After
Gretchen
Gretchen could see the crowd clustered outside the courthouse from a block away. Maybe they were some kind of tour group, lined up waiting to get through security, she tried to tell herself.
“Oh my God,” Cassandra said, leaning forward from the back seat of the SUV. She and Becks were in the way-back row, Elizabeth in the bucket seat next to Gretchen’s. Sam was driving—the only normal part of all this. “Who are those people?”
“Who?” Gretchen echoed as if she wasn’t looking right at them. She had a bad feeling she knew exactly who they were.
“I think they’re reporters,” Becks said, squinting to get a better look.
“Vultures. Just ignore them,” Elizabeth said as if she were well versed in navigating the press. For all Gretchen knew, she could be. “Opportunistic motherfuckers.”
“Elizabeth, please. You know I hate that word.”
“Motherfucker,” Becks muttered, like a child trying it on for size.
“Sorry, but if the shoe fits…All reporters are ever trying to do is get attention and yet everyone looks to them to see what’s important. How is that a good idea?”
“Can we maybe not get a lecture on systemic injustice right now?” Cassandra snapped.
“Girls, please. Don’t bicker,” Gretchen said, though there was something comforting about the normalcy of it.
Gretchen already felt sick to her stomach just imagining the questions that might be hurled her way—Mrs. Falk, are you standing by your husband? Did you know he was having an affair with Frankie Callahan? What if they phrased it like that, like it was already an accepted fact?
She was still worried first and foremost about Richard. How he was holding up, whether he was lonely, panicked. Afraid. Plus she missed him. She understood Hilary’s point about packing Richard’s bags if he had cheated—but she had no evidence that he had. She didn’t know anything for sure yet.
* * *
Brooks was laughing at her. A great big belly laugh.
And not just in her general direction—in Gretchen’s face.
They were sitting on the porch of the East Hampton house in two oversize, cushioned armchairs that caught the breeze right off the ocean, the water glinting in the distance beyond the long, manicured lawn and a gorgeous row of mulberry trees. As usual, Richard was at the office.
Gretchen shot Brooks a look and kicked his foot. “Excuse me—why are you laughing?”
But she’d already started to laugh, too.
There was nothing like the comfort of their shared history.
Especially these days when she’d been feeling increasingly isolated.
It was something about the women in her circle lately or perhaps the ages of the children now or Richard’s increasingly hectic schedule.
Gretchen often felt like she could disappear. No, like she’d already been erased.
“I’m laughing because you just said you wouldn’t care what Richard did for a living.”
Brooks had his legs propped up on an ottoman, sunglasses on, his face covered with stubble. He looked so different. Not bookish at all. Actually, quite handsome, in a way Gretchen had never noticed before. She was glad to see he was finally coming into his own.
He’d been with Gretchen and the kids at their house in East Hampton for four days, without Melinda.
He hadn’t explained why she hadn’t turned up, but they often traveled separately because of their jobs.
They were often just separate, period. Gretchen had pointed this out to Brooks more than once.
(Women cheated, too!) But he always said he trusted Melinda.
And Brooks had some unexpected time to burn, with an extended hiatus between the end of his job as an environmental lawyer in D.C.
at Sinclair, Williams—one of the top firms not just in Washington, but in the country, as he liked to remind everyone—and the start of a new senior vice president role at Grace Chemical.
Thank God Melinda wasn’t there. Gretchen could not stand that smug woman.
Melinda couldn’t help but mention, at every possible turn, that she had gone to college in “Cambridge.” Every word out of her mouth dripped with condescension; she honestly seemed to think that having a job outside the home was the only measure of a person’s worth.
Did Melinda not realize that Gretchen could tell exactly what she thought of her being “just a housewife”?
Then again, she probably wanted Gretchen to know she looked down on her.
Melinda could surely see the way that Brooks looked at Gretchen—everyone could.
“I mean it. I don’t see how it’s funny. I wish he were home more. That matters to me much more than his résumé.”
“I’m laughing because that’s bullshit, Grets,” Brooks went on.
“You can try to pretend that it wouldn’t have made a difference to you if Richard had been a plumber.
But that’s only because you were going to inherit from your parents anyway.
And even then, I still think you’d have cared.
You’re a snob, Grets. It’s not your fault. It’s genetic.”
“I am not a snob!”
But it was a fact that Gretchen admired Richard’s professional success more than she cared to admit—especially because he had made it without becoming cutthroat or manipulative.
Would she have loved Richard without Goldman Sachs?
Loved him for his soulful eyes and dazzling smile, his kindness, the way his voice was husky in the morning, or the way he teared up when he looked at the children’s baby pictures?
Or any baby pictures, really. Gretchen certainly thought so.
But—if she was completely, brutally honest—she couldn’t say for certain.
Brooks lifted his wineglass as if to toast her.
“Anyway, you’re a snob. And so am I. So is anyone who grew up the way we did.
It’s an occupational hazard.” He tilted his head to the side and smiled sympathetically.
“Sometimes life is easier when you stay with your own kind. That’s just a brutal fact.
And that’s true wherever you come from. Come on—I’ve heard Richard complain.
He doesn’t get the stupid social obligations, the tedious boards, the benefits, the miserable cocktail parties with certain other families.
But you have to keep it all up.” Brooks paused.
“Richard likes to…wander. And fair enough.”
“Wander?” Gretchen sounded offended. She was offended. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Sorry, bad choice of words. He doesn’t like social niceties. He likes to think of himself as above that kind of thing. Melinda is like that, too. All I’m saying is that—”
“I should have married you?”
He rolled his eyes, but the jab had hurt him. Gretchen could tell. And she felt bad. He was only trying to be a good friend, and she was being defensive.
“I’m saying that I understand, that’s all. And I always will.”
* * *
In the end, no one spotted them until they were nearly at the courthouse door, but when it finally happened, the reporters flocked alarmingly in their direction.
“Mrs. Falk, Mrs. Falk!” they shouted over and over again as they rushed up the stairs, microphones, recorders, and iPhones extended like swords, camera shutters like a cascade of tiny fireworks.
And then suddenly the most unearthly calm overtook her.
Like it had when she was little, and her father would get lost in one of his drunken rages.
The kind that in Richard’s house would have ended in bloodshed, but in hers only resulted in terrifying dread.
Her body was tethered to the ground, but her heart floated up and away to safety.
She was a machine now with one job: protect her family.
“Don’t look their way and move quickly,” Gretchen instructed the children. “But do not run. We have nothing to be ashamed of.”
They picked up the pace, but they were still on a collision course with the reporters. All except Becks, who was so fast with his long legs he was already ten steps ahead. Elizabeth, Cassandra, and Gretchen were almost jogging, but not quite.
Gretchen saw the girls as they had been once upon a time—running ahead to get to the Central Park Carousel, holding Becks’s toddler hand.
She had enjoyed every second of watching them grow, the decades of loving Richard.
All of that was real and true. This situation didn’t change any of it.
With each pounding step, Gretchen felt more certain than ever that she was ready for this battle, whatever it entailed.
No more chasing down heartbreak with Hilary, and she’d pay the money she owed, wrap up that situation.
She was keeping her family together, no matter the cost.
The second they pushed through the revolving doors, a short, round security guard charged in their direction, belly swinging, keys jangling. “No, out!” he bellowed angrily, waving a hand. “No, no, no!”
“I’m sorry?” Gretchen asked as they jerked to a startled stop. “We have a—”
“No, no, not you,” the guard growled, charging past them. “Out, out!” he shouted as a couple of the reporters spilled inside. “You know the rules. Hassle the families, and you’ll get banned.”
“That’s not a rule,” a young white man shouted back. He’d been one of the ones quickest up the steps. “You can’t make something up that tramples on the First Amendment.”
“Watch me,” the security guard said, looming over him. “And watch the chief judge back me up by parking your ass in jail while we work out the so-called legalities.”
The rest of the reporters retreated through the doors, grumbling. Soon the young man had also disappeared.
“Thank you,” Gretchen said as the guard walked past, motioning for them to pass through the X-ray machines.
“Wasn’t for your sake, lady,” he said without bothering to look her way again.
Because Gretchen was a person of no consequence there. It was a new feeling, but one she was fairly sure she was going to have to get used to.
—