door.
“Where are you going?” I ask. I didn’t expect fanfare over the breakfast spread, but maybe at least a Good morning.
“Sasha’s.”
“In that?” I ask, and she looks down at her pajamas but clearly doesn’t see a problem. “Yeah. Can I take the car?”
“It’s Sunday,” I say, trying to keep the annoyance out of my voice. She knows that’s the unspoken rule that even if we miss meals during the week, with Finn’s late nights and her volleyball practices, on Sundays we make time. Mia looks past me to the table.
“Oh, but you’re doing Weight Watchers again, I thought,” she says, matter-of-factly. She’s not trying to be hurtful. I am doing the program again, but explaining that you still actually eat meals on it seems pointless. She eyes the stack of chocolate chip pancakes and goes to take one off the top.
I hand her the car keys. It’s good to see her getting out of the house and seeing friends, if I’m honest. She’s been moping for months since her breakup with Josh or John or whatever his name was.
How she can date the guy for too little a time span for me to recall his name but can cry over him for an eternity is beyond me.
“You can have the car, but help me with something.”
“What?” she says, hand on one hip, ready to be inconvenienced by whatever it is I have to ask.
“There’s that charity dinner next week. It’s at Paige and Grant’s restaurant in town. Come down and help me with the silent auction or serve tables or something.”
“Ugh” is all I get from her.
“I’ll take that as a yes. Be home by dinner. We’re eating at the table.”
When she’s gone, I catch a quick look at my reflection in the sliding glass door that leads to the deck.
Before I can scrutinize whether Weight Watchers is working, I see past my image and into the backyard of the elusive Georgia Kinney, who is as rare a sight as a snow leopard in the wild.
I run out to the edge of the deck and open the camera on my phone, zooming in, to get as close a view as I can.
She’s lifting her baby into a swing, the plastic kind with the foot holes and safety bar.
She pushes her, mindlessly. She doesn’t coo at her, and she doesn’t scroll on her phone, ignoring her, either. She just stares off, absently.
If I were that freaking gorgeous, I’d be thrilled all the time.
I’d live in strappy tops without worrying my back fat would squish through them like a tube of biscuits you whack against the counter to split open.
I’d wear my sunshine-colored hair loose down my back and never expose my porcelain skin to the sun, not once.
Granted, she is a good fifteen years younger than me, and her husband for that matter—the youngest mom in the neighborhood, I think.
She’s in her mid-twenties, it looks like.
It might be pathetic, but I don’t get why she doesn’t want to make friends with any of us.
I mean, it’s a little snotty. Finn hung out with her husband, Lucas, a couple times, so I know she’s from England.
Maybe she thinks she’s better than us if she’s English, and she probably is, calling gasoline petrol, and a cell phone a mobile: they always sound so fancy.
But they have been living across the street over a year now, and she hasn’t even said more than a quick hello.
She didn’t even write a thank-you note for the mascarpone pound cake I dropped off when they moved in.
It won a prize at the state fair, for God’s sake.
She could have at least returned the plate.
Still, she looks so glamorous, and her husband’s a judge, and I will win her over.
“Are you spying on them?” Finn asks, and I jump and clutch my chest. I whip around to see him standing in the open doorframe, smirking at me.
“No! Of course not.” I push past him and shut the door, a little annoyed at the interruption.
“Then, what were you doing?” he asks, amused.
“Finn,” I say firmly as if that’s an answer to his question. I click the lid down on the Keurig and listen to it sputter and drip.
“Look at all this,” he says, sitting at the table and filling his plate with egg casserole. I place his coffee in front of him and sit, serving myself a pancake.
“I thought you were doing the Weight Watchers thing again.”
I clench my jaw and look at the ceiling, then exhale loudly in annoyance.
“Sorry,” he says, flashing his palms in defense. I decide to change the subject so we don’t start the day with tension.
“It’s just that I find it off-putting that they’re so antisocial.
The O’Briens lived there eleven years before the Kinneys moved in, and they were over all the time.
It feels—I don’t know—uncomfortable that they can’t be normal.
I like to know my neighbors. We should all be friends, look out for each other. ”
“He seems normal,” Finn says. “Well, we only had a beer a couple times, but he seems okay. I think she’s a—whatchamacallit—a wallflower.”
“What?” I laugh.
“She has that phobia where she’s afraid to leave the house, I think,” he says.
“Agoraphobia?” I suggest.
“That sounds right,” he says, buttering a piece of toast.
“Um. Wait, wait, wait. Are you kidding? He actually told you that?”
“Yeah. Well, I don’t think he used that word, no, but something like that,” he says, and I smack his arm a few times.
“Why would you not tell me that! Are you serious? Tell me exactly what he said.”
“Jeez, Cora. I don’t know. She had some trauma happen, and now she has to be within, like, spitting distance of her house or she freaks out and panics.” He eats his triangle of toast in two bites, opens his phone, and starts scrolling.
“Finn, oh, my God. That’s—He told you this, and you didn’t tell me?”
“We were having beers. I forgot. I’m not the one obsessed with her, so it didn’t seem like headline news I had to rush and tell you,” he says.
“And he just opened up and told you this out of the blue?”
“Uh...no, I don’t know. I think I suggested they come over or you two get together, and that was the reason she couldn’t.”
“Oh. My. God,” I say, picking up my phone.
“Cor, don’t.” He stops me.
“What?”
“Don’t tell Paige. Just—”
“I’m not,” I lie and put my phone back down. “At least it’s a good reason. I just thought she was a bitch.”
“Maybe she is. She could be an agoraphobic bitch. Why do you care so much?” he asks.
“Are you gonna hang out with Lucas again? Our house is within ‘spitting distance’ of hers, right? Maybe she’d be comfortable coming here. Maybe it’s in the comfort zone, y’know?”
“I don’t know how it works, but he didn’t make it sound like that was an option.”
“Just—do you have plans with him again?”
“We mentioned golf in a couple weeks. The club is having an amateur tournament. I said he should come.”
“Oooh. When is it? I could invite her over. It would be a way to start the conversation. ‘Since the guys are abandoning us for golf, you should come over for a glass of wine’ sort of thing. Perfect. When, when, when?” I push, and he shrugs, mumbling through a mouthful of food that he’s not sure.
“Can you check?” I ask.
“Now?” He looks at me with a mix of amusement and annoyance.
“Yes, please.”
“You’re obsessed,” he says but places his napkin on his now-empty plate and goes to grab his day planner.
He’s the sort who needs to write everything down in neat, blocky ink letters into a physical datebook, says his phone can be unreliable and a successful man always has a backup.
He comes back and sits down again, sipping his coffee and paging through it.
“The thing at the club is on the nineteenth. But, Cor, maybe take a hint if she doesn’t wanna be buddies.”
“Um, for your information,” I say, “she would be very lucky to know me. I still know every teacher at the elementary school, my book club has a waiting list, and I can tell her who all the good parents are in the neighborhood and which ones to avoid—”
“I think she wants to avoid all of them, right?” he interrupts. I look at him a moment, then stand and start to clear the table.
“You know what your problem is?” I ask.
“I do not. Please, do tell.” He smirks, but I’m getting genuinely annoyed with him.
“You give up too easy when things get...challenging,” I say.
“Since when do you think that?” he says, but he’s only half listening. He’s back looking at work emails on his phone. He’s not someone easily rattled.
“Since, I don’t know, always.”
“Example?” he asks, looking at me now.
“You want an example?”
“I would like an example, yes.” He crosses one leg over the other and folds his arms, amused, but also challenging me to come up with something. I stop scraping plates into the disposal and give him my full attention.
“The dog we got that you returned after he peed in the house a few times,” I say.
“It was a foster dog for a reason. You see if it’s a good fit. And there was more than peeing, he was—”
“Fine. The basketball team you joined at the Y and quit after your first practice.”
“I don’t need a concussion, Cor.”
“Okay,” I say. “Spanish lessons, tennis lessons, building the shed in the backyard, the downstairs bathroom reno—”
“Okay.” He stops me, and I stop rattling off my list, although I could have gone on. I wanted to end my list with and us. You gave up on us when you did what you did, but he still denies it, and I pretend to believe him.
“Fine, you wanna stalk Georgia Kinney from across the street, enjoy yourself. I’ll stay out of it.”
“Thank you.” I smile. “It’s not stalking, it’s called making an effort.” But my smile quickly fades when I put down my tea towel and walk over to kiss the back of his head. I see what’s written in his planner for tonight: Drinks with C.
He said he’d be out tonight because Benny Waller was retiring and everyone from the office was getting together for a send-off.
I asked him why on a Sunday, and he said that’s just how it worked out for everyone’s schedule.
And then he went on to say it’s weird that going out on a Sunday seems odd but not a Thursday.
You still have to get up for work the next day. I let it go.
Who is C? It’s not Cora because I wasn’t invited, of course. Carrie, Cheryl, Claire, Chloe. Do I know anyone with a C name? One of his assistants is Celine, I think. Or Chelsea? I feel my face flush and heat prick up my spine.
“You okay?” Finn asks, picking up his coffee, about to head up to his office.
“Fine,” I say, and he smiles and heads upstairs.
I can’t do this to myself. C is probably for coworkers.
Yes. It’s probably colleagues. Yes, yes.
It’s a weird way to write it, though; it seems like a name.
Short for Drinks with Connie or something, right?
It’s weird. Wouldn’t he write Work party or Benny’s retirement? It doesn’t sound right.
If I knew where the event was, I would go and find out myself, but he’s careful not to tell me these details anymore after I showed up that time and humiliated him, causing irrevocable damage to his reputation.
I can’t ask either. I won’t ask because we cannot go back down the road we were on a couple years ago.
I almost ruined everything once, accusing him, and I was wrong.
I was obsessed with catching him. Maybe that was a dig just now, when he said I was obsessed with Georgia.
It almost ended us the last time I started thinking like this.
I take a deep breath. It’s nothing. I stare at his planner on the table.
I won’t open it. I take a step closer, though.
I think maybe I could open it quickly. I sit at his place at the table and stare down at it.
I lift my hand tentatively...and just then Finn appears out of nowhere.
“Jesus!” I clutch my heart.
“Whoa,” he laughs and picks the planner up off the table. “Sure you’re okay, Cor?”
“Fine. Great. You just scared the shit out of me,” I say, and he heads back to the stairs. Did he just come to get that so I wouldn’t see it?
“Hey,” I call to his back. He turns.
“I was thinking dinner out tonight. What do you think?”
“Oh, I’m out tonight. I thought I told you,” he says.
“Oh, maybe I forgot. What do you have, again?”
“A thing with the office. Birthday drinks.”
“Ah, right. You probably told me,” I say, and he disappears up the stairs. I sit at the kitchen table. My ears are hot, and my hands shake. He’s lying to me. He forgot to be consistent. It’s a retirement party, Finn, you bastard, not a birthday party. It’s happening again. Who the fuck is C?