7. Lena
LENA
I’m on a step stool with a box cutter, taking down the dropped ceiling tile by tile, when my phone starts going off on the windowsill.
Dust in my hair. Grit under my nails. My shoulders are burning in a way that feels like being alive.
Then the phone buzzes. Then again, and again, and it doesn’t stop.
I get down off the stool and wipe my hands on my thighs and pick it up, and it’s City Scene.
KINGSLEY’S NEXT CHAPTER?
There are two photographs.
In the first one my husband and Genevieve Foster are coming out of a service exit, his hand at the small of her back. In the second she’s getting into a car and he’s holding the door for her, her hand on his forearm, and both of them are laughing.
The floor drops away behind my ribs. Heat comes up my neck and floods my face, my mouth goes dry, and under my breastbone a burner I haven’t felt in years lights all at once.
Jealousy. Plain, ugly, married jealousy, and right behind it panic, cold and quick, because she’s laughing.
He’s holding a door and she’s laughing, and I’m standing in a filthy storefront with ceiling in my hair.
I sit down hard on the step stool. My hands are steady on the phone, and somehow that’s the worst part. The rest of me is a house fire and my hands are steady.
Then I do the thing I’m not proud of, and I’d do it again. I zoom in.
His hand isn’t on her back. It’s near it. There’s daylight between his palm and her coat, his fingers curled up off the fabric, his elbow locked, his weight on his back foot. Everything above that man’s waist is trying to leave the alley.
The second photo takes me longer, and it’s the one that settles it.
He’s laughing in it. Or his mouth is. Nobody at City Scene knows this: when my husband really laughs, his hand goes out.
He doesn’t look. He just puts his hand out toward whoever’s next to him—my wrist, my shoulder, the back of my neck—while his eyes stay on the person who said the funny thing.
He got champagne down my dress that way at his cousin’s wedding.
He’s been doing it since our second date and I’ve never once mentioned it, because if I mentioned it he’d start noticing, and then it wouldn’t be his anymore.
In this photograph, both his hands are on the car door.
I sit on that stool in a ceiling’s worth of dust and I know, all the way down, that nothing has happened between those two people.
Which does not help me even slightly. The burner under my breastbone doesn’t care about elbows and doorframes. It just keeps going.
I make myself read the article. Genevieve is “a longtime friend of the family.” Her father’s resorts and our hotels are “natural partners.” Somebody paid for that sentence. And near the bottom, the paragraph that isn’t about Genevieve at all:
Whatever comes next, insiders describe a family that has spent a difficult decade absorbing outsiders who struggle beneath the demands of a dynasty.
Outsiders. Plural is a nice touch. There’s only ever been one and everybody knows it.
My face goes hot again, a different hot, and I put the phone screen-down on the sill before my thumb can find the link at the bottom—the footage that started it, in that soft blue.
They’re not getting the click out of me.
And there’s the other part, the one with nowhere to go.
I like Genevieve Foster. Or I did. We’ve stood next to each other at events for years and never got past the weather, and once she found me hiding in a coat check at a resort conference and stayed with me through a whole cocktail hour, and neither of us ever mentioned it afterward. I thought that was class.
She’s twenty-nine and she looks like the inside of a brochure and she’s known since she could read what she was raised to be. Nobody ever had to sit her down and explain how it works. That’s what Diana means by natural partners. Not the resorts.
Marisol comes in from the hardware store with a crowbar and a bag of gloves and takes one look at my face.
“Show me,” she says.
I show her. She reads it standing up, and her jaw goes, and when she gets to the alley photo she says something in Spanish I’ve only ever heard her use about her landlord.
“It’s staged,” she says.
“I know.”
“No, listen to me. That’s the alley door. Nobody walks a Foster out the alley door. You walk a Foster out the front, under the awning, where the light’s good.” She jabs the phone with a finger. “Somebody put those two people in a doorway where there was a photographer.”
“I know.”
“Then why do you look like that?”
Because knowing it’s staged doesn’t put the burner out, is why. Because none of it changes a single thing about my life this week. I can’t get either of those into a sentence yet, so I go back up the step stool and take down another tile.
His voicemail comes in while I’m up there. I don’t listen to it until the middle of the afternoon, sitting on an overturned bucket eating a granola bar out of Marisol’s bag.
He sounds terrible. Hoarse and slow, like a man who’s been up all night arguing with somebody.
He says he had no idea the photos existed until this morning.
He says the meeting was set by his mother, that Genevieve was already in the room when he got there, that his mother’s office sent them out the service corridor “because of the press at the front,” and that he understands that differently now than he did at the time.
He says there is nothing between him and that woman, there has never been anything, and he’s aware of how a man sounds when he says that.
Then a pause. Then: “I’m not going to keep calling. You know where I am.”
The text after it says the same thing with fewer words. He wrote that one second, once he’d thought about it.
And I sit on an upturned bucket in a filthy storefront and I believe him. It doesn’t feel like deciding anything. I know that man the way I know a footstep in a hallway, and he’s the worst liar in that entire family, and it’s the only thing about him they can’t stand.
So my husband didn’t cheat on me. My husband will never cheat on me. And I’m sitting here anyway, with dust in my teeth, and believing him doesn’t fix one single thing. It just makes it lonelier, because there’s nobody left to be angry at except the person I keep wanting.
The foundation calls at the end of the day.
It’s Caroline Davis, who runs the committees and has never once called me. Beth calls me. So I know the whole thing before she opens her mouth, and my stomach knows it too. It’s already halfway down.
“Lena. How are you holding up?”
“I’m on a ladder, Caroline.”
That throws her a second. “Well—good. Good for you.” She takes a breath, and I can hear paper.
She’s got it written down in front of her.
“So. The winter committee. We’ve had a conversation about the shape of the season, and the board would like to take a different direction with the leadership this year. ”
We’ve had a conversation. Who’s we, Caroline. Heat starts at the back of my neck and pours forward over my scalp and into my face, and my free hand finds the edge of the windowsill and grips it.
“Different how?”
“Just a—we think a fresh pair of hands. It’s a lot to carry, and with everything you have going on?—”
“I don’t have anything going on. I have less going on than I’ve had in years.”
“Lena.” Her voice drops into the register people use in hospitals. “Nobody thinks any of this is your fault.”
“That’s a strange thing to say to somebody who’s just been let go from a volunteer position.”
Silence. Then, quieter, off the paper: “It came from above me. That’s all I can tell you.”
I’m standing in the middle of the storefront with the phone against my ear and my whole face burning, my back teeth set so hard my jaw clicks, and what finally comes out of me is small and stupid and the only thing I actually care about.
“What happens to the reading program?”
“It’s—that’s continuing, of course. It’s a wonderful program.”
“It’s my program.”
“It’s the foundation’s program,” she says, and I don’t think she means it cruelly. I think she believes it. That’s worse. It’s also exactly how it happened.
I don’t ask whether Walter made the call.
I already know. The shape of the season.
A fresh pair of hands. A different direction.
That’s Walter, every word of it. Diana wouldn’t have bothered—a winter committee sits well beneath the level of her attention.
My mother-in-law wanted me gone. My husband’s uncle wanted to be the one holding the door.
When I hang up I’m shaking so hard the phone jumps out of my fingers onto a box, and I stand there with both hands over my mouth and let one sound out into my own palms, short and furious.
Then I kick an empty paint can the length of the room.
It’s loud and it solves nothing and I’d do that again too.
Marisol doesn’t say anything. She hands me a beer she’s had in her bag since the hardware store, warm, and I drink some of it standing in the dust.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay?”
“No. Not okay. I just needed a word out loud.” I set the bottle down on a box. “You know the worst part? I’d have quit that committee eventually. It’s a handful of meetings and a lunch and a woman named Fiona who thinks a raffle is beneath her. I’ve thought about quitting every winter.”
“But you wanted to be the one doing the quitting.”
“I wanted it to be available to quit.” My throat aches around the words. “They didn’t take a job from me. They took a door off a hallway, and now I’m just standing in a hallway with one less door.”
Marisol looks at me for a second. “Okay, that’s grim and I’m getting you a real dinner.”
Then she goes and gets the lease off the windowsill—she’s been carrying it around all day, waiting for a moment that was never going to come—and she puts it on top of a box with a pen.
“You don’t have to do this today,” she says. Which is what she says when she wants somebody to do something today.
So I crouch down over a cardboard box with my hair full of ceiling and I fill it out. Address. Term. Deposit. Emergency contact.
The pen hangs over that line for a long moment. Then I leave it blank, and a cold little weight settles low in my stomach, and I’m not going to think about that right now.
And then the line at the bottom.
Tenant name.
I write Lena Bennett Kingsley, because that’s my name, because I’ve signed it that way at doctors’ offices and on Christmas cards and on every guest list in this city for six years.
I look at it. The last name is doing something to the first two. It’s leaning on them. Kingsley takes up more room than it should and it changes what the rest of it means, the way a big new building changes the block it lands on.
I put the pen down. I pick it back up. Then I draw a line straight through Kingsley, firm, all the way, and I write my initials next to it.
Lena Bennett.
And I sit back on my heels and look at it, and God help me, the paper looks cleaner.