Chapter 8 #2
He might have made a mistake in leaving them alone together.
Ulla had a forceful personality. She tended to steamroll people with meaningful silences and solid smiles and had a way of enforcing her point of view by allowing you to come around to it.
This kind of expected mind reading was a conversational curse that Wes had inherited and one that had meant the downfall of some past relationships, both professional and personal.
He had trouble asking for things from other people—that would be rude.
Better to let someone figure out his desires through watching.
He didn’t act this way in business relationships.
His editorial letters to clients were clear and to the point—he didn’t bullshit them, and it served both parties well—but in personal relationships, he had a way of assuming both the best and worst in the other person simultaneously.
The best in that whoever he was with was the absolute perfect person for him—at least for two weeks.
And the worst in that they didn’t know how to love him without all the connections he brought along.
It was easier to assume temporary status for any relationship.
It was easier to accept the mutability of the heart than to let himself be hurt.
Ulla and Mo were chatting like old friends by the time he got to the table, and amazingly not about pork or butter—or any kind of animal product that he could determine.
Instead, horrifyingly, it was obvious they had been talking about him.
Ulla smiled in an I just showed your baby pictures kind of way when he approached, and he saw her reach for her phone again.
It was surreal to see Mo unfazed by Ulla.
In the past, new friends were showing work samples by this time, but Ulla had paused her embarrassing story about him to check something on her phone.
Of course, Mo was not a new friend. Perhaps Wes needed to make and bring around more enemies to the estate.
Suddenly, Wes’s own phone buzzed, and he reached into his pocket. The message was from Ulla. She is sweet. I like her, but can we talk alone?
He texted back. I’m her ride.
Instead of replying to the text, Ulla pursed her lips and turned to Maureen. “There are several lovely shops around here. How about we walk around together, and we can show you the circuit?”
Maureen glanced uncertainly at Wes. “I don’t want to intrude.”
Ulla, who clearly had won over Maureen more in five minutes than he had in a day, touched her lightly on the arm. “Please do me the favor of letting me show you around. I never get to play hostess to Wes’s friends.”
Mo seemed about to argue again but cast a look at Wes.
The word friends sat as heavy as an anvil between them.
“Sure. Of course.” Two minutes later, the three of them set off again into the chilly morning air.
Ulla led the way—she usually did—and Mo walked in step next to Wes. “I’m not planning on buying anything.”
“That’s fine,” Wes said. “It’s always fun to look.
” Even though he didn’t believe that at all, especially not at the women’s clothing stores that he had been dragged in and out of too many times.
Before he left for boarding school, on days when his nanny was sick, he remembered sitting outside changing room doors or hiding in the giant metal circle racks of women’s skirts and dresses, waiting for Ulla to find the right outfit.
He hated to shop even for himself and subscribed to one of those “order for me” men’s clothing services.
The first stop was a consignment store for luxury clothing.
The window display showed mannequins decked out with entire ensembles, one in what looked like a navy-blue Victorian jacket with tasseled trim and padded shoulders.
“Looks like Miss Havisham out on the town,” Maureen whispered. Wes grinned at her.
The other mannequin wore a pale-pink sateen dress with a ruched flower at its waist. “Jason Wu,” Ulla pointed out as they passed it. “And the shoes are Jimmy Choo.” How she could tell one pair of beige pumps from another was a mystery to him.
Inside the store, long racks lined the walls, color coded and separated by type of garment.
The coats hung out together near the front of the store, while couture dresses lined the back wall.
Shelves of purses hung above the clothing racks to crown them off.
Ulla immediately separated herself, now distracted from the need to talk by the need to browse. Maureen seemed as frozen as Wes was.
“I really don’t need anything,” she said again, not looking at him.
“Neither do I.”
“I mean that I’m not uncomfortable about what I packed.”
“Trust me, we’re here as an excuse for my mother to gab as much as for anything else.
This is her exercise. Some people do yoga, she does shopping.
” Ulla was deep in conversation with the attendant at the counter, gesturing at the bags.
They would be here for a while. Ulla could buy anything new, but she loved the thrill of the hunt, and upscale used-clothing stores offered that to her.
Try as she might, she could not escape her upbringing as the child of a child of the Great Depression and always appreciated what she thought to be a good deal.
Maureen turned toward the closest rack of blouses and fingered a red cap sleeve shirt. “Look at this,” she said, pulling him toward it. “It’s a leather blouse. Who would wear a leather shirt?”
He checked the tag. “It’s lambskin leather with a silk lining. And oh, look at the care instructions.”
Mo maneuvered closer, turning against his chest out of necessity to glance at the label. His heart sped up as her hair pressed against his face, the smell of rose filling his senses.
“Dry clean only by a leather expert?” She snorted. She took a step back, much to his relief. “How do you even determine that? Do you go into every dry cleaner until you see one in leather chaps?”
“If my dry cleaner is wearing leather chaps, I think they probably have a better social life than I do.”
When she wandered off to browse, he noticed her expression change when she stumbled upon something she liked.
Her eyes widened as her fingers reached out tentatively toward a dress.
Her lips, which were very pink and had a shape like they were always about to pout, opened slightly.
His mouth went a little dry and he had to look away.
He didn’t realize he’d wanted to be looked at like that.
He took out his phone as a buffer but found himself staring at the lock screen without typing anything.
What did Mo’s daily life look like? Maybe he’d passed her on a jog in the park and never noticed.
Maybe she’d been at a literary party he’d been dragged to.
The Google alerts hadn’t told him anything about her, other than a few short stories she’d published in the past few years.
In trying to picture the kinds of spaces she might inhabit, his brain felt like it did while drafting a new project.
Unlike with adapting The Proud and the Lost , he didn’t know the characters in her life, though she was starting to get to know his.
That reminded him. Ulla, now freed from her conversation with the saleswoman, had anchored herself near a shoe rack. She didn’t seem surprised when Wes edged next to her. “What’s up?”
“I hate it when you say ‘What’s up.’ ” He had inherited her peevishness, the kind they both got under stress. Her tone was clipped, the consonants exact, but he could tell she was not okay.
“What did you want to talk about?”
“Your father and I are planning on separating,” she said simply, not looking up from the heels in her hand.
“What?”
She still couldn’t look at him, and he couldn’t stop looking at his mother not looking at him. “It might be permanent, it might not. I wanted to tell you before the media got ahold of it.”
“You are the media.”
She turned to meet his gaze, finally, and gestured with the heel. “Oh, you know that’s not true. Although my SEO manager tells me that clicks are up ten percent, whatever that’s worth.”
She said it in a throwaway tone that made him think she knew exactly, in dollars and cents, how much that was worth, but he saw the glaze of tears in her eyes anyway.
He softened his tone. “Why … why are you separating?”
“The spark is gone,” she said simply.
And he laughed. He couldn’t help it. A couple who had been together for forty years. “Of course, the spark is gone,” he said. “I mean, doesn’t the spark just— go at a certain point and the marriage kind of, I don’t know, maintains its momentum anyway?”
“We’ll see,” she said. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder, they say, and maybe that will work for us.”
A crash in the background made them turn around.
Mo seemed to be apologizing to a mannequin that she’d knocked over.
It wasn’t until he got closer that he noticed the woman behind the mannequin, who seemed also to have been knocked off her feet.
“I’m so, so sorry. I found something I thought I might try on, but—”
“It is useful to take it off the mannequin first,” Wes called across the shop, unable to stop himself.
Mo glared so hard that he saw the light at the end of the tunnel.
The look only made her button nose crinkle in a way that was cute, though he doubted she’d appreciate being called that word.
After a minute, bodies—plastic and real—were upright again and Maureen headed into a dressing room with the dress in question.
He took advantage of the relative privacy again. “So is he living at home still, or—”
“He’ll be staying at our home in Tahoe. He’s got his cars loaded on a trailer to head down there now. And the cat.”
“Harold will hate that.” Harold was a ragged old tabby that had been adopted at a Broadway Barks event a few years ago and only taken to his father.