After
Gretchen
Ophelia was wonderful in the welcome assembly.
She hadn’t had long to prepare, but she was an absolutely spectacular butterfly.
At least Gretchen thought that was what she was supposed to be.
It was a little hard to tell, and also not easy to focus.
But Gretchen was there, and she had made it on time.
She had even managed not to tell Cassandra that she thought that Ophelia was the best. Cassandra called that “comparative valuation,” and apparently it was very bad.
Valuation of any kind was verboten, no matter how hard a child worked.
Gretchen had been able to get herself pretty well pulled together by the time she’d left the house—full face of makeup, unwrinkled dress, and her nerves settled some by a cup of chamomile tea.
And she had done a very good job of staying calm and behaving normally ever since she had walked through the doors of the Sloan School’s auditorium.
It was true that she had almost told Cassandra everything the second she saw her.
Her elder daughter was brilliant, charming, and exceedingly capable, skills that made her an excellent investment adviser, just like Richard.
Actually, Cassandra was like Richard in almost every way, which probably accounted for Gretchen’s spasm of need when she saw her.
Once the thrill of watching Ophelia perform had passed, they were trapped in the stillness of the auditorium as the assembly droned on.
Gretchen had been sitting there for only thirty minutes, but it felt like a lifetime.
And it was so hot. For all the money they paid to that school, the least they could do was invest in some decent air-conditioning.
Gretchen adjusted herself in her seat, crossed her legs.
She just needed to calm down. Be patient, that’s all.
But as the third-grade sunflowers gathered onstage, the tingling in Gretchen’s right arm started.
Could she be having a stroke? An actual stroke brought on by the stress of Richard’s arrest?
That was one of the first signs, wasn’t it?
That kind of tingling. In fact, her other arm felt a bit weak, too, and—she pressed a hand to her chest—her heart was racing.
She was sweating again, profusely. She could feel it running in a stream down her spine.
Her throat was so tight she could barely get a mouthful of air.
This was some kind of stroke, for sure. If you acted quickly—she needed to get to a hospital. Now.
Gretchen stood just as the older children, sunflowers, began to dance. “I have to get out,” she leaned over and whispered to Cassandra.
“Mom, what are you doing?” Cassandra whispered back. “Just wait two minutes until this act is over. Then you can go.”
“Now” was all she could manage.
She pushed past Cassandra and down the row of seats, stamping on people’s feet, tripping on their bags. She heard angry voices hissing around her.
Gretchen was almost there, almost to the aisle. One last big push and she’d be out, and free. Only a second away from fresh air and then—
* * *
Brooks pointed out the obvious when she confessed at the end of junior year that she wanted to marry Richard.
They were having lunch together on campus in Foco, as they often did, and she just needed to tell someone.
She was honestly giddy about the whole idea.
But the stunned look on Brooks’s face had taken the wind right out of her sails.
“Marry?” His eyes were saucers. Then he cleared his throat, pushed his glasses up his nose, and focused back on his worn copy of The Grapes of Wrath and his bowl of lunchtime Cheerios. “Your parents are going to freak,” he added under his breath, shaking his head a little bit.
Gretchen felt a flash of irritation. Smug Brooks and his constant reading—anything about the environment, whether it be novels, nonfiction, or memoir.
He devoured all of it, determined to become an enlightened expert on the natural world and how to save it.
He was also head of Planet Watch, a campus group dedicated to taking volunteer trips around the globe to help with environmental cleanup.
It was good work, but also quite calculated, Gretchen always suspected.
Brooks Grace was going to start out as an environmental lawyer at a big firm in D.C.
that had an impressive pro bono record. But he would surely one day run Grace Chemical, which had been recently rebranded as the only chemical company that genuinely cared about the planet.
This Machiavellian marketing strategy was the brainchild of Brooks’s father, a dead-eyed great white of a man forever in search of his next meal.
Brooks’s mother was genuinely lovely, though, unlike Gretchen’s.
Brooks got his kindness from her. But he’d also needed to wall off so much of himself to endure his dad.
That was no doubt why he’d long ago disappeared into his books.
Maybe that was why Gretchen felt such an attachment to him.
She’d always felt sorry for the kind, sensitive boy who was still just trying to survive his childhood. She could relate.
“What do you mean my parents are going to freak out?” Gretchen asked Brooks, though she felt a strong tug of denial.
“Oh, I mean, come on, Grets.” Brooks eyeballed her for a long moment. He was the only person besides her parents who called her that. It irritated Richard no end, which could have been why Gretchen had never asked Brooks to stop.
There was so much about her family that Richard didn’t—couldn’t—understand the way Brooks did.
In part, though, that was precisely what Gretchen admired about Richard—that he’d come from nothing and worked so hard to get where he was.
And she knew he’d keep working that hard.
He’d end up more successful than all his friends; she was sure of it.
She told Richard that all the time, how much she believed in him.
“I’m serious.” Gretchen snatched Brooks’s paperback, so he’d have to look at her. “What do you mean?”
“Come on, Midge and Chad?” Brooks made a haughty face. “They are the biggest snobs on the planet. Didn’t they get rid of a five-year-old dog once when they found out its papers were forged?”
Patches. Oh, God, how Gretchen had adored that dog. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
But she understood exactly. Was that part of why she loved Richard—so she could prove she was nothing like her parents? No, of course not. Or if it was, it was a very small part.
“I love Richard,” Brooks said, his mouth seeming to stick on Richard’s name. Like it was a piece of jagged glass. “He’s a great guy. One of my best friends, and he’s charming as hell. But he doesn’t exactly have the pedigree your parents are looking for.”
“My parents will love him,” Gretchen said. “Just like I do.”
But the truth was, even Richard had voiced concerns. He’d brought her parents up a few times after Gretchen kept inventing excuses for them not to meet.
“Maybe you should just tell them I didn’t grow up going to a country club,” he’d offered. “Give them time to get used to the idea.”
“Please, my parents don’t care about that!
” Gretchen had lied with a flap of her hand.
Of course, that was pretty much all they cared about.
They’d built a marriage on appearances. They’d rooted the life of their only child in those shifting sands.
Richard would never be able to charm them. They were immune to authenticity.
No, they found it confrontational.
Even to Gretchen, Richard did seem a little rough around the edges.
Only if you looked very closely, really.
Richard was smart enough to have picked up on how to dress and proper manners and all that.
The basics. And he didn’t mind when Gretchen corrected him on things like which fork to hold.
Some things you couldn’t fake, though: knowing which of the back bowls at Vail were the least crowded in the afternoon, for instance, or exactly how to order the right bottle of wine from a pushy sommelier.
But rough edges could be smoothed over time.
You could not grow a heart where none existed.
For his part, Richard was unapologetic about being the son of an electrician and a nurse.
And he was not ashamed that his father had been an abusive alcoholic and gambler who, after years of beating Richard regularly, disappeared when he was thirteen, leaving them badly in debt.
And then his mom had started drinking, too.
Eventually, she was let go by the hospital, and Richard had spent high school working nights parking cars to pay their bills.
His mother had died when Richard was a senior in high school.
He’d lived with a friend until he graduated, with his scholarship to Dartmouth in hand.
And yet he stayed so hopeful. Perhaps that was what Gretchen admired most.
But of course Gretchen’s parents were going to care that Richard’s blood was decidedly un-blue.
She’d just been trying so hard to pretend otherwise.
At least Richard had gotten into Dartmouth all on his own and with a full scholarship.
He was captain of the crew team, for heaven’s sake.
Her parents cared about achievements, too.
They just frowned upon the messiness of bootstraps or the dirtying of hands required to pull them up.
“I love Richard for who he is. That’s what matters.”
Brooks narrowed his eyes. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Live in a fantasy world,” he said. “It’s not fair to Richard.”
“What would you suggest I do?”
Brooks shrugged and gently pulled his book from her hands. “Make a different choice. For both your sakes.”
“Love isn’t a choice, Brooks.”
“Of course it is, Gretchen,” he said without missing a beat. “Everything is a choice.”
* * *
“Mom, Mom.”