Epilogue #2
And my god, the flowers are a hot mess. There are three arrangements on the mantel—one tall, one medium, one short—and they’re all completely different styles.
One looks like it came from a fancy florist. One looks like it came from Trader Joe’s.
And one looks like someone just grabbed a bunch of deli flowers and shoved them in a vase.
I turn to Michalis, who’s now conveniently avoiding eye contact. “Did you do this?”
He crosses his arms. “What do you mean by ‘this’?”
I gesture broadly at the entire room. “The decorations.”
“I did the best I could!”
I walk over to the mantel and pick up the deli flowers. “Where did these come from?”
“The bodega on Seventh.”
“And these?” I point to the fancy arrangement.
“I ordered those online.”
“And these?” I hold up the Trader Joe’s bouquet.
“Trader Joe’s.”
“Mik, why didn’t you just get all the flowers from the same place?”
He crosses his arms defensively. “Because I wasn’t sure what Mom would like! So I hedged my bets.”
“You hedged your bets with flowers?”
“Well excuse me for trying to make this nice!” He glares at me. “You want to fix it yourself? Be my guest.”
I hold up my hands. “I’m just saying, there’s a lot going on here.”
“Yeah, well, I had to do it all myself because Allie’s running late. Per usual.”
I groan. “What’s new?”
My little sister has never been on time to anything in her entire life.
Not to school, not to dance recitals, not to family dinners, not even to her own high school graduation where she was supposed to give a speech.
She operates on what we’ve dubbed “Allie Standard Time,” which is approximately forty-five minutes to an hour behind the rest of the world. It drives Dad crazy.
“Where is she?” I ask.
Michalis shrugs. “Somewhere between here and Bushwick. Probably stopping for coffee she doesn’t need and texting someone she definitely shouldn’t be texting.”
“The drummer?”
“I think she’s moved on from the drummer. Now it’s a poet.”
“Oh god.”
“A spoken word poet.”
“Kill me.”
“He has a man bun.”
“I need to sit down.”
Michalis laughs and heads toward the kitchen with the cheese platter. “You want coffee? Mom made a pot before she left.”
“Does the Pope shit in the woods?”
“That’s not the saying, Em.”
“Close enough.”
Michalis is just handing me a steaming mug of coffee—black, the way I’ve taken it since sophomore year of college—when the front door swings open with enough force to rattle the photographs on the wall.
“EMMA!”
I barely have time to set down the mug before Phoebe launches herself at me.
We collide in the entryway, a tangle of arms and thick red hair and squeals that always seem to escape us both whenever we’ve been apart too long.
To anyone watching, we must look ridiculous—two women in their mid-twenties shrieking like we’re fifteen again, reuniting after a summer apart instead of three months.
I don’t care. This is Phoebe Feldman. This is my person.
My platonic soulmate since we were seven years old, sitting cross-legged on Cori’s kitchen floor, eating ice cream straight from the carton and trying to teach each other dance moves from a Britney Spears video that neither of us could actually execute.
Well, I couldn’t execute them. Phoebe could do literally anything. She still can.
“It’s been forever!” She pulls back, hands on my shoulders, scanning my face like she’s memorizing it.
“It’s been three months.”
“That’s basically forever.”
“That’s a quarter of a year.”
“Exactly.” She pouts, that same pout she’s been pulling since we were kids, the one that always got us out of trouble with teachers and occasionally with her mom. “Forever. And after today, it’ll be nine whole months before I see you again.”
I pull her back into a hug, squeezing tighter. “Where are you off to this time?”
“Paris.” She says it the way other people say they’re going to the grocery store. Like it’s nothing. Like she hasn’t built an entire life on the other side of the ocean. “The company’s doing Giselle and La Sylphide for the fall season, then we’re touring through Germany and Austria for the spring.”
Phoebe is a ballerina. A real one, one who dances with the Paris Opera Ballet, who gets written about in dance magazines, who makes it look effortless even though I’ve seen her feet—bloody, calloused, and held together with KT tape.
She joined the company two years ago and now she spends nine months of the year in Europe, performing on stages I can’t pronounce, in front of audiences who don’t know that she used to cry during pointe class and hide her worn-out shoes from her mother so she wouldn’t have to admit how quickly she was burning through them.
The other three months, she’s back in New York, crashing at Cori’s place in Queens, texting me at 2 AM because her sleep schedule is permanently calibrated to Central European Time and she can never readjust.
Phoebe’s always been like the wind—there sometimes, gone another.
She takes risks. She’s bold. She’ll try anything once, whether it’s dying her hair pink (eighth grade) or getting a tattoo in Prague (last year) or dating a French choreographer who turned out to be married (we don’t talk about that).
Phoebe just does things. She leaps before she looks and trusts that a net will appear to catch her.
But god, I love her.
“Emma, sweetie, it’s my turn.”
I look up and there’s Cori, arms open, smiling that warm mom-smile that’s been a fixture of my entire life.
I step into her hug and she squeezes me tight. “Hi, Cori.”
“Hi, baby. Look at you! You’re glowing.”
I am definitely not glowing. I’m exhausted and nauseous and I’ve been living on saltines for three weeks, but I smile anyway. “Thank you.”
Cori’s eyes hold mine for a beat longer than necessary. She’s always been able to see through me. It’s unnerving, and also the reason I love her.
Cori is Phoebe’s mom and my mom’s best friend.
They were roommates when Mom first moved to New York—back when Mom was broke and working as my nanny and Cori was pregnant and taking night classes.
They lived in some tiny apartment in the East Village with another guy named Marcus who, according to family lore, was the funniest person alive.
Marcus moved to LA in 1996 with his husband, Brett, and they’ve been there ever since.
He’s a big artist over there now. Mom still sends him a birthday card every year.
Mom and Cori have been best friends for over twenty years now.
Through everything. Cori’s marriage and divorce.
Mom’s career taking off. Raising kids. Building lives.
They talk on the phone at least three times a week, usually while cooking dinner and yelling at their respective children in the background.
Some of my most fun childhood memories are of Mom packing me, Michalis and Allie into the car and driving out to Queens for the weekend.
Cori would make these massive Greek dinners—she learned from my Yiayia, spent entire Sundays in the kitchen with her, wrote down every recipe in a notebook that’s probably falling apart by now—and we’d all crowd around her dining table for hours.
Me and Phoebe would put on “shows” in the living room.
Elaborate productions involving lip-syncing and choreography we’d invented ourselves and demanded applause for whether we deserved it or not.
We took a trip to the Hamptons once, all of us crammed into Cori’s minivan. Another time we went to Montauk. Cori taught me how to braid hair. Mom taught Phoebe how to write like a journalist. We grew up in each other’s houses, in each other’s lives.
Cori squeezes my hands now. Her fingers are warm, slightly rough—she still gardens, even though her arthritis has gotten worse and her doctor keeps telling her to stop. “I can’t believe your mom’s retiring.”
“Well. Kind of retiring.”
“What do you mean, kind of?”
“She’s only moving from being on camera. She’s going to be an executive producer now. Still at CBS, still doing journalism. Just behind the scenes. Picking which stories to cover, managing the team, that kind of thing.”
“Still a pretty big change,” Cori says.
“Yeah.” I pause. “I think she’s ready, though. She’s done the on-camera thing for almost twenty-five years. That’s a long time to have strangers critique your hair and your outfit and whether you smiled enough.”
Cori nods slowly. “I know she loves what she does. But she loves you kids more. And this will give her more time. More flexibility.” Her eyes meet mine. “It’s well deserved.”
I agree, but I don’t say it out loud.
The thing about having a famous mother is that she’s never entirely yours.
My mom is famous. Not movie-star famous, not pop-star famous—journalist famous.
The kind of famous where people recognize her at airports and restaurants and stop her for photos mid-meal.
Where strangers feel entitled to comment on her appearance, her voice, whether she seemed “warm enough” during the broadcast last night.
She’s covered everything. Wars. Natural disasters. Elections. Terrorist attacks. She’s interviewed presidents and prisoners and everyone in between. She’s won Emmys. She’s been on the cover of magazines. She’s one of the most respected journalists in the country.
But I remember what it cost. The late nights.
The early mornings. The birthday parties she missed because she was covering a story halfway across the world.
The times Dad would put us to bed alone, telling us she’d be home soon, knowing full well she wouldn’t be.
The times I’d see her face on the television and feel this complicated knot of pride and resentment—she was mine, but she was also everyone else’s.