2. Willow
— ? —
Willow
The balloon artist had a line, and the line had a hierarchy, and I was learning the hierarchy whether I wanted to or not.
At the front were the mothers who had sent a nanny ahead to hold the place.
In the middle were the mothers pretending not to care while checking their position every time somebody moved.
Then me, six feet back with a juice box, watching my son stroke a balloon giraffe that another child was actively crying over.
“Archie. Gentle.”
“Pet him.”
“That’s Oliver’s giraffe.”
“Pet him nice.”
“Oliver is crying.”
“Oliver sad,” Archie agreed, and carried on stroking the giraffe with the calm of a boy who has identified a problem and established that it is not his.
The party was in a brownstone that has been in a family since before anybody paid income tax.
The birthday boy was turning four. There was an espresso cart with a barista brought in from elsewhere, and a signature cocktail, and a hedge cut into an ambitious shape, because this is what a child’s birthday looks like when the child is going to inherit things.
Nothing much is for the children and most of it is for their parents.
A woman in linen said hello to me at the drinks table.
“You’re Archie’s mother.”
“I am.”
“He’s got wonderful hair. Where’s that from?”
“His father, I think.”
“No, I meant you. Where are you from?”
“Massachusetts.”
“Oh, Boston?”
“Nantucket.”
“Nantucket.” She said it again, warmer, because she had already decided what it meant. “We’re out there every summer. Whereabouts are you?”
“Mid-island. Fairgrounds Road.”
“Grew up?”
“Grew up.”
“Year-round?”
“Year-round.”
She made me say it twice. She had it after the first one. She took the second anyway, and I watched the calculations happen behind her eyes. Year-rounders meaning townie, meaning staff, meaning not a summer person, not one of theirs.
“How wonderful,” she said, “to have the whole island to yourselves in the winter.”
She looked at my shoes for a moment longer than she needed to, said she ought to find her husband, and went. Her husband had been standing eight feet away at the drinks table the entire time.
I did not go near the espresso cart, because the line was long and my son was short. I was close enough to hear it, though.
“That’s her, isn’t it. The Folger wife.”
“The second one?”
“There is no second one. That’s the only one.”
“You’re joking. The way his mother talks I assumed there’d been a first.”
A laugh, low and short. “Well. You know the story.”
“I know a story. I don’t know if it’s the story.”
“Courthouse wedding. She moved into the apartment, and then there was a due date, and the due date did not add up.”
“Kristina must have been beside herself.”
“Charlotte says she was. The whole family was waiting on an announcement and what they got was a clerk and a sonogram.”
“Poor Michael.”
“Poor Michael is right. He could have had anybody in this city.”
“And instead there’s a girl from a family nobody’s heard of, from that island, already pregnant.”
“It tells itself, doesn’t it.”
A pause. The machine hissed.
“What is it she actually does?”
“Nothing. That’s the point of her. She had the baby and she moved into the penthouse and now she comes to these, like one of us.”
“She isn’t one of us.”
“She isn’t one of anybody. She’s a transaction.”
“Don’t be foul.”
“I’m not being foul. You know how it ends. It’s always the assistant or the nanny. He’ll wake up one morning and work out he can do better, and she’ll get money, and none of us will see her again.”
The machine stopped. Cups were handed over. Heels went away across stone.
I did not turn around. If I had turned around they would have seen my face and known, and then one of them would have had to apologize, and I would have spent the rest of the afternoon making two women feel better about a thing they had said about me.
I have done that before. I am world class at it.
I did work out who they were. I am not a saint.
The louder one had blocked the front of the balloon line for an hour purely so a nanny could collect a giraffe on her behalf.
The other one told me at Halloween that Archie’s costume was so brave, to my face, with her whole chest. Between them they have produced four children and neither knew where a single one was, one of whom was at that moment eating the fancy hedge.
Not a jury I would have chosen.
Every fact they had was correct. There is not one sentence I could stand up and deny. It is only the ending they get wrong. They have all the numbers and no idea what any of it was for.
He was a boy with a boat before he was anything. I loved him before I knew there was a thing to be gained by it, and he loved me back, and there is nobody at that party who would believe it.
“Mrs. Folger.”
I turned.
Kristina was at my elbow in cream linen with a glass of something clear that was not water. She has a way of arriving that suggests she has been standing there the whole time and you have been slow.
“Kristina.”
“You’re hovering.”
“I’m watching Archie.”
“You’re hovering over him as though the balloon artist intends to abduct him. He’s fine. Children are durable.”
“He’s two.”
“I raised three of them. They bounce.”
“Yours had a woman paid to catch them.”
“They did.” She drank. “You say that as though it settles the matter.”
“It settles part of it.”
“It settles the part you like.”
She did not mention the two women. She did not acknowledge that they had spoken, or that I had stood there and let them.
She reached out and straightened my shoulder with two fingers.
“Shoulders back,” she said. “You stand like a woman waiting to be told she can stay.”
And then, while I was still assembling a face, “It puts ideas in people’s heads.”
She had been standing right there. She had heard every word, the transaction and the settlement and the nanny, and she came over and told me it was my posture.
“You’ve said that to me before,” I said. “Almost word for word.”
“Have I?”
“You know you have. In your sunroom.”
“Then perhaps you ought to have listened.”
Archie arrived at speed with both hands out and jam across his face, and by the time I had the napkin she was gone.
***
The elevator went at ten that night, and nobody comes into our penthouse at ten.
I came out of the kitchen holding a wooden spoon, which is not a weapon, and there was a woman in my hallway taking her coat off.
“Willa,” she said.
Nobody has called me that since we were girls.
Krystal Parker put her coat over her arm and looked around my hallway with open, generous interest.
“This is unbelievable,” she said. “Michael said seventy floors and I said don’t be ridiculous.”
“Krystal.”
“I know. Ten o’clock, I’m a menace, he needs a signature on an annex tonight or the whole thing slips a week.” She held up the folder. “Twenty minutes and I’m out of your hair.”
Michael came through, already reaching for it. “You’re a lifesaver.”
“I’m a nuisance.”
“You’re both,” I said.
Krystal laughed, warm as anything. “She’s right. Ask anyone.”
She got the folder open against her forearm and put a finger on a line before he had found his glasses.
“That one. And don’t sign the schedule tonight, sign it Wednesday, because you’re not flying Tuesday morning.”
“I’m not flying Tuesday morning,” Michael agreed.
“He was going to. He had it booked. Six o’clock out of Newark, and then he’d have landed and been useless until Thursday.” She said it to me, generously, one wife to another. “Men do this.”
“They do,” I said. “Some of us have been saying so for years.”
“Then you know.”
“I know. I’ve had a lot of time to know.”
Michael looked up from the page. “What?”
“Nothing. Sign your annex.”
He signed his annex. And then there were bare feet on the wood behind me and Archie was in the doorway in his sleep suit with Duck in a headlock, doing the wobble of a child who has woken up in the wrong part of the night.
“Hey, baby. It’s sleep time.”
“Up.”
He saw Krystal and went completely still.
She got down. No hesitation, all the way down onto her knees on my floor in that skirt, so she was underneath his eyeline instead of over it. That is the correct thing to do. Almost nobody does it.
“Hello,” she said. “That’s a very good rabbit.”
Archie considered this.
“Duck,” he said.
“Duck. Of course.” She did not laugh at him. Every other adult laughs at him and he feels it. “Hello, Duck.”
“Hi.”
“Does Duck sleep in the bed or on the bed?”
“In.”
“That’s the right answer.”
My son gave her the smile with the four teeth in it, because he is two, and two-year-olds have no loyalty.
I picked him up.
“Say night night.”
“Ni ni.”
I put him back in his crib and stood in the dark with my hands on the rail. One minute. That is all I allow myself.
Then I went back out.
Michael and Krystal were in my hallway with their heads down over the same page, and he was saying something about tonnage, and she said something back, and he laughed out loud.
He has a laugh he does at the office and a laugh he does at home. That was neither. That was the one from a boat, in the dark, when we were seventeen.
“Right,” he said. “Tuesday.”
“Tuesday.”
She got her coat on. At the elevator she turned around.
“It really is good to see you, Willa. We should get lunch. There’s nobody in this whole city who knows where I’m from.”
The doors closed.
“She’s incredible,” Michael said, coming back through with the folder open. “Best hire I’ve made in years.”
“Great.”
“She caught the flight thing. I’d have got on that plane.”
“I caught the flight thing.”
“What?”
“This morning. In the kitchen. I told you I’d been saying it for years.”
“I know you did.” He was reading while he said it. “I meant she caught it in the schedule.”
“Right. She caught it in the schedule. I only caught it in the man.”
“You’d have liked her at fifteen. She was funny.”
“I did know her at fifteen.”
“Right.” He looked up. “Right. Obviously. You were BFFs. Sorry.”
He pressed the heels of both hands into his eyes. His shirt had been on since half past five that morning and I had a whole second of wanting to put my hand on the back of his neck.
Then he took his hands away and looked at me properly.
“You’re still close?” he said. “You and Krystal.”
The one question that would have let me put all of it on the table.
“Y-yeah,” I said.
“Good.” He closed the folder. “That’s good. I’m glad you’ve got somebody.”
And he went to bed.