19. Chapter Nineteen
Stanley
Aspen follows me out into the hallway, and when I turn to look at her, she’s hesitating.
“You walk like a woman headed to her own funeral,” I say as laughter echoes through the hall. Her house is a mansion, so we’re far from the crowd up here.
“I’m fine,” she replies.
She’s not fine. She was in her bedroom for over an hour. “It looks like you’re in a hostage situation. Could you at least pretend to like me?”
“I am pretending.”
I watch her and wonder if she’s going to blow the whole cover. Would it be so bad if she did?
She breathes in through her nose, and it doesn’t fix her face, but it’s a start.
“I’ll be better after wine,” she says.
“How much wine are we talking?”
“I don’t see how that’s—”
“Strategically, I need a number. For planning.”
“At least two glasses. Maybe four.”
“Maybe four,” I repeat, not taking her for much of a drinker. Four is going to knock her out for the night.
We keep walking, and this time I’m following her.
“Smile and pretend that you like me. Otherwise, our parents will think we’re fighting. They probably already suspect it since you were upstairs for so long.”
“I avoided over an hour of the day. I call that winning.”
I follow her down the steps.
The bottom of the staircase opens onto the foyer, and the foyer opens onto everything else. The volume of the house has increased by half since we went up. There’s music through speakers, and the smell of the brisket has made it all the way to the front door.
Aspen lands on the bottom step a stride ahead of me, and her shoulders immediately drop. She turns left into the living room, and she’s already smiling at someone before she’s fully through the doorway. I stop on the last step and watch a woman become herself in real time.
I don’t follow her in. I stand there and watch.
“There she is. Look at this girl. Come here.” A small, sharp-eyed woman in a wool dress and pearls brings Aspen into a hug, and Aspen falls right into it.
“Where’ve you been all morning?”
“In the air.”
“Don’t lie to me. You’ve been in this house two hours.”
“In my room.”
“Mm.” The aunt’s eyes come up and land on me. “Stanley?”
Aspen turns, looks for me, and finds me on the bottom step where I’ve been standing.
“Aunt Lisa. This is Stanley.”
The aunt gives me the head-to-toe that a woman her age gives a man she’s been warned about. She doesn’t say a word to me. She says it to Aspen.
“He’ll do.”
“Aunt Lisa,” Aspen scoffs, keeping eye contact with me like she’s sorry.
“He’ll do, sweetheart. Get your father to pour him a real drink. He looks parched.” And she’s gone, off toward the kitchen, verdict entered into the record.
Aspen turns back to me with the smallest mouth-corner lift on the planet. “Welcome to the family.”
“I was seen, judged, and processed in under fifteen seconds.”
“She liked you.”
“Stan.” My dad is already waving me over with a bourbon in his hand. “Get over here, son, come meet—”
“Coming, Dad.”
I look at her. For the first time since the staircase, she holds my eyes a full second.
“Go,” she says. “I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
“They flew in for you. Go.”
She turns and walks toward Beth, who’s just come out of the kitchen with a fresh glass of white wine, and she doesn’t look back at me.
I watch her go.
Then I walk over to my father. He’s got an arm around an older man I’ve never met — blazer, gray hair, a beer in his hand, and the exact look every adult in this house has been aiming at me since the driveway.
“Stan. Dr. Tremblay. He and I were at Cornell together.”
“Sir.”
“Robert’s been telling me about your year.”
“He oversells, sir.”
“He undersells. He undersells everything except you.”
My dad laughs — the laugh he uses when somebody’s being kind to me, and he’s accepting it on my behalf. My mother arrives at my other elbow with a small plate. Three crackers and a piece of cheese cut into a rectangle.
“Carolyn doesn’t sit anyone down before two-thirty. It’s just a snack.”
I take the cracker and eat it.
“Margaret. Did Stan hear what we’re getting out of Detroit?”
“Robert.”
“What? He should know.”
“The boy just walked in the door. Eat your own cheese.”
The men laugh. My mother laughs too. She hands me the second cracker.
My dad sets a hand on the back of my neck. “Stay a minute, Stan. Tremblay wants to hear about the kid from Western.”
I don’t want to talk about the kid from Western. I want to be in sightline of my fake girlfriend, who is somewhere across the foyer, talking to a woman holding a white wine.
But I talk about the kid from Western anyway.
By the time my dad turns me loose, I’m eight minutes into a conversation I never planned to be eight minutes into, and I’ve stopped pretending I’m not watching her.
She’s moved in those eight minutes — Beth, then a woman I don’t know, then back to Aunt Lisa, then a pass through the kitchen where she leaned on the counter and traded three sentences with her mother, then two to her father’s assistants by the window.
And in every one of those conversations, she’s the version of her I didn’t have access to this time yesterday.
She laughs once. I catch it from across the room — head back a quarter-inch, hand coming up to her own collarbone the way a woman’s hand comes up when something’s landed.
She doesn’t look at me.
Not at eight minutes. Not at ten. Not at twelve.
She doesn’t need me here. This would be happening all without me if it weren’t for Gavin Carroll.
As I watch her, I start to understand something.
Every room I have ever stood in with this girl, she’s been on enemy ice.
That quiet, contained, watching thing she does, that’s a woman holding a position she has to defend.
This version of her is at her comfort level.
I’m across the room watching it happen, and I wouldn’t interrupt it if I could.
“Stan.”
My mom.
“Yeah, Mom.”
She looks at me. Then she follows my eyes across the room, finds Aspen with the two assistants at the window, and she starts talking about something at home. I’m only half-listening.
Aspen doesn’t have a drink. I’ve caught it three separate times now. She set her glass down somewhere on the way to Beth and never picked another one up, and she’s fifteen minutes into this thing with her hands empty.
My mom has finally ended her story, so I say, “Excuse me a second.”
My parents look at me.
I say, “I’m going to get Aspen a drink.”
My dad blinks, looks across the room, and nods.
I go. I don’t cut through her circle. I don’t get her attention. I’m a man on an errand.
There’s a man at the bar I don’t know — mid-fifties, gray jacket, built like a refrigerator, pouring himself a fresh red. He looks up.
“Ermington.”
“Sir.”
“Stanley Ermington. Briggs.”
I know who Briggs is. He runs a Hartford program one rung below the league Coach runs, and he’s put six kids up the ladder in four years.
“Heard a lot about you. Forty-one in fifteen. Plus-seventeen. Corsi over sixty at five-on-five.” He levels a look at me. “You read your own analytics?”
“I read them, sir. My girlfriend wrote them.”
Briggs, who has not smiled once, smiles.
“Bart’s girl?”
“Yes, sir. Smarter than me by a distance.”
“Mm.” He pours a glass of red and holds it out without asking which one I want. “For her?”
“For her, sir.”
“Good answer.” He pours me a water into the other hand without asking either, because he’s been briefed. The whole house has been briefed.
“Briggsy.” Coach Linwood, behind me, beer in hand, a palm landing on my shoulder. “Don’t keep him. He’s working.”
“That so?”
“He’s minding a wine for my daughter.”
Coach doesn’t take his hand off my shoulder. “Briggsy’s had eyes on you since you were sixteen, Stan. He’s the reason I knew to call your dad about the summer skate.”
I didn’t know that.
I don’t get a chance to do anything with it, because Coach pats my shoulder twice and tips his chin at the bar. “Take the wine to her, son. Glad you remember what she likes to drink.”
Hell, I don’t. I nod anyway and start walking over to her.
I cross the room, and I let myself look at her. She’s finishing something with one of the ladies. She glances up, sees me, and sees the wine. She doesn’t smile. She holds my eyes one full second.
I reach her and put the wine in her hand.
“Wine.”
She looks down at it. “Thank you.”
“Least I could do. I’ve been pinned in the corner with my parents and a doctor from Cornell for sixteen minutes.”
“I know. I counted.”
I look down at her.
She doesn’t look back up. She takes a sip and turns back to the two guys she’s been talking to. “Mike, Pete — this is Stanley Ermington.”
I shake two hands. I make a decent impression. I’m not fully present for it because my mind keeps replaying what she said. She counted.
Carolyn’s bell goes through the foyer — once, twice, and on the third she just calls over the lot of us. “Find your card.”
Aspen breathes in beside me. “Here we go.”
“You good?”
Her eyes flash around at the moving bodies. “Following your lead,” she whispers.
I take a step toward the arch. She follows.
The table’s set for sixteen — candles, a runner, real plates, real napkins, the whole thing built by a woman who’s been at it since five a.m. Aspen finds her card halfway down one side, between Aunt Lisa and a man I haven’t met. I find mine.
I’m directly across from her.
I’m next to my mother.
I look up, and Aspen is already looking at me. Her face hardens. She’s back to being annoyed, and I don’t know why.
I sit across from her and unfold my napkin. I lean half an inch over my plate like I’m fixing my fork, and I mouth it across the table, low enough that nobody else in the room can read me.
Smile.
She exhales through her nose. She forces one. It’s a bad one.
She looks at me. I look at her.
“Yeah.”
She smiles again. Better.
“Right.”
Beside me, my mother takes her seat and looks at Aspen’s horrible smile. She lifts her water and takes a sip. She doesn’t say a word.
I look at Aspen, who’s ignoring me, and then I look at my mom. She knows something’s off. She’s known since Aspen disappeared for over an hour.
I lose the play.
That’s fine.