10A. The Parents
Karen Austin, Mother of Dub
In years past, Karen and Dub went to dinner the Saturday night of Family Weekend with Hakeem Pryce and his parents, Ray and Alysha, at a place called the Wooden Duck Tavern.
The Wooden Duck has a rustic Yankee aesthetic—Windsor chairs, heavy brocade drapes, ivory tapers in glass hurricanes on the tables—and it serves things like pot roast and broiled scallops.
It isn’t overly fancy or intimidating, but Karen suffered through dinner the two previous years because Ray Pryce was a wine guy who dug deep into the Wooden Duck’s cellar, and all Karen could think was that she would be paying for half of a bottle of Chateau Latour Bordeaux that she had three sips of and didn’t appreciate.
Her anxiety evaporated at the end of the evening when Ray Pryce insisted on taking the check.
But last year, after having been his guest twice, Karen said, “Next year is on me.”
Next year is now this year and financially, Karen is worse off than she was last year because her ex-husband’s rafting company went belly-up, he got his skanky girlfriend pregnant (they’re having a girl, bless their hearts), and his child support payments have dried up.
Dub is at Tiffin on a full scholarship; he’s ostensibly given a stipend, but that stipend is only two hundred dollars a year.
Karen sends him care packages of ramen noodles and protein bars, but she’s had to warn him against buying milkshakes at the Grille every day after practice.
For this reason, she should be relieved when Dub tells her that they won’t be having dinner with the Pryces this year because the Pryces are eating with Hakeem’s girlfriend, Taylor, and her mother instead.
“At the Wooden Duck?” Karen asks.
“Yep.”
Karen thinks but does not say, And we weren’t included?
“Is everything okay between you and Hakeem?” Karen asks.
The football game was low stress; the other school could barely field a team, so it was a chance for Dub and Hakeem and the senior running back (sorry, but Karen will never use the phrase “sixth-form”; she finds it obnoxious) to put on a fireworks display.
The boys’ dynamic on the field seemed okay, but when Hakeem came out of the locker room, Karen opened her arms for a hug and—maybe she was imagining things—he seemed a bit cool.
He chatted with her distractedly for a moment before announcing that he had to “find Taylor.”
“Everything’s fine,” Dub says.
“Fine” is the only word Karen’s other three sons seem to know, but Dub is more articulate than his brothers. He knows “fine” isn’t a satisfactory answer.
Finally, he looks at her. “Some stuff was going on,” he says. “But we resolved it. And no, I’m not offering any more details.”
Fair enough, Karen thinks.
She and Dub end up going to dinner at the Alibi in Haydensboro, which is a dive bar with a better-than-it-needs-to-be roast beef sandwich on the menu. They sit at a sticky table. Karen orders a beer and Dub a Coke, and only then does she see his shoulders relax.
“It’s nice,” he says. “Being off campus.”
During dinner, Karen asks questions: Tell me about math.
What’s the new English teacher like? Which class is your favorite?
She’s warming up to the big one, which she finally broaches once they have demolished their sandwiches (Dub eats three) and are splitting a brownie sundae.
“How’s it been?” Karen pauses. “Without her?”
Dub digs his spoon into the sundae so that he gets a good ratio of brownie to ice cream to hot fudge to whipped cream. But before he eats, he flicks his eyes at her, exhales, and says, “If I tell you something, do you promise to keep it secret?”
“Of course.”
Dub tells her about a computer file that Cinnamon sent him before she died. DO NOT OPEN THIS FILE UNTIL THE MORNING OF OUR GRADUATION.
Karen feels like she’s been plopped right into the middle of a teen drama on TV. “You haven’t opened it?”
“I have not.”
“What do you think it is?”
“I don’t know, Mom.” When he looks at her, she takes in his handsome face, cheekbones and eyelashes any girl would kill for, the square jaw replicated in her two older sons, the pimples that remind her he’s still a kid—but what kid has the willpower to obey such a request?
Karen isn’t sure she’d be able to do it herself.
“There’s something else,” Dub says, and he sets down his spoon, sundae suddenly irrelevant. Here it comes, she thinks. He’s finally going to tell her.
She waits. And waits. She wills herself not to force it out of him but she can’t help saying, “I’m a safe place, Dub. My love is unconditional.”
These feel like the right words, but it’s as if she’s poked a turtle with a stick. He retracts back into his shell.
“Whatever.” He resumes his careful excavation of the sundae. “I’m going to honor her wishes.”
In the end, Karen thinks, it wasn’t a bad weekend.
The Thoroughbreds won the game (it amused her how little the other Tiffin parents knew about football) and she left without a six-hundred-dollar charge from the Wooden Duck on her Visa.
But she had hoped for better. She had hoped Dub would finally tell her the truth.
Vikram Banerjee, Father of Davi
Vikram Banerjee is many things, but an idiot isn’t one of them.
His wife, Ruby, tried to persuade him, back when Saylem first entered their lives, that Davi “wouldn’t bat an eye” at the new arrangement.
“I’m sure she’s experimented herself,” Ruby said. “She goes to boarding school, darling.”
Was that what they were paying for at Tiffin? Vikram asked his wife. Davi’s sexual experimentation?
“It’s part of growing up,” Ruby said. What Ruby meant was that it had been part of her growing up while she was a student at King’s School, Canterbury.
When Vik and Ruby first met, stories about Ruby’s exploration with the girls in her house were fuel for the already considerable desire Vik felt for Ruby.
Not once in twenty years has Vik felt jealous of those long-ago school friends, nor of any other woman in his wife’s orbit.
Saylem, however, is different.
Ruby brought Saylem home from the Portobello Road Market one Saturday in late summer as though she were a silk scarf or vintage mirror.
Davi was off in Ibiza and Vikram was on the phone with China, trying to find a reasonably priced cotton vendor for Out of Office’s new line of cropped tees, and he didn’t have the bandwidth to wonder who the young woman in their kitchen was.
When he finally hung up to make himself a cup of tea, Ruby introduced him to “our new friend, Saylem.” Our new friend?
Vik thought. Curious choice of words. Before he could even put on the kettle, Ruby and Saylem started kissing, Saylem’s hands traveled up inside Ruby’s blouse, and a moment later, they pulled Vik in.
He couldn’t pretend to be completely surprised; he and Ruby had recently discussed the idea of a third in order to spice up their sex life.
Vik had been thinking of a late-night tryst at a good hotel, preferably in a foreign city—Rome, Marrakesh, New York—after several bottles of champagne were consumed.
Not a middle-of-the-day sober situation in their family home.
Ruby and the stranger from Portobello Road lured Vik to the master suite, where he came so quickly and so explosively in Saylem’s mouth that he spent the remainder of the interlude watching Saylem and Ruby fondle and tongue each other, which was captivating certainly, though his mind eventually wandered back to his Chinese vendors.
He expected Saylem would leave before dinner, never to be seen or heard from again. He and Ruby would open a bottle of cold Sancerre and toast to checking that particular adventure off their list.
But Ruby wanted Saylem to stay—not just overnight, but indefinitely.
Saylem moved her things—which all seemed to fit in one roller bag—into their guest room, though she spent every night in bed with them.
Vik went along with it because Davi was due home from Ibiza, at which point, he was certain, the fantasy would end.
“You’ll have to leave tomorrow,” Vik told Saylem over an improbably domestic scene of toast soldiers and fried eggs. “Our daughter is coming home.”
Saylem sucked on her vape and looked to Ruby. Vikram pulled a twenty-pound note from his pocket and said, “Would you run to the shops, please, and get us a dozen oranges? I’ll make juice.”
Saylem blinked as if to say she wasn’t there to run errands, though who knew? She’d spoken very little since arriving.
“Thank you,” Vik said, to put a point on it.
Once Saylem left, Vik asked Ruby what the hell she was thinking, Saylem wasn’t a new puppy to show Davi, she was a human being. How were they going to explain a third person to their sixteen-year-old daughter?
We’ll tell her the truth, Ruby said. She then went on about TikTok and Euphoria and some article in New York magazine and Davi not batting an eye.
No, Vik thought. It was wrong, Davi was still a child. She was sophisticated, yes, but their family life had a sanctity, one they would irreparably damage if they introduced Saylem to Davi.
“We can’t do it,” he said. “I’ll die on this hill. It was fun while it lasted, but Saylem has to go.”
Ruby laughed, which was another way of saying Die if you must, Vikram.
He had no veto power—not in their marriage, not in their business partnership.
Ruby’s family had fronted the money to start Out of Office, and their homes in Belgravia and outside Montepulciano had been gifts from Ruby’s parents, now deceased (so Vik couldn’t even appeal to the traditional values of his in-laws).
Vikram had often joked that his last name might as well be Singh.
Ruby was both queen and king of their castle.
Saylem would stay.