3. Allison
ALLISON
There’s potting soil under my thumbnail when I walk into the Callahan Air gala, and I only notice because everything else in the room is clean enough to do surgery on.
One whole wall is glass looking out over Manhattan, and the other is a string of screens with Callahan’s routes moving across a dark blue map. London pulses in gold. I curl my fingers around my evening bag to hide the dirt.
A couple of hours ago I was unloading flats of alyssum off a truck, because one of our drivers has the flu. Then I showered in the little apartment over the retail house, where my parents lived when they first owned the place, and put on shoes that have never touched honest ground in their lives.
And I put on the dress. It’s rust-colored silk with thin straps and a skirt that moves when I walk, and it’s the dress I wore on our third date. I haven’t had it on since, and I’m not going to pretend tonight was an accident.
A woman in a headset tells me Mr. Callahan would like me in the receiving line. Of course there’s a receiving line.
I see Gavin before he sees me. He’s under a huge model of our newest jet with Rebecca on one side and the head of our biggest London client on the other, and he looks rested.
My husband looks like a watch ad, and I’ve slept in bursts all week, so the resentment comes up sour in the back of my mouth.
Then he turns and finds me, and his whole face changes.
It’s private, right there in front of everybody. He looks at the dress, then at my mouth, then back at the dress, and I watch him figure out which dress it is. He looks hit, and happy about it. The heat in his face goes straight down my spine and tightens my skin under the silk.
That part’s real. It would be so much easier if it weren’t.
He steps out of the receiving line without asking permission from anybody important.
“You came,” he says.
“You invited me.”
“Lately those aren’t always the same thing.”
No, they aren’t. He puts his hand on my waist and kisses my cheek, and his mouth stays there a little longer than a hello needs.
“This dress,” he says against my ear.
“It covers all the necessary parts.”
“Barely.”
It covers me from collarbone to knee. I smile anyway. “Liar.”
“I’ve been thinking about taking it off since you sent me the picture.” His thumb moves on my hip. “And I didn’t even know it was this one.”
The flush drains out of my face, and dread comes in behind it. Three nights ago I sat in my office in his shirt and asked him how long London would be, and he still hasn’t answered me.
“How long?” I ask.
His hand goes still on my waist. “Not here.”
“That’s been your answer for three days.”
“We’ll talk at home. I promise.”
“Before or after you take off the dress?”
He breathes out through his nose. “Before.”
Rebecca murmurs in his ear, and his face goes calm and businesslike, the look he gets when he already knows how to fix a problem. “Photographs,” he tells me. “Stay close.”
I try.
For a while I stand beside him, and it’s nice.
He tells a banker from Zurich that I own Barrett Greenhouses and a woman who runs a shipping company that I built our living-wall division from nothing.
His hand stays warm on my back, my shoulders finally come down from around my ears, and I start to feel stupid for walking in here braced to get hurt.
Then the photographer starts.
“Mr. Callahan and Ms. Kendall first.”
That’s fair. They stand in front of the gold London route looking exactly like what they are, two people who’ve spent years building the same thing.
“Mrs. Callahan, can you come in on Gavin’s left?”
I step in, and the photographer nudges me toward the edge so the London client can fit between Gavin and Rebecca. Then there’s one with the new London pilots, and I get moved again.
“Just principals on this one, please.”
A young publicist touches my elbow and steers me out of the frame.
Nobody’s rude. Rudeness would at least give me something to push back on.
I end up beside a potted palm with my face hot and my smile stuck on, while my husband and his ex-fiancée stand in the middle of picture after picture.
It’s humiliating in a very polite, well-lit way.
The palm is plastic. I know because its soil is black foam and somebody stapled one of its leaves back on. It feels personal.
“Your company did the greenery tonight, didn’t it?” says a man next to me. He’s old enough to know better.
“No.”
“Really? I thought Barrett was the little family nursery.”
“It was a nursery when my grandfather opened it on the side of the road. My parents bought it from him and grew it, and now we do commercial landscapes and living installations.”
He smiles at me the way you’d smile at a macaroni necklace. “Charming.”
I look at the stapled leaf. “Very.”
Rebecca appears at my elbow before he can make it any worse. “Martin, the Danish delegation’s looking for you.”
Martin leaves fast. Delegates are easier than women with facts.
“He asked me last month whether any of our pilots were women,” she says.
“What’d you tell him?”
“I sent him their résumés. Separately. One a day.”
I laugh before I can stop myself, and that’s one more thing that would be easier if I could just hate her. I understand exactly why Gavin trusts her.
She shifts the tablet in her hands. “Did he explain the new London schedule?”
My fingers go cold around my bag. “No.”
For the first time all night she looks uncomfortable.
“Then he should,” she says.
“You could.”
“It isn’t my marriage.”
“You seem pretty involved in the schedule.”
Her face cools. “I’m involved in the base. Gavin made the schedule personal when he decided to wait.”
Somebody calls her toward the stage, and she walks off without saying she’s sorry. That seems to be the popular choice tonight.
Gavin’s speech is short and good, and when it ends every phone in the room lights up at once.
The company timed a magazine profile to go live the moment he stepped off the stage, and the headline fills the screens along the wall.
THE PARTNERS BEHIND CALLAHAN AIR’S LONDON BET.
Under it is a photo of Gavin and Rebecca walking through a London hangar.
I open it on my phone right there in the middle of the room. I tell myself not to look for my name, and then I look for my name.
Rebecca is Gavin’s “true partner in Callahan Air’s rise from a single leased jet to the name every executive on two continents wants to fly with.
” I have to scroll a long way to find myself.
His lovely wife, Allison Barrett Callahan, softens the famously severe Callahan image through her family’s tasteful greenhouse business.
Tasteful. My ears go hot and start to ring. Last month my crew hauled fieldstone into a hotel lobby by hand. It was extremely tasteful.
The communications director drifts over, pink and pleased with herself. “The pickup’s excellent,” she says. “Gavin’s corrections really helped. The first draft had the wrong number of planes and last year’s client list.”
“He read it?”
“Twice. You know Gavin.”
I do. I know he checked every number in that article and let every word about me stay exactly where it was. That hurts worse than the article, a hot, hard ache right behind my breastbone.
Across the room Gavin’s shaking the London client’s hand with Rebecca beside him, right under the word PARTNERS on the big screen. I don’t throw my drink and I don’t leave. I walk over to my husband, smile at the man he’s talking to, and say, “I need you for a minute.”
I must look exactly as mad as I am, because Gavin excuses himself right away. He takes me into a small office off the ballroom.
“What happened?” he asks.
I hold up my phone. “Your true partner and my tasteful little greenhouse.”
He shuts his eyes. “Allison.”
“You read it.”
“I checked the business parts.”
“Twice.”
“The descriptions are just color.”
“You fixed the numbers.”
“Because it was wrong.”
“So was this.” I put my finger on Rebecca’s name and then on mine. He takes the phone and reads the paragraph again, and his mouth goes hard.
“I should have caught it,” he says.
“You did catch it. You just didn’t think it was wrong.”
“That isn’t fair.”
“I’m really starting to hate that sentence.”
He sets the phone down on the desk. “Rebecca’s my business partner. You’re my wife.”
“Then why does everybody out there think wife is the decorative job? I’ve been moved to the edge of every picture tonight, somebody complimented my warmth, and a man asked me if I did the plastic plants.”
His voice drops. “Who asked you that?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
“Now it does.”
He isn’t angry with me. I almost wish he were. He looks guilty and frustrated and still half turned toward whatever’s waiting for him outside this room.
“The article is business theater for the clients,” he says. “It isn’t our life.”
“It’s the part everybody can see.”
“I know what you built.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” He doesn’t even hesitate, and I believe him, and it doesn’t make the rest of it go away. He touches the side of my face. “You’re the most beautiful woman in that room.”
“That’s not a job either.”
“No.” His thumb moves along my cheekbone. “It’s still true.”
Want comes up under the anger, low in my belly, hot and embarrassing, and he sees it, because he always sees it. His eyes drop to my mouth. For a moment there’s no article and no gala and no London glowing on a screen, just my husband and the dress he remembers.
The door opens. Rebecca’s on the other side with her tablet held against her chest, and she doesn’t look surprised to find his hand on my face.
“One of the London clients is on the phone,” she says. “His people have questions about the contract, and the whole team’s waiting.”
Gavin doesn’t turn around right away. “Give me five minutes.”
“He’s going to bed before that.”
His hand falls away from my face.
“We’re not finished,” he tells me.
“No,” I say. “We never are.”
He flinches, and then he goes to take the call.
I stay. I sit through dinner and smile beside him whenever somebody wants a photo that needs a wife in it. When Gavin gives the dinner toast, he thanks me for “keeping the living part of my life alive.” It’d be sweet if it didn’t make me sound like one more service he pays for.
When it’s finally over I get into the back of the car, and he climbs in a minute behind me. The privacy glass goes up. Rain streaks the windows and the city goes by outside them, and he pulls his tie loose, and neither of us says a word for a few blocks.
Then he turns to me.
“There’s something about London I should have told you before tonight.”