6. Izzy
— ? —
Izzy
Two weeks of flowers.
Roses the first morning, white ones, with a card that said I’m sorry.
Please call me. Peonies the day after, because he knows they’re my favorite, I told him years ago about my grandmother growing them, back when he still collected facts about me.
That card said I know these won’t fix anything.
I just need you to know I’m thinking of you.
Helena carried both arrangements out to her car without being asked.
“Mount Sinai again?” I asked from the stairs.
“The nurses have named me their patron saint.” She balanced the vase on her hip and looked at me over the blooms. “The cards, sweetheart. Do you want them?”
“Throw them away.”
She didn’t throw them away.
I know because I went looking two nights ago and found them in the kitchen drawer, rubber-banded together, and I sat on the floor and read every one and then put them back and hated myself for it.
By the end of the first week he’d worked his way up to orchids, the rare kind, four hundred dollars a stem. I’ll wait as long as it takes. This week it was wildflowers, buckets of them, so many the delivery guy had to make trips.
There’s been a man with a long lens parked across the street since the third morning. On the fifth, Helena walked a coffee out to his car, and when he thanked her she told him it was so he’d have something to do with his hands besides pointing that thing at her house.
“Your foyer looks like a funeral parlor,” I told Helena.
“My foyer looks loved.” She handed me the newest card without reading it. “This one’s thick.”
I love you. I’ve always loved you. I’ll never stop.
Every card in the same tidy florist’s print. He dictated his heartbreak over the phone, and someone with a nicer pen wrote it down for him.
I know you love me. That was never the question.
Tonight is the Carter Foundation Gala.
I built this event. I picked the venue and the caterer, charmed auction donations out of people who owed me favors, sat across from donors at lunch and told them why a kid who can’t read a get-well card deserves better. My name is on the invitation, engraved, right beside his.
Mr. Wilson Carter and Mrs. Isadora Carter request the pleasure of your company.
This afternoon Helena found me on the sofa in my bathrobe with unwashed hair.
“You don’t have to go.” She perched on the armrest. “No one would blame you.”
“They’d understand completely.” I pulled the robe tighter. “Poor thing. Couldn’t face everyone. Who could blame her?”
“That’s what I said.”
“That’s why I’m going, Mom.” I stood up. “It’s my gala. My charity. My name on the damn invitation. He gets the company and the jet and the headlines. He doesn’t get this.”
“And if he’s there?” She asked it gently.
“He’ll be there. It’s his name on the building.”
“And if she’s there?”
My stomach dipped. I hadn’t let myself go that far. “She wouldn’t dare.”
Helena looked at me for a long moment, then reached out and smoothed my hair back from my face. “Then we’d better wash this.”
***
The dress is emerald green with a slit up the thigh, bought for an event Wilson canceled the week of. Tokyo, that time. It’s been hanging in plastic ever since.
Helena zipped me into it an hour ago and studied me in the mirror. “You look like a woman who’s done apologizing.”
“I never apologized.”
“You’ve been apologizing for years, honey. Just never out loud.”
My grandmother’s diamond studs go in last. If I have to walk into that room alone, I’m at least taking her with me.
The car stops at the Metropolitan Club and I step out alone. The flashes start immediately.
“Izzy! Over here!”
“Mrs. Carter, did you file for divorce?”
“Any comment on Sabrina Burnham?”
I give them a smile and nothing else. Let them print grace. It’s the only thing I’m wearing tonight that can’t be torn apart in the comments.
Inside, the ballroom glows, chandeliers, white linen, my centerpieces, my auction tables. Conversation hums along under the string quartet until people start noticing me. Then the hum dies in patches, and comes back lower, and I don’t need to hear the words to know them by heart.
They came for a show. Smile. Make them buy a bracelet instead.
“Margaret.” I kiss the powdered cheek of our biggest donor. “You came.”
“Wild horses, darling.” She grips both my hands and drops her voice. “How are you? Truly. I’ve thought of nothing else all week.”
“Truly? I’m upright in four-inch heels, which counts as a triumph.” Her laugh comes out startled and real. “Go look at the auction. There’s a Cartier piece with your name all over it.”
“You’re wicked.”
“I’m fundraising.”
She pats my cheek and releases me.
Harold Finch catches my elbow near the bar. Eighty-two years old, steel fortune, hasn’t given a dime to children’s literacy since his wife passed.
“Isadora. Lovely as always.” He gestures at the room with his bourbon. “Though I confess I’ve never understood why I should care whether other people’s children can read.”
“Harold.” I step a little closer. “Dorothy read to your grandkids every Sunday. You told me that at her memorial. You said it was the only time the house felt full again after she got sick.”
He goes still.
“There’s a boy in one of our programs who’s never been read to. Seven years old and he’s never had someone sit next to him with a book. His mom does her best but she’s working nights. There’s no Dorothy at home.”
I let that sit for a second.
“Dorothy gave that to your grandkids every week. We’re just trying to give it to kids who don’t have a Dorothy.”
He stares at his bourbon. His jaw works like he’s chewing on a word he doesn’t want to say.
“Twenty-five thousand,” he finally says. “Put her name on it. Dorothy Finch.”
“I will. And Harold?” I wait until he looks at me. “She’d be so proud of you.”
He waves me off like I’m being ridiculous, but his eyes have gone glassy when he turns toward the auction tables. I watch him go and give myself three seconds to feel that win.
Then Bitsy Prescott corners me, and she gets four words into “We saw the news…” before her husband’s hand closes over her elbow.
“The auction,” he says, too loudly. “Marvelous spread this year.”
“Bid on the Aspen week, Charles. Bitsy deserves a view.” I touch her arm as if she said nothing at all. “Ski passes included, so you’re out of excuses.”
They laugh too hard and drift off whispering before they’re even out of earshot.
I’m not a widow. Everyone keeps forgetting that nobody died.
I keep moving through the room the way I have at a hundred of these, cheek, cheek, thank you for coming, yes, the children’s wing breaks ground in spring, and I almost believe I’ll get through the night.
Then the back of my neck prickles.
Wilson stands across the ballroom in a black tuxedo, holding a full glass he clearly hasn’t touched, ignoring the man talking at him. Dark circles, hollow cheeks, the last two weeks have taken actual weight off him.
Good. I hope the ceiling keeps him company every night.
Then he catches me looking, and his lips move around my name, and the ache lands in the exact spot I can’t afford tonight. He sets the glass down. He starts toward me.
Red steps into his path.
Sabrina Burnham, in a gown cut to her navel, blonde waves over bare shoulders, laughing at whatever she’s already saying to him, her hand landing on his arm. He answers her. He doesn’t step back. He doesn’t move her hand. In the middle of his wife’s gala, with phones rising all over the room.
She’s here. At my gala. Touching my husband. And he’s letting her.
My legs carry me over before I decide anything. The crowd parts so smoothly it’s almost polite.
“Sabrina.” I make my voice bright and social. “How generous of you to attend the Carter Foundation Gala. I don’t recall seeing your name on the guest list.”
“Isadora.” She doesn’t even blink. “What a beautiful event. Wilson invited me. Personally.”
The room narrows to a point.
I turn to Wilson. I keep my face exactly where I put it, pleasant, composed, and I watch him read everything underneath it anyway. He’s the only person alive who can.
“Did he.”
“Izzy.” His voice is wrecked. “Her father… the invitation wasn’t… please, let me explain…”
“Enjoy the auction, both of you.” I straighten a place card that doesn’t need straightening. “The Cartier piece is getting a lot of attention. Excuse me. I have a speech to give.”
“Izzy, please…”
I’m already walking.
Dana meets me at the stage stairs with her clipboard hugged to her chest.
“Mrs. Carter.” Her eyes flick toward the ballroom. “I saw the guest situation. Say the word and I will handle it. I know the fire marshal personally.”
“Tempting.” The laugh that escapes me surprises us both. “But we’re raising money for children tonight, Dana, and jail would complicate that.”
“For the record, I would have done it.”
“That’s why you get the good champagne.” I squeeze her wrist and take the stairs.
She murmurs into her headset. The lights dim. A spotlight opens on the podium and I climb into it with my heart slamming and my smile on straight.
“Good evening.” Steady. Thank God, steady. “Thank you for being here for the Carter Foundation.”
Applause. I find a point on the back wall and hold it.
“The first year we did this, I sat in a hospital ward and watched a little boy hold a get-well card from his grandmother. He couldn’t read it. He wanted to, he kept turning it over, looking for a way in. No one had ever sat with him long enough to show him how letters turn into words.”
The room goes silent, the good kind of silent.
“His mother worked three jobs. His teachers had thirty other kids who needed just as much. That boy was going to slip through every crack this city has, and he was six years old, and he already knew it. You could see it in how carefully he put the card back in its envelope.”
Where’s Wilson. Don’t look.
I look. He’s exactly where I left him, alone now, eyes shining, and he mouths my name again. I move my gaze back to the wall.
“Because of tonight, two hundred children get somebody who stays in the room with them.” My voice holds.
I don’t know how, but it holds. “Tutors. Books. A grown-up who shows up and keeps showing up. That’s the whole program, honestly.
It isn’t complicated. Most love isn’t. You just have to be there. ”
I hear how it sounds the second it leaves my mouth. So does everyone else. The silence gets very loud, and somewhere in it, a wine glass stops halfway to someone’s lips.
“Thank you for being there. Bid generously. Goodnight.”
The applause swells and I’m down the far stairs before it peaks.
The service hallway is quiet after all that noise. My heels click past the kitchen, through a door marked EXIT, and then I’m outside on some loading dock that smells like wet cardboard.
And I just break.
I can’t help it. I press my hands over my mouth but the sobs come anyway, loud and ugly, and I end up sliding down the brick wall in my nice dress like some kind of movie cliché. My mascara is everywhere. My shoulders won’t stop shaking.
Inside I can hear the quartet starting up again. A pretty, upbeat piece. It sounds so stupid from out here.
He invited her. He actually invited her. To my gala.
I’ve been getting destroyed online for two weeks. He’s seen all of it. He knows what people have been calling me. And he still put her name on the guest list.
For a deal. For a signature. For anyone who isn’t me.
I’m sitting on a loading dock in a dress that cost more than my first car, crying so hard I can’t breathe, because my husband picked a business dinner over his wife.
Again.
Like always.
Some kid from catering backs out the door with a crate and spots me. He freezes for a second, then turns right back around and disappears inside.
Yeah. I get it. I wouldn’t want to be here for this either.
The crying doesn’t stop until everything hurts. My throat. My ribs. My face.
My phone comes out and I text the driver.
I don’t bother fixing my makeup. What’s the point? Who am I trying to look good for now?
The door behind me stays shut.
My eyes keep going back to it even though I know better.
That speech I gave up there was all about showing up. About being there for people. Three hundred people heard it. Wilson heard it. He was watching me the whole time I said it.
And the door is still shut.
I keep waiting for it to open but it doesn’t. He’s not coming after me.
He’s probably in there right now holding a glass of scotch he won’t actually drink, making small talk with people who don’t matter, and it hasn’t even occurred to him to come after me.
Why would it? He never has before.
My car pulls up and I climb in. The driver takes one look at my face in the mirror and doesn’t say anything. I could kiss him for that.
We pull away and I look back once. Just once. The windows are all lit up. I can hear music from the street. My event is still happening in there without me.
And the door I walked out of is still closed.
I don’t know why I thought tonight would be any different.
I walked out that door and some stupid part of me actually waited. Stood there in the cold like an idiot, hoping he’d come after me.
Hoping that this time, just this once, I’d be important enough to chase.
He flies across the world for people he barely knows.
He’ll drop everything for a meeting, for a deal, for someone else’s emergency.
But he couldn’t walk through one door for me.
Mom’s going to be awake when I get home. She’ll take one look at my face and know exactly what happened. She’ll put the kettle on and sit with me and she won’t say I told you so.
At least not out loud.