Epilogue
Ruby
The black shapewear went on the same as it did last year, which is to say badly, with a fight, and the same rip somewhere I decided not to look for.
A year ago that struggle had felt like a bad omen for the whole night. Tonight it just made me laugh, alone in my dressing room, wrestling my forty-six-year-old body into shrink wrapping for the Harding Home Jubilee.
I got it on and looked at myself in the mirror. Same honey-blonde hair, parted on the side. A little more grey in it than last year, and this time I left the strand where it was instead of tucking it away. I found I didn't much care who saw it.
"You're going to be the best-looking woman there," Oscar said from the doorway. "It won't be close."
I caught his eyes in the mirror. A year ago he had leaned in this same doorway and told me the car would be here any minute. Tonight he was looking at me, not the clock.
"You have to say that," I said. "You're contractually obligated."
"I don't say anything I don't mean. You know that about me. It's half my problems." He grinned. "The other half is I don't say the things I do mean. I'm working on that one."
He was. That was the thing I could say now that I couldn't have said a year ago. He was working on it, every day, on the ordinary days when nobody was watching and there was nothing to prove.
My eyes went to the door at the far end of the dressing room, the one to Jeremy's old room.
Last year the sight of it had put an ache in me.
Tonight I smiled at it, because Jeremy was coming, driving in from Brooklyn to meet us at the Cipriani, and he was bringing Libby.
They had been together most of the year now, the two of them in the same architecture program at Pratt, and I had met her a handful of times when we drove up to see Jeremy.
She was quiet and quick and a little bit in awe of everything, and my son looked at her the way I used to catch Oscar looking at me.
Tonight was her first Jubilee. I reached for my lipstick, still perched on the little red ceramic leaf Jeremy made me at camp, and I put it on.
"Seven minutes," I told Oscar.
"Take fourteen," he said. "The party won't start without us."
That part hadn't changed. Some things you keep.
I slipped on the dress, a deep green one this year, and tied the sandals, and stood in front of the three-way mirror. I smoothed my hands over my stomach, the bulge I'd never lost after Jeremy and had stopped waging war on. I looked good. I knew I looked good, and I didn't need to be told.
But then Oscar's head came back around the door.
"Ruby." He stopped when he saw me in the dress. "God. Come here."
I turned. "What?"
"Come down the stairs and let me see you come down them. Humor me."
* * *
He was waiting at the bottom of the staircase when I came down, one hand on the newel post, watching me the whole way like there was nowhere else in the house worth looking.
"You look so beautiful," he said, when I reached the bottom, "that I'm about ready to carry you right back up these stairs and forget the whole party."
"Stop it." I laughed as I felt the heat come into my face. I was forty-six years old and blushing in my own foyer like a girl.
"I mean it."
"Shhh.” I put my hand flat on his chest, and I let it stay there, and I looked up at him. "Later."
His eyebrows went up, and I walked past him toward the door before he could say anything, pleased with myself, feeling him watch me go.
* * *
We sat in the back of the stretch limo for the hour into the city. A year ago this drive had been the loneliest hour of my life, Oscar lit up by his phone, me talking to the window.
Tonight his phone was in his jacket, face down, and it stayed there.
"I've been thinking," he said, somewhere on the turnpike. "About the spring. There's another one out in Pennsylvania, isn't there? Wright. Not Fallingwater, the other one."
"Kentuck Knob," I said, before I could stop myself. "It's twenty minutes from Fallingwater. We drove right past the turn for it."
"So we go back. Do them both this time. Make a few days of it." He looked over at me. "Unless you'd rather see something new. You're the one who knows where they all are. Pick anywhere. I'll drive."
A year ago I sat in this seat and told him I wanted to see Fallingwater, and he asked me if it was raining. I looked at him now, offering me the whole country of them, any house I wanted, and something in my chest turned over.
"There's one in Chicago," I said. "And a whole cluster in the Midwest. We could do a real trip. A week easily."
"Then that's what we'll do."
"You'll get bored by the second house."
"Probably," he said with a laugh. "But maybe not. When you get going, talking about his designs and what they mean to you, it turns it all around. I love hearing you talk about the things that excite you.” He reached over and took my hand, and held it for the rest of the drive.
The limo slowed and turned onto Wall Street. Cipriani glowed ahead of us, the hidden lights sweeping up the Corinthian columns, and it was as beautiful as it was every year.
* * *
The car stopped at the curb. Oscar got out his side, and I reached for my purse, and then his hand was there, holding my door, holding his hand out to help me from the car. Not the driver. Him.
"Thank you, Alan," Oscar said over the roof of the car, and then to me, "Come on. Let's go show you off."
He kept my hand as we went in. He did not disappear into a flurry of handshakes and leave me on the curb.
He walked in beside me, and when people came up to him, and they did, right away, he kept me next to him and said, every time, some version of the same thing: "You know my wife, Ruby. She designed the Ocean City project."
* * *
I found Olivia by the bar within the first twenty minutes, the way I always did.
"There she is." She hugged me, then held me back at arm's length and studied my face. "Okay. Tell me. How are things with you and Oscar? And don't give me the party answer."
"I finally understand what you were talking about last year," I said.
"At this exact party. You told me things with you and Adam hit play again after the kids left, and I couldn't imagine it.
I thought you were the lucky one and I was just stuck.
" I shook my head. "I get it now. I'm happy, Liv.
Really happy. The kind I didn't think I got to have anymore. "
Her eyes softened. "I hoped. I saw him holding your hand walking in.
" She squeezed my arm. "You know Adam and I had our own rough patch, years back.
It got bad for a while." She waved it off before I could ask.
"Story for another day. The point is people can come back from a long way off. I'm glad you two did."
"Have you seen Nicole?" I asked. "Or Dustin?"
Olivia glanced around the room. "Not yet. Neither of them." She frowned, then let it go. "It's early. They'll turn up."
We both looked toward the door for a second. Then the crowd shifted and someone called Olivia's name and the moment passed.
* * *
People kept finding me that night. That was the strangest part, the part I was still getting used to.
A woman on the board of an arts foundation took my elbow and told me they were planning a community center, and that they wanted Harding Home on it, but only if I would be the one to design it.
She'd seen what I did with the Ocean City carousel.
She wanted that, she said, the thing that made a place feel like it belonged to the people in it.
I told her to have her people call the office Monday.
It still surprised me a little, being asked for by name.
For twenty years I had been the owner's wife at these parties. This year I was the architect.
Adam found me near the windows with two glasses of champagne and gave me one.
"They broke ground Tuesday," he said. "Ocean City. Foundations are going in on the first row of houses." He clinked his glass against mine. "The carousel's staying right where it is through the whole build. The town made us promise. Your green goes in around it next spring."
"They started building," I said. It came out quieter than I meant it to.
"You started building." He smiled. "I just carried the folder."
* * *
Later, the band moved into something slow, and Oscar appeared at my side and held out his hand.
"Dance with me."
I let him lead me out. He was a good dancer, always had been, one of the first things I noticed about him twenty-three years ago in a bar that smelled like spilled beer. He put his hand at the small of my back and I felt about twenty-three again myself.
"Have you picked your next project?" Oscar asked.
"I've narrowed it down, but I'm not really sure yet."
"Well, I have no doubt that whichever one you pick, they'll be lucky to have you."
Oscar's gaze held mine. I knew he meant what he said.
As I wrapped my arms around him tighter, I saw Jeremy arrive with his girlfriend, Libby, on his arm. They were scanning the crowd for us.
I pulled back from Oscar, stopping our dance, and waved to Jeremy. Smiles lit their faces when they spotted us and they headed over.
Oscar took my hand and we walked over to meet them off the dance floor, but then a marble column caught my eye.
I stopped walking.
"Everything okay?" Oscar asked.
"Everything's perfect. But I really need a napkin and a pen."
The End
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