Chapter 2 #2
She opened her door before Caroline could knock.
She was in sweatpants and a Temple Law sweatshirt, with her red curls every which way and her reading glasses shoved up into them.
She took one look at Caroline’s face and at the bag in her hand, and she said a word that would have gotten her held in contempt of court.
Then she pulled Caroline inside and hugged her so hard her back cracked.
“I saw it,” Stephanie said into her shoulder. “It’s on the news. Your face is on the news, Caro. They showed you on the balcony after. You looked like the queen of England.”
“Mezzanine.”
“What?”
“It’s a mezzanine. Not a balcony.”
Stephanie pulled back and held her by both arms and looked at her. “Okay. You’re in shock. That’s fine. Sit down before you fall down.”
The apartment was small and warm and a mess. There were legal files on the coffee table and a half-eaten carton of lo mein on top of the legal files. The TV was on with the sound off. On the screen, a news anchor in a red blazer was talking in front of a picture of the Hadley’s dome.
Stephanie grabbed the remote and turned it off so fast she almost threw it.
“Sorry,” she said. “Sorry. I was watching for you.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay. Nothing about this is okay.” Stephanie swept the files off the couch and onto the floor. “Sit. I’m getting you wine. No. Tea. No, wine. Do you want both? You can have both.”
Caroline sat down on the couch. It was the same couch Stephanie had owned since law school.
It pulled out into a bed with a metal bar right across the middle, and Caroline had slept on it after her college boyfriend dumped her, and after Stephanie’s first big trial, and after the night fifteen years ago when they’d both had too much tequila at a wedding.
She had not slept on it in about five years. She realized she had not been in this apartment in about five years. Stephanie had come to the townhouse, or to the store. Caroline hadn’t come here. She had been busy.
Stephanie came back with a glass of red wine and a mug of tea and set them both down in front of her. Then she sat on the coffee table, knee to knee with Caroline, and waited.
Caroline told her.
She told her about the light and the nine seconds and her father on the organ bench.
She told her about the stopwatch. She told her about budget season, and the food they ordered in, and she’d ask me about my day.
She told her about everybody’s waiting. Her voice stayed level for all of it, and then she got to the part where Connor said he liked the version of himself Brittany saw, and her voice just quit. It went out like a light.
Stephanie didn’t say anything. She took the wine out of Caroline’s hand and set it down, and she held both of Caroline’s hands in hers, and she let Caroline sit there with her mouth pressed shut and her eyes burning until she could breathe again.
“He didn’t sleep with her,” Caroline said, when she could.
“Okay.”
“He swears he didn’t. I believe him. He’s a terrible liar.”
“Okay.” Stephanie’s voice was very careful. “Does that help?”
Caroline thought about it.
“No,” she said. “That’s the worst part. I keep waiting for it to help.”
“Because he gave her the stuff that was yours,” Stephanie said. “The talking. The him.”
Caroline looked at her.
“I do family court on Tuesdays,” Stephanie said.
“I’ve heard it before. The ones who say ‘at least I didn’t sleep with her’ never understand why the wife looks at them like they set the house on fire.
” She squeezed Caroline’s hands. “You want me to kill him? I know people. I represent most of them.”
Caroline laughed. It came out wet and cracked, but it was a laugh.
“Not tonight,” she said.
“Offer stands.”
Stephanie pulled out the couch, swearing at the metal bar the whole time. She put on sheets that smelled like her closet and gave Caroline the good pillow and her own flannel pajamas, which were too short. She left the bathroom light on and the door open a crack, the way she had in college.
Caroline lay on the pull-out bed with the bar pressing into her back and the radiator banging, and did not sleep.
Her phone lit up on the floor beside her all night. Connor. Connor. Her father. Connor. A number she didn’t know. Another number she didn’t know. A text from the woman who ran the gift-wrap counter that said only ? we love you. Connor.
At two in the morning, she turned the phone face-down.
At three, she turned it back over, and read every message from her husband, and did not answer any of them.
* * *
Stephanie’s kitchen radio came on at six.
It was an old clock radio on top of the refrigerator, tuned to the morning talk station, and Stephanie turned it on every day to hear the traffic. Caroline was already awake. She was sitting at the tiny kitchen table in her work dress with her hair up and a cup of coffee going cold in front of her.
Stephanie shuffled in, squinting, and hit the button without thinking.
“—and I don’t care what anybody says, folks, that was not a Christmas kiss,” the morning host said. “I’ve watched it about fifty times. I timed it. That went on for half a minute. Thirty seconds! My wife and I don’t kiss for thirty seconds, and we like each other—”
Stephanie slapped the radio off.
The kitchen was silent. The radiator banged once.
“Half a minute,” Caroline said.
“He’s an idiot. He’s a professional idiot. He gets paid to be an idiot.”
“It was nine seconds.” Caroline heard how she sounded and couldn’t stop. “I timed it. I had the stopwatch.”
“Caro.”
“By tonight it’ll be a minute. By next week he’ll have kissed her for an hour.” She picked up her phone. There was an article on the local news site with a title that said HOW LONG WAS THE HADLEY’S KISS? and a poll under it. People were voting. “Look. They’re voting.”
Stephanie took the phone out of her hand and put it in the pocket of her robe.
“You don’t have to go in today,” she said.
“It’s the first Saturday in December.”
“I know what day it is.”
“It’s the second-biggest day of the year.
” Caroline stood up and poured her cold coffee down the sink.
“I have two hundred people on the floor. I have Santa at ten. I have a lady from the children’s hospital coming at noon about the Snow Ball seating, and she is going to cry, because she cries every year. I am going in.”
Stephanie looked at her for a long moment. Then she handed the phone back.
“Take the back door,” she said. “Please.”
* * *
The cab turned onto Walnut Street at seven-fifteen, and Caroline saw the trucks.
There were four of them parked along the curb in front of Hadley’s, big white vans with satellite dishes folded on their roofs.
Reporters stood on the sidewalk in heavy coats, holding coffee, with the store’s holiday windows lit up behind them.
The windows showed a snowy village this year, with little mechanical skaters going around a mirror pond.
Caroline had spent most of a year on those windows.
Now every one of them was the background for a story about her husband’s mouth.
“Keep going,” she told the driver. “Go around the block. Take me to the loading dock on Sansom.”
He kept going.
Her phone rang while they were stopped at the light. It was her father.
“Sweetheart,” Richard said. “Are you all right? Where did you sleep? I called and called.”
“I’m at Stephanie’s. I’m fine, Dad.”
“You’re not fine. How could you be fine.” He cleared his throat. He sounded old and tired and like he had not slept either. “Listen. I’ve been on the phone since six. The board called me.”
“The board.”
“Some of them. They’re worried. There are trucks out front.”
“I know. I’m looking at them.”
“They want calm. That’s all. They want this to blow over before it hurts the season.” He paused. “And Connor called me.”
Caroline closed her eyes.
“He’s very upset,” her father said. “He’s very, very sorry.
He wanted me to know that he’s trying to make things easier for you.
So you don’t have to deal with the press on top of—on top of everything.
” Another pause, longer. “He’s asked Brittany to come in and help manage the holiday floor.
Just through the press situation, sweetheart.
A few days. She’s very good with reporters. ”
The light changed. The cab moved. Caroline did not.
“Connor asked his chief of staff,” she said slowly, “to run my floor.”
“To help. To help you.”
“The woman he kissed last night in front of the whole city. He asked her to come into our store and help me.”
“Caroline, he’s the chairman.” Her father’s voice went thin and pleading. “He has the right. And it’s only—”
“I have to go, Dad.”
“Sweetheart—”
She hung up.
The cab pulled into the alley on Sansom Street, and she paid the driver and got out into the cold.
The loading dock doors were open. Two of the stock guys were unloading a truck of wrapping paper, and they both stopped when they saw her.
One of them, a big kid named Jamal who had worked the dock for three Christmases, took off his hat.
“Morning, Mrs. B,” he said.
“Morning, Jamal.”
“Heck of a show last night,” he said, and then turned red to his ears. “I mean the choir. The kids. I mean—”
“I know what you mean,” she said. “Thank you.”
She went up the freight elevator and along the back hall to the mezzanine. People were already at work. The gift-wrap ladies were setting out their ribbons. A girl from cosmetics was fixing a wreath. Every one of them looked up as Caroline passed, and every one of them looked away too fast.
Her office was at the end of the mezzanine, behind a door with frosted glass. It had been her father’s office before it was hers, and his father’s before that. It was small and full of old sketchbooks and fabric samples and a coffee maker that only worked if you hit it.
Caroline unlocked the door and pushed it open.
The lights were already on.
On the brass hook behind the door, where Caroline hung her own coat every morning, hung a camel coat with the collar turned up.