Chapter 15 Cahoots
Cahoots
Everything went smoothly with Esme’s arrival.
She tapped on Jack’s door a little after six.
Perfect timing. Blair had texted him ten minutes ago that she was home and ready to read his pages, and he’d been stressing about holding her off.
He swung open the door and stepped back.
“Come in for a second so she doesn’t see you. ”
“Thanks for helping me!” Esme floated in on a cloud of sandalwood.
She was looking at him funny, so he got his shit together. “Happy to help. Your mom is going to be thrilled.”
It occurred to him that there was no reason he should accompany Esme to the main house. He’d gone to such pains to make sure the surprise happened as they had planned—and that it happened in such a way that he could witness it. But really, there was no need for him to be involved from this point.
It was disappointing.
“You’d better head up,” he said, holding out the fob. “She’s expecting me. Actually, I’m overdue, and she might start marching over here at any moment.” To see the pages he had dangled before her but had no intention of showing her. “You can leave your bags here for now if you want.”
Esme took the fob but said, “You’re not coming?”
“I don’t want to intrude.”
He wanted very much to intrude.
“Oh, come on. You did all the legwork. You shouldn’t miss the payoff.” She paused in the entryway, and he had the sudden fear that she could read his mind, that she knew how much he wanted not to miss this reunion. “You coming?”
He didn’t need to be asked twice.
“You can still leave your bags here if you want.” She was carrying a lot of shoulder bags: an enormous one that looked to be made of mismatched quilt squares, a slouchy leather handbag with a Gucci logo on it, and a pink lunch bag with a long strap.
Leaving them would free her up to be tackled by her mother.
“Great, thanks.” She put all but the pink lunch bag down. “I can’t leave Mrs. Frankenstein here, though. She’s been cooped up too long.”
“I’m sorry, you can’t leave who here?”
She rotated the bag so he could see through a little window on one side of it.
The lunch bag, it turned out, was not a lunch bag but a carrier for some kind of rodent.
He was so far away from his usual life that it even made sense to him, in that moment, that the child of a woman with pets named after Twilight and the Addams Family would have a rodent named Mrs. Frankenstein.
“What is all this junk?” she asked as she passed the bowl of crow trinkets he kept on the bench in the entryway. He’d added a paper clip and the head of a porcelain doll to the collection that very morning.
“I’m feeding some crows, and they bring me gifts.”
That stopped her in her tracks, and she looked at him as if for the first time. “Really?”
“Really.”
“That is badass.”
He was stupidly, embarrassingly proud to have impressed her.
“Oh my God!” she suddenly exclaimed. “This is my earring!” She picked up the earring, and this, too, made sense to Jack. It was a dangly thing that looked like a chandelier crystal from the Barbie Dreamhouse—and like something this Bohemian child would wear.
“You can keep it, though, because I tossed the other one ages ago.” She set it back in the dish. “OK, showtime.”
Esme skulked across the yard like she was a secret agent, and Jack had to smile. She had her mother’s dramatic streak. But also, he should talk. Maybe he should start humming the Bond theme again.
“Hey!” Blair called when Esme slid the door open. “I’m in the living room with a giant cat on my lap, which doesn’t happen that often.”
Esme grinned and made a jazz-hands gesture in Jack’s direction. It was possible he was making a reciprocal jazz-hands gesture internally.
“I don’t know why I’m resisting getting up,” Blair said as they made their way into the kitchen. “It’s not like Morticia isn’t going to abandon me the moment she realizes you’re—”
Esme had come to stand in her mother’s sight line.
There was a long, silent pause. Blair Kellermoon struck dumb. Jack hadn’t seen that before, and he suspected he never would again.
“Surprise!” Esme finally said, and Jack thought there might be a hint of concern in her tone. He shared it. Had they made a mistake, ambushing Blair? Would this aggravate her anxiety or compulsive tendencies or whatever it was she had going on that they had yet to talk about?
“Ahh!” Blair came to life and vaulted off the sofa—Morticia had, as Blair predicted, already vacated her lap when Jack appeared—and the two women hugged and cried and laughed and exclaimed.
He shouldn’t have come. He was uncomfortable with this much emotion displayed so unselfconsciously.
He was going to slink out. He reached down to pat Morticia before making his way back out through the kitchen.
“Jack!”
He wasn’t sure which one of them had shrieked his name, and when he turned, he had to laugh.
They were posed identically with their hands on their hips, wearing matching expressions of indignation.
They were distinguishable only by a couple of decades and different aesthetics.
Blair, in jeans and a white Oxford shirt with her blond hair up in a high ponytail, looked like she belonged in a Calvin Klein ad, whereas Esme looked like she’d come from a Grateful Dead concert.
If he squinted and blurred his vision, he’d almost think Esme was the mother, given her chronologically older style.
“What’s so funny?” Esme asked.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t go,” Blair said.
“I’m going to let the two of you catch up.”
“No!” Esme cried. “I’m the one crashing your date.”
“It’s not a date,” he and Blair said in stereo.
Blair seemed startled by their identical reactions and furrowed her brow for a moment before recovering. “Why don’t you play bartender and make us drinks?” she said to Jack as she guided Esme to sit on a stool at the kitchen island.
Jack hesitated.
“I’ll have a sauv blanc,” Blair said.
“Me, too,” Esme said.
“Nope,” Blair said to Esme, who groaned. To Jack she said, “I’m not one of those cool moms who let their kids drink.”
“Ugh, Mom. I’m in college now. I can assure you that I’ve—”
Blair held her hands up. “I don’t need to know.”
“I make a mean mocktail,” Jack said to Esme. Since they’d been spending most evenings together, Jack had grown familiar with the contents of Blair’s pantry and refrigerator, and she had a lot of fancy seltzers and cold-pressed juices and the like. He felt confident he could come up with something.
“Fine,” Esme huffed. “I’m going to stick Mrs. Frankenstein in the… guest room.” She looked at her mother as if for permission.
“Of course. Let me say hi first?”
“Morticia would eat Mrs. Frankenstein if she had the chance,” Esme explained to Jack, “so I have to lock her in a bedroom.” She let the gross little creature out and handed him to her mother.
“Is that a rat?”
“It’s a guinea pig!” both women said in unison and with identical degrees of affront.
It was a black guinea pig with a white streak. “Like the Bride from the Boris Karloff movie,” Jack said. He had to admit, that was clever.
“Oh my God, you’re referencing a movie,” Blair said.
He rolled his eyes as Esme ransacked the kitchen for supplies: a towel for Mrs. Frankenstein to rest on, some kale for her to eat, and a dish of water into which she squeezed a wedge of lime. Jack refrained from rolling his eyes, but only just.
“I’m going to get her settled,” Esme said. “I’ll be back.”
Jack got to work on the drinks and served them when Esme reappeared. He set a glass in front of Blair, who’d taken a stool at the island. “Sauvignon blanc.” He set another in front of Esme. “And a reunion refresher.”
Esme scrunched her nose. “What is that?”
“It’s this strong ginger-flavored sparkling water your mom has, the juice of half a lime, and some muddled cucumber.” He should have done a better job with the name.
“Oh, that actually sounds good.” Esme took a sip. “Yum!”
Blair grabbed the glass and did the same. “Yum.”
He cracked up, causing both women to look at him with identically shaped eyebrows raised. “You two are like twins.”
Esme rolled her eyes. “Bartenders are supposed to give good advice, right? Tell me what to be when I grow up.”
“Wow, you don’t do small talk, do you?” Jack said.
“Do you?” Blair asked.
Fair point. He rested his elbows on the “bar” in front of Esme. “OK, what are you majoring in?”
“Undeclared.”
“Ah.”
“Which is actually extremely stressful.”
“There’s no hurry, honey,” Blair said.
“There kind of is, Mom. I have to declare by fall of my sophomore year, so next semester is my last one to fuck around.”
“Esme.”
The scandalous tone Blair deployed made Jack smile. In some ways, she was still the proper Southern belle.
“Also.” Esme turned ninety degrees and leveled a serious look at her mother.
“I regret to inform you that I have to drop French. I’m pretty sure I’m going to fail it.
I should have started in level two instead of three.
” Before her mother could reply, she rotated back to face the island. “What did you major in, Jack?”
“English.”
“Of course.”
“But then I had no idea what to do, so I got an MFA. And then I still had no idea what to do, so I went to teachers college.”
“You were a teacher?”
“For nine years.”
“Wow.” Esme was blinking at him as if she was trying to square that with her image of him. “Like for little kids or big kids?”
“Big. Eleventh- and twelfth-grade English. American lit for the seniors and college composition for the juniors. Every other year I also taught AP English Lit.”
“Wow,” she said again, and he had no idea why she was finding it so remarkable that a novelist had previously been an English teacher.
“Do you really want to know what I think?” he asked.
“That’s why I asked you.”
“You’re lucky that you have these years to do what you want. To learn and explore. Don’t overthink it too much. Major in what calls to you.”
“Then I can always go to teachers college,” she said, deadpan.
He quirked a smile. He couldn’t help it. “Then you can always go to teachers college.”