Erica #2
“Oooh, a destination wedding!” Zoe turns her phone around without being asked. She’s already pulled up a venue page with stone archways, chandeliers, vaulted cellars, a rose garden, and a cobbled courtyard with fairy lights. It looks like a fairy tale.
“You could book that castle,” I say. “And still have enough left for a year-long honeymoon. Twice around the world if you want to be dramatic about it.”
Tanya looks at the screen. A long look. She’s practically drooling.
“Dale would ask where the money came from,” she says, half to herself.
“You’ll figure that out when you get back.”
“But what should I say when he asks me why I need to go to DC?”
“Girl’s trip,” Zoe says. “Someone turns twenty-five on the Fourth of July.” She glances at me pointedly. “Where better to celebrate an Independence Day birthday than in the nation’s capital?”
Tanya’s whole face lights up. “That’s right. It’s your birthday!”
“Yep. It’s my birthday,” I say. “You won’t even have to lie.”
“Dale would insist I go.”
“Because he’s a sweet, nice guy,” Zoe says. “He’ll probably tell you to buy her a cake.”
“He’d send a cookie bouquet,” Tanya confirms.
“I like peanut butter cookies,” I say.
Waffles chooses this moment to get up off the floor to stretch into a downward dog position. A long fart escapes his backside.
“Biiiig stretch,” Tanya praises. “Who’s the goodest boy? Who’s the goodest boy in Louisiana?”
Zoe looks ready to bolt because the smell is atrocious.
Waffles walks back to Tanya’s chair and leans his entire body weight against her leg. She looks down at him. Her face goes soft.
“He’s very gentle,” she says, as a point of record. Then her eyes spark like she just got a brilliant idea. “Hey… can Waffles come?”
“No,” Zoe and I say, at the same time.
Tanya nods once and shrugs sheepishly. “Had to ask.”
We spend the evening with Tanya and Dale once he gets home from work. It’s a nice, relaxing time, and so domestic which gives me a small ache in my chest. We play games and reminisce all night, and at dawn, we say our goodbyes, and Zoe and I are in Manhattan by mid-morning.
Zoe sleeps the entire way but I can’t sleep on planes, so by the time we’re walking the Upper East Side I have reworked the Four Seasons layout twice in my head and need coffee that isn’t from an airport terminal.
My phone buzzes. It’s Ivy. Something about Senator Halloway at last night’s fundraiser. She’s working something with that connection but doesn’t say what.
She’s been laying the groundwork and updating me since our Coffee Loft meeting three days ago. She was so into it before I even got about halfway through the pitch. She just held up one hand and said, “I’m in.”
Just like that.
And I knew right away we’d be fast friends.
She’s the kind woman who’s sick and tired of being interrupted mid-sentence by men who then repeat what she’d just said and take all the credit for her brilliance.
Who had smiled through a hundred dinners where some chief of staff mansplained the room she’d already worked three times.
Who has decided, somewhere along the way, that if these men are going to underestimate her, she’s at least going to make it expensive for them.
That was enough for me.
The “face,” or inside connection, is a critical piece of a job like this. The person who knows which congressman is cheating on his wife, which trustee owes a favor to whom, and which donor will open any door you need if you just let him think it was his idea.
Six years ago, Dennis Hobbs, my dad’s inside guy, turned out to be a brown-nosing social climber. He was a nobody. Dad should have seen the signs. When the job went sideways, he handed investigators everything they needed to put my father in prison and walked away clean.
Ivy has ten times as much access as Hobbs ever did, and she has no reason to give us up to anyone. She has more to gain from exposing what’s been buried than she’d ever get from protecting the people who buried it.
I put the phone away.
“She texted again?” Zoe asks. “What did she say?”
“She’s working a room full of politicians. She’ll tell us more when she’s ready.”
Zoe chews on this for half a block, then says, “What’s Ivy’s angle?”
“She doesn’t have one.”
Zoe snorts. “Everybody has an angle.”
“I think she’s just ready to knock some guys down a peg or two.”
“Huh.” She walks. Thinks. “I got more of a most-popular-cheerleader-in-school vibe from her.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if she was.”
What I do know about Ivy is that she walks into rooms full of very important people and leaves with things they didn’t realize they’d handed over.
Favors, introductions, information. She collects these things like a kid collects Pokemon cards and does nothing until the moment that information comes in handy. That’s someone you want on your team.
“Do you think she’s got a lot of dirt on people?” Zoe wonders.
“Most definitely.”
A small dog in yellow rain boots and a matching slicker is being walked past us by a woman in a jogging suit. It’s not raining.
“I mean like, embarrassing things.” She goes on. “Like what if the most powerful men in DC play D&D in someone’s basement every Thursday? What if…”
Zoe stops, just now registering the dog. “Why is that dog in a raincoat and booties?” She watches it go. Turns back. “A whole secret D&D campaign. Imagine judges and congressmen in capes rolling dice and deciding whether their elf character trusts the wizard.”
“I’m pretty sure Ivy has worse dirt on these guys than that.”
She skips forward to pull a tag off a flier advertising guitar lessons, then shoves it in her tote bag. “I just hope she’s not some kind of DC sleeper agent and we all end up in federal prison.” A beat. “Do you think federal prison has good food?”
I catch up to her and give her the side-eye.
“I’m just saying.” She puts her hands in her pockets. “She’s in. I’m on board.”
I glance at the building numbers. “We’re almost there.”
Ginger’s gallery sits on a cross street off Fifth, three blocks from the Met. The building is narrow limestone with floor-to-ceiling windows and a single brass handle on a door with no buzzer, no posted hours. It’s very chic.
Zoe stops and looks up at the facade. She tips her head back and lets out a low whistle.
“After you,” I say, and pull the door open.
Ginger comes from the back when the door chimes and sighs heavily when she sees us.
“What do you two want?”
Classic Ginger. Straight to the point and unapologetic about it. We go way back, so I don’t take her greeting as an affront.
“Twenty minutes,” I say.
“It always starts with twenty minutes.” She waves a hand. “Come sit. I’ll put the kettle on.”
The gallery is totally and completely Ginger. That’s the only way I know how to put it. Clean white walls meet gold accents, natural light pouring through the high windows. Her back office is open and very beige, like a Pottery Barn showroom. She’s built something real here.
We sit in a comfortable corner of her office and give her the run-down. She listens without interrupting. Sets tea down in front of both of us. When I finish, she steeples her hands and looks at the table for a moment.
“I have a Peruvian textile artist coming in,” she says.
“Her first New York show. I’ve been building toward it for six months.
I have fourteen things happening at once right now.
A sculptor in Red Hook who won’t return my calls, a painter from Berlin who returned all of them and sends voice memos at two in the morning, and a twenty-three-year-old from Bushwick who thinks he’s the next Andy Warhol. ”
“See? You need a break,” I say. “We’ll be done before the end of July and then you can come back and deal with your temperamental artists.”
“There are relationships in this room I’ve spent years on,” she says. “Every time I step outside this gallery for a job there’s risk to all of that.” She looks at me. “I can’t.”
“What would it take?” I say.
“Erica,” she says pragmatically. “I love you. I’d vouch for you anywhere. But I can’t get involved right now.”
The room is quiet. I look at Zoe. Zoe looks at me.
“I understand,” I say, and I mean it. It came from a real place and it’s a real no and I’m not going to make her feel bad about a real no. “Good luck with the show. The textile artist. What’s her name?”
Ginger blinks, caught off guard. “Carmen Villanueva.”
“After the Sao Paulo collection. She’s going to be huge.”
“She is,” Ginger says. And something drops, just slightly, in her expression. “She’s extraordinary.”
“Then I hope the show is everything,” I say.
We stand. Zoe says her goodbyes too, genuinely, because Zoe genuinely likes Ginger. Everybody does. Ginger hugs us both and tells us to be careful, and we mean it when we say we will, and then we’re heading for the door.
I reach into my bag, pulling out a coffee receipt from this morning. I write a number with a lot of zeros on it and set it on the counter without breaking stride. Then I count in my head.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four…
“Wait.”
I stop, letting the tiniest smirk crack on the corner of my lips. Then I put it away and turn around.
Ginger stands by the counter, holding the receipt aloft between two fingers. She raises one brow and cocks her head and says, “You could have led with this.”
Zoe sleeps on the plane back to DC, then sleeps in the Uber, then nearly sleeps standing up on the sidewalk while I find my keys. We walk the last half block. Zoe’s hanging on my arm, dead weight, one stumble from faceplanting.
Then a cluster of men spill out of a restaurant ahead of us, loud and loose, and Zoe lifts her head from my shoulder like an animal that’s caught a scent.
She blinks. Sees them.
“Ooooooh,” she says, with genuine scientific interest. “Man candy.”
I keep walking.
“No, wait!” She grabs my arm. “Look at them. Just. Look.” Her tongue is practically hanging down to her knees. “That one in the gray hoodie. He can check me into the boards. That’s my Roman Empire right there.”
“Zoe.”