In Twenty Years: A Novel (4 page)

“And your parents?” Tatiana semi-snorts.

“I’m not sure my mom believes in Thanksgiving anymore. Taking up the injustice of the Native American. Or the sacrificial turkey. Maybe both.” Lindy rolls her eyes. But still, she wonders if anyone would ever cook her Thanksgiving in July, which actually sounds kind of sweet. “Yeah,” she says. “What a stupid fucking idea. Thanksgiving in July. Why not Christmas in April? Halloween in March?”

Tatiana leans in and kisses her perfunctorily once more.

“I just popped in to say good luck tonight. I gotta run: crisis on a CW set. I’ll see you at the after-party.”

Lindy waits until the door latches shut to reread the Thanksgiving menu. She wavers, then prints it out to suggest to her chef.

Then she clicks on The Crafty Lady’s contacts page, her finger twitchy, and pulls up Catherine’s e-mail address. (Like this is actually Catherine’s e-mail. Catherine’s company is about to go public: Lindy had seen a tweet about it a few weeks ago while she scrolled through Twitter late one night, plagued by a bought of insomnia—the insomnia brought on by Tatiana and Leon and all the possible ensuing complications. The CEO’s e-mail address would hardly be announced right there, on the contacts page. Lindy knows this. Her own assistant usually tweets or Facebooks or Tumbles or whatever for her. Lindy doesn’t really have time for all that, and she’s guessing Catherine doesn’t either.)

And this leads Lindy to an epiphany.

I don’t need this shit,
she thinks. Why go poking a bear when it’s better left alone?

Instead, she yanks open her desk drawer, full of sharpened but unused pencils, and drops the FedEx in, slamming it shut with such force her entire desk trembles. She’ll figure out what the fuck this is all about after the show. More important things are waiting, like earning her $4 million. More important things like finishing up the best song of her life, which might finally make her label say:
You still got it.

She stands abruptly and ignores her puffy, sad reflection as she strides out the office door toward the waiting catsuit. No one ever said Lindy wasn’t capable of proving everyone else wrong.

3

CATHERINE

Catherine is in the test kitchen, her staff of eleven swirling around, and nothing is going as planned for the HGTV taping exactly thirty-nine hours from now. This was supposed to be their trial run for the pilot she’s filming, and the pilot she’s filming could very well save her company, or at least buffer it until the deal with Target comes through. But the flesh of the apples is already browning! And they’re Granny Smiths, for God’s sake! Is no one on her team aware of the fact that Granny Smiths are
green
,
not
red
,
as she specified? Why would she want
green
apples on a Fourth of July shoot? And the plates—
the plates!
—are showing water marks! Oh, and she requested royal-blue napkins, and these are unequivocally a deep shade of navy.

“Stop!” she says to the photographer, whose name she can’t remember but who is snapping, snapping, snapping away to capture stills for The Crafty Lady website.
“STOP!”
she barks louder, and he peers an eye above the lens, as if just hearing her for the first time, and lowers the camera.

“Sasha! Please call Owen and tell him I’m taking a later car home.” Catherine snatches the napkins off the table. “Ask if the kids want to FaceTime after their showers.”

Sasha, her twenty-five-year-old assistant, with blotchy cheeks and terrified eyes, scurries around a lighting tent, her phone already to her ear.

“And please be sure that Mason has studied for his spelling test!” Catherine calls after her. “Tell Owen that I don’t want to get another e-mail about him not living up to his potential.”

Is it spelling? Catherine isn’t sure. It could be a math test, actually. She can’t remember the specifics. Something. It’s something about Mason not living up to his potential, like third graders need to worry about potential. But these days, Catherine guesses, maybe they do.

Sasha rushes back in, the phone against her shoulder, and drops a pile of printed e-mails on the disastrous Fourth of July table.

“Forgot to give you these,” she mouths, pale and skittish, and then is off. She reminds Catherine of an overcaffeinated fox.

Somehow, out of the 543 e-mails in Catherine’s inbox, Annie Eisley Cunningham made the list of print-worthy must-reads. Catherine rubs her forehead, regretful at her piercing tone, regretful that her assistant (and the rest of her staff) scurry around her, regretful that she’ll be missing another dinner at home. That’s six in a row, something Owen will surely remind her about.

Owen also tells her that it’s
just amazing
how she can run a nearly-billion-dollar company but can’t figure out how to schedule sex with him. She tells him (she doesn’t really, she just says this in her head because all she actually does is apologize and feel guilty), that it’s
just amazing
how fortunate he is to be a stay-at-home dad when he decided that he loathed being a lawyer and his wife happened to blow up in the blogosphere and then, in the span of a decade, sits on the precipice of taking her company public.

Yeah,
she thinks now, swapping out navy napkins for a more patriotic royal tone, even though Owen isn’t here and has nothing to do with this particular problem.
It’s goddamn amazing, Owen, it really is.
What she also doesn’t say to Owen is that The Crafty Lady has seen a treacherous slide over the past year; copycat bloggers have produced content faster and fresher, with younger demographics and hipper ideas. So if she
doesn’t
work these late nights, doesn’t slave over the right color of napkins, then the treacherous slide will evolve into a full-blown avalanche. And then what? They’ve built their whole lives around her success. Owen included.

But Annie’s name makes Catherine smile. She runs her fingers over the paper, like this brings them closer, and she wishes they’d stayed tighter, been in better touch. But life got busy: children were born and work took up so much time, and there were dinner parties with preschool parents, and there was that catastrophe from their wedding, and of course, once Bea died . . . If she hadn’t, Catherine knows they’d never have splintered, the six of them. But she did, and they did, and as Owen likes to say so often now, “You’ve made your bed, so lie in it.”

Actually, what he says is: “You’ve made the bed, Catherine! And the sheets, and the pillows, and the bedside candles, so just go lie in it, and I’ll be right here managing the kids’ homework and sports schedules!”

Usually, she’s so tired that she pretends he’s not being sarcastic and, in fact, goes to their bedroom and passes out.

“Catherine.” Sasha has returned and hands her a green-tea energy drink. Catherine drops the e-mail stack on the table. “I hate to tell you this.” Sasha’s voice drops to a whisper. “But I was just scrolling through some images from last year to compare . . . and . . . well . . . we used these same napkins last year. And that cookie design too. I mean, I know this is for the pilot, but since they’re going live on our site too . . .”

Catherine can barely hear her now.

“What?”

Sasha clears her throat. The air vacuums from the room.

“The firecracker cookies. We did those last year. And . . . the mason jar centerpiece.” She’s whispering again. “Very similar.” A pause. “That’s why I was checking.”

Catherine leans forward to hear her. “What?”

Fred, her lead designer, appears beside her.

“They’re not the same.”

Sasha stares at her feet. Catherine stares at Fred. Fred finally withers and says: “They’re similar, but not the same.”

Catherine knew it! She beats a fist against her thigh. Catherine knew she shouldn’t have put anyone else in charge.

“Goddamn it, Fred.”

Fred tucks a flop of blond hair behind his pink ears and looks like he might cry.

“There are no tears in craft design,” Catherine says, incredulous, and Fred swallows too much air and hiccups.

“I’m exhausted,” he says, as tears do begin to seep out. “Tapped dry. We turn these around every other week, Catherine! I can’t . . . I can’t keep up.”

“So you thought stealing from last year was the best way to go? That no one would notice? Stealing is
never
the solution! It’s the worst form of crafting, Fred! The lowest of the low.”

Catherine starts to say more, but suddenly clamps down, her mouth pressing into a thin line, her lips then morphing into an angry comma. She worries that she’s said too much, that her overzealous rebuke might actually betray her own guilt, her own notebook full of others’ ideas that she pulls up, prints out furtively late at night, and tucks away for inspiration. Never, she tells herself, for plagiarizing.

Catherine sighs loudly and grabs the stack of e-mails, marching off the set, her staffers parting ways, like the Red Sea for Moses, to give her space. She slams the test-kitchen door and exhales, savoring the silence, the solitary moments when no one is asking her for anything, no one figuratively tugging on each arm, needing something more. She starts down the hallway, rounds one corner, then rounds another. Over and again. The walking clears her head, lets her
think
,
refuels her neurons. She tosses her shoes by the elevator and takes another lap, then remembers the e-mails, the papers in her hand.

Annie Cunningham.

Why on earth is she e-mailing?

She stops abruptly by the women’s restroom. Her shirt feels sticky now, the silk clinging to her lower back, the sky-blue fabric turning a deeper shade where sweat has seeped in. She tugs at her waist, then at her neckline. The air smells like vanilla honeysuckle because they were testing scent sticks as part of a new product line to lure Target into partnership—a partnership that would infuse the company with much-needed cash—especially if the pilot doesn’t go. A partnership that Catherine needs more than Target needs her.

She leans against the door of the bathroom.

Dear Catherine:

Wow. It’s been years! I love watching your segments on Good Morning America! And The Crafty Lady . . . I check it every day! Also, I really loved your Halloween decorating ideas from last year: I am on our building’s co-op board, and I followed them to a T for our lobby!! They were such a hit that I’ve been asked to head up the decorating committee again this year!

Anyway. Gosh, now I feel silly. Maybe this won’t even get to you. But . . . did you get a FedEx today? From . . . Bea? Or Bea’s lawyer? Well, I did. And Lindy did because she texted me out of the blue.

It is all very weird, and I’m not sure what to make of it. It seems that she owns our house. Our old house on Walnut Street. I know. It doesn’t make sense to me either. When would she have done this? Why would she have done this?

Anyway, let me know.

xoxo,

Annie

Catherine’s brow creases (she doesn’t do Botox because it does not play well with her middle-America demographic) as she tries to connect the dots.

Catherine hasn’t thought much about their old house on Walnut Street over the last two decades. She doesn’t have a clue what Annie is talking about or why on earth Bea would have bought it, or what a FedEx bearing this news would mean. But when she does think about that old house on Walnut Street, just for a beat of a moment there against the door to the ladies’ room with vanilla honeysuckle in the air, she senses a tiny flourish of nostalgia, a pulse of a memory when life was simpler and she—they all—were so happy. It was almost twenty years ago—
eighteen years!
—but the feelings come easily, quickly, catching Catherine off guard, flooding her lower lids with tears.

She bats her pink-polished fingers to dry the dampness and glances around to ensure that no one bears witness to her weakness. There are no tears in craft design.

Then she tilts her head against the wall, her body sinking against it, its weight the only thing propping her up, keeping her from sliding like jelly onto the ground.

It couldn’t have been so long ago,
she thinks.

It stings like it was just yesterday.

4

OWEN

Owen looks like a startled deer when Catherine unexpectedly drops her tote in the mudroom and skulks into the kitchen. He literally jumps a few inches from his perch on the stool by the granite kitchen island and yells, “Holy shit.” His Heineken bottle spins to the floor and shatters.

“I’ll get that,” Catherine says, already heading to the pantry to retrieve the broom.

“I can do it,” he offers, though he doesn’t move, doesn’t feel like moving. “What are you doing home? I thought . . . Sasha called me and said . . .” He trails off, not wanting to sound displeased that she’s home. Because he’s not. Though her arrival changes the tone of the evening, a colder wind blowing through what he thought would be a warm, breezy night.

Catherine reappears from behind the pantry door and starts sweeping, her temples pinching. Owen takes a little pity and grabs the paper towels to wipe off the counter, still slightly dismayed by her arrival, now that he’s tasked with conversation rather than relaxing on the couch with his phone.

“Have you eaten?” he asks, balling up the paper towel and aiming it at the sink. “The kids are showering. I was going to order a pizza.” He hesitates. “But . . . I guess I can cook now?”

It’s a question hoping for only one answer.

Oh no, a pizza is fine.

Even though when they agreed five years ago that he would stay home with the kids, he cited his passion for home cooking (and gardening!) as one of the reasons why. “I want to be the dad who makes lasagna from scratch for them!” he’d said. “You go do the heavy lifting outside of the house; let me do the heavy lifting here.”

The paper towel bounces off the porcelain farmer’s sink and onto the floor. He sighs. It’s just as well. He’d have to put it in the garbage either way.

Catherine squats and ushers the glass shards into the dustpan, a few stubborn splinters refusing to eke their way onto it.

“I’m not hungry,” she says, sweeping harder.

“I’ll get you something just in case,” he offers. “A Greek salad? Garlic knots? Or we can order something else. What would you want? Or . . . I mean . . . I can cook. I think there are chicken breasts in the freezer.” He makes a show of opening the giant freezer drawer and fishing around, even though he knows that she sees through his act.

“It’s fine. I have to work anyway,” Catherine says, scanning their gray wood-planked floor, searching for any shiny remnants that sparkle under the glare of the kitchen light, but apparently seeing none, she is satisfied.

No easy feat these days,
Owen thinks.
Satisfying her.

“You really have to work tonight? You’re finally home.”

He regrets this as soon as he says it because that’s not what he means. Not that she’s
finally
home. Well, that
is
what he means. But that’s not how he wanted it to come out. This is how their fights always start these days—someone misinterpreting something, some tone too harsh, another tone too passive-aggressive.

He watches her set the broom back exactly just so, as she found it, and disappear around the corner to dump the glass scraps into the trash. He runs through all the scenarios, bracing himself for all the ways this is about to turn south.
Shit.
It would have been so much easier if she’d worked late, which he hates thinking, because all he wants is for her to be here, more present, with them.

She emerges from the mudroom with a FedEx envelope in her hand.
Work. It’s always work. Maybe it’s just easier this way,
he considers.
She’ll close the door to her office, and then we won’t have anything to argue about.

But she surprises him, sliding the envelope across the counter toward him, resting it a foot from where the Heineken spun to its peril.

“What’s this?”

“It’s for both of us.”

Owen pulls the document from inside, cocking his head, his face a puzzle. He can feel Catherine watching him, like she used to when he’d bring home his own work from the firm, and he’d spend hours sifting through depositions, through fine print, trying to find logic in all the rhetoric. He raises his eyes to meet hers, wondering if she remembers that time too: how she’d lean against the door frame and smile, telling him he was the smartest man in the world, and that there wasn’t any stupid deposition he couldn’t make sense of. He wills her to move to him, to pull him tight enough so he can smell the lingering aroma of whatever she hatched up in her test kitchen, so she can smell the half-drunk beer on his breath.

She meets his eyes and offers a limp shrug. “What do you think?”

It takes him a beat to realize she’s referring to the FedEx.

He refocuses, trying not to think that he hadn’t moved to kiss her hello when she got home. And that she hadn’t moved toward him either.

“I don’t understand,” he says. “A reunion? At Bea’s behest? A delivery we have to be together for?”

“I don’t understand either.”

He likes that: that they’re a team again, on the same page, even if it’s about something as off-kilter as a letter from their dead friend’s lawyer.

He opens the stainless Sub-Zero and grabs another beer, holding up one for her, but she shakes her head no, which she always does. He knew she’d say no even before he offered. She doesn’t do beer these days. Instead, she grabs the bottle of Grey Goose from the liquor cabinet and twists off the top, pouring a splash into a Tiffany crystal tumbler (a wedding gift), then pouring a little more.

“We should go,” Owen says, the crest of certainty rising suddenly. Wouldn’t it be great to be back there, on their old stomping grounds, where they were happy and life was easy, and maybe he could actually reach over and kiss his wife again?

“We should go,” she agrees, her index finger tracing the rim of her glass.

“But?”

“But.” She laughs hollowly. “Well, there are a hell of a lot of ‘buts.’”

“There aren’t any ‘buts’!” he says, aware that his voice is rising but unable to quiet it. “Why are there always ‘buts’ with you now?”

She stares at the ceiling, sips her Grey Goose, then sips it again.

“We haven’t seen them in
years
, Owen. After our wedding—”

He cuts her off. “You took sides after the wedding, not me.”

“I might have to work.”

“It’s a holiday weekend, Catherine. For Christ’s sake.” Owen interrupts her and sets his bottle down a little too hard, its echo clanging in the space between them.

“There are . . .” Her voice quavers. “There are fires at the office to put out now.”

“When aren’t there?” There are always fires to put out at her office. He doesn’t ask for details because it’s not like she’s sought his advice in years. He doesn’t need to feel irrelevant for one more second.

Catherine turns to him, pale.

“Oh my God,” she whispers. “I just realized. The Fourth of July. It would have been her birthday. She would have been forty.”

Owen swallows his beer. Three long sips. The taste of the hops in the back of his throat.

“I want to go,” he says finally. It’s not a question; it’s not a request. It could be considered a plea, but he says it firmly, and he hopes she’ll respect it.

She chews the side of her lip, then nods.

“OK,” she says, so softly he almost misses it.

Owen takes a long swig, polishing off the bottle, and listens to the clatter above them, the stampede of their freshly showered children reverberating above—Penelope, already eleven, and Mason, a gangly nine. The stampede of their lives plowing forward without her, without Bea.

“Jesus. Forty. How could we have forgotten?”

Catherine doesn’t answer. She pours herself another vodka. So Owen reaches for the phone to call for the pizza.