She Loves Me Not (11 page)

“Out on Pond Ridge Road,” Isabel informs her, as
Mary rolls her eyes to suggest that anyone in their business should be well
aware of this fact. “He has a fifty-acre estate out there. I hear there's a
recording studio in the main house and a mini amphitheater on the grounds.”

“Wow. I'd love to see it.”

“Well if he lists the place, you most likely
will.”

Isabel smiles at Cameron's slightly star-struck
expression. She's just a kid, really—not long out of Bryn Mawr, living back home
with her parents over in Bedford, half-heartedly dabbling in a relatively cushy
career while attempting to land a husband before the biological clock starts
ticking.

There are dozens of young women like her around
here; Isabel supposes that after next year—her last at Vassar—her oldest
daughter will join the ranks.

Andrea won't be able to afford a place of her
own—certainly not in the city, and not even here. Her father sure as hell can't
be counted upon to give her money once he's fulfilled his tuition
obligation.

These days, Ted is financially focused on the
McMansion he's having built down in Armonk, and on the toddler sons he has with
his second wife. Formerly the “other woman” in Isabel's doomed marriage, Shelby
is a living cliché: blond, slender, and apparently oblivious to the fact that
she's got a few good years at most before her husband strays—if he hasn't
already begun to.

Oh, well. Ted's infidelity is no longer Isabel's
problem, thank goodness. He belongs in the past, along with her low self-esteem,
her money problems, and her life-threatening illness.

These days, she's fit and healthy, feeling good
about herself and her single lifestyle at last. She may not be wealthy by
Westchester County standards, but she just deposited a nice fat commission check
in her savings account and a slightly smaller one in her checking account,
enough to cover the in-ground pool she plans to install this summer.

And unbeknownst to her coworkers, she's already
laid the groundwork to snag the Jason Hollander listing when he puts his estate
on the market next month. She's the listing agent for Hollander's good friend
and Pond Ridge Road neighbor Hesper Cantwell III, who is asking and will
probably get 2.5 million dollars for his sprawling Victorian mansion on ten
acres. Hess, as he prefers to be called, introduced her to Jason Hollander last
weekend.

There was something slimy about the way the record
producer looked her up and down appreciatively before she removed her sunglasses
and he apparently realized she was almost old enough to be his mother. Still,
she gave him her card, and he said—

“Isabel?” Amy, the high school student who helps
out with the phones on weekends, interrupts her thoughts. “I'm forwarding a call
to your desk.”

Well, speak of the devil. At least, Isabel hopes
it's Jason Hollander. Wouldn't that be a nice way to top off the weekend?

Seeing Cameron's wistful expression as she sits
beside her silent phone, Amy adds, “He specifically asked to speak to
Isabel.”

Meaning, he isn't a random caller willing to be
transferred to any available agent.

“Thanks, Amy.” Isabel lifts the receiver as it
rings. “This is Isabel Van Nuys. How can I help you?”

A male voice clears its throat. Then an unfamiliar
voice says, “Hi. I'm interested in relocating to Westchester County, and I was
wondering if you'd be able to show me some properties.”

“Of course. We specialize in relocations, actually,
so . . .” She picks up a pen and holds it poised over her notepad. “Is
this a corporate relocation?”

“No.”

Too bad. When an employer is helping to foot the
moving costs, people tend to spend a little more on the house itself.

“Do you have any idea what you're looking for,
Mr.—?”

“Gabriel.”

“All right, Mr. Gabriel, why don't you give me your
price range, number of bedrooms, desired location, when you're moving, that sort
of thing?”

There's a pause.

She can hear a radio playing in the background.
Sounds like an old Billy Joel song.

“Something medium sized, I guess,” he says. “In
the, uh, five to six hundred thousand dollar range.”

“Mmm hmm . . .” She makes note of that.
“And is it just for you, or . . . ?” She trails off tactfully.

He takes her cue. “I have a wife, and
. . . and a baby. And we want to have more kids, so I guess we'll
need, uh, at least three bedrooms. Four would be better.”

He seems vaguely nervous. She doesn't blame him.
He's about to spend a helluva lot of money on less house than he would get for
half a million anywhere else in the country.

“Well, I have to assure you that Woodbury Hills is
a wonderful place to raise a family.” Wonderful and outrageously expensive.

‘That's what I hear.”

It occurs to her to ask him how he did hear, and
how he happened to specifically request to speak to her. She opens her mouth but
he speaks first.

“It sounds like you're speaking from experience. Do
you live there in town?”

“Right outside of town,” she tells him. “Now, let's
see, Mr. Gabriel, do you like old houses, or are you looking for something more
modern?”

“Either, I guess.”

She scribbles the word
flexible,
and beside it,
27 Gilder
Road?

That particular property has been on the market for
at least six weeks, which is unusual in Woodbury Hills. Isabel isn't surprised
it's been such a difficult sell so far. For one thing, it's in a rather remote
location as opposed to the widely desired family-friendly neighborhood within
walking distance to town and the commuter line to the city. For another, the
contemporary split level with a boxy stucco exterior doesn't appeal to most
buyers, who tend to favor classic clapboard houses with shutters, windowpanes,
and redbrick chimneys.

Isabel realizes that Mr. Gabriel has fallen silent
again.

“ . . .
the sinners
are much more fun . . .”
Billy Joel sings in the background
on the other end of the line.

“I'll put together some listings, Mr. Gabriel, and
I'll FedEx them to you so that you can go through them with your wife and decide
which ones you want to see. Then you can let me know when you'll be in town so
that—”

“Oh, you don't have to send them to me first. I'll
just come up and you can show me whichever houses you think I'd like.”

“Are you sure? Sometimes it's possible to weed out
homes just based on the listing. It could save you”—
and
me
—“a lot of time.”

“No, thank you. I don't have time to see listings
first. I'm, uh, actually going to be there tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” she repeats. “Well, that's sooner than
I'd expected.”

“Is that all right?”

“Of course. Of course it's all right.” There goes
her plan to drive up to Poughkeepsie and spend the day with Andrea. “I'll get
some listings together for you and we can meet here in my office in the morning.
I'll give you directions. Which airport are you coming from?”

“Oh, I'll be driving down from Boston,” he says
unexpectedly.

Boston? For some reason, she assumed he was
relocating from someplace down South. What made her think that? It wasn't an
accent—he doesn't have the slightest trace of one.

She gives him directions, arranges to meet him at
nine-thirty, then hangs up to find nosy Mary looming over her desk.

“You've been pretty busy lately, Isabel.”

“Yup.” Smiling, she opens a manilla folder and
hunts through it for the listing for 27 Gilder Road as the Billy Joel song
continues to play in her head.

“E
xcuse me, Miss, did you want butter on that egg and bacon
sandwich?”

“No,” Christine says automatically, her thoughts on
the leaky faucet back home. She forgot all about asking Rose about her
plumber.

Belatedly, it occurs to her that Ben would probably
like a little butter on his sandwich. She opens her mouth to call the waitress
back to the counter, but she's already disappeared into the busy kitchen at the
back of the diner.

Oh, well. Ben can always put butter on it at home
if he wants it. For all she knows, he still hasn't regained his appetite. Maybe
a container of chicken soup would have been a better thing to bring him.

She eyes the desserts in the rotating glass case by
the register as she waits for the sandwich. The carrot cake blanketed in cream
cheese icing looks especially good, but she can't indulge. Not today. Not for a
while.

She can't help wondering whether, if she takes off
the extra twenty pounds or so she's gained since marriage, Ben will find her
more attractive.

If he finds her more attractive, he'll be more
inclined to make love to her during her next fertile period. Which means she has
a little over two weeks to lose a few pounds.

She used to be skinny. Not as skinny as Rose
Larrabee, but nobody would have called her chubby a few years ago.

These days, every time she looks in the mirror, the
word
chubby
is what comes to mind—along with
frumpy.

Not that Ben is currently the spitting image of his
youthful self, either. For one thing, he had a hell of a lot more hair when they
met, and it was less conservatively cut. He wore contacts instead of glasses,
and his wardrobe wasn't quite as—well, stodgy as it is now.

Of course, she looked different back then, too: a
size eight when she met Ben, and wore tailored skirts and heels to work daily as
an executive secretary just across Forty-second Street from his office. She used
to see him almost every morning in Grand Central Station: a dark-haired,
wedding-ring-free stranger who invariably rode up the escalator reading a
hardcover novel in a transparent glossy cover. She was intrigued by this; not
just by the fact that he read something other than the newspapers, but that he
clearly got his books from a library.

So she knew right away that they had something in
common. Christine was quite fond of the New York library branch near her Queens
apartment. She never saw eligible-looking men during her weekly browsing visits
there, just senior citizens, students, and the occasional story-hour-bound dad
with toddlers in tow.

Now, looking back, she is amused that it never
occurred to her that Ben might be using the library because he was too poor—or
too cheap—to buy books.

She was too busy with her investigation, figuring
there was a good chance that the library-book-toting commuter lived in Queens,
as she had seen him exiting the number 7 train a few times. She hoped she might
bump into him in the library stacks some day, as she couldn't seem to work up
the nerve to speak to him in the midst of rush-hour chaos.

Nor did it ever occur to Christine that Ben was
noticing her as well. He seemed perpetually engrossed in his reading. Thus, she
was utterly caught off-guard when Ben looked up from his Tom Wolfe novel one
morning out of the blue and made eye contact with her as she was riding up the
escalator two steps behind him.

She remembers what he said, and exactly how he said
it.
“How's it going?”
he asked, his voice cracking a
little on the
go
syllable.

She has no idea how she responded. But the next
thing she knew, he was asking her out for coffee. As it turned out, he didn't
live in Queens, but on Long Island—he transferred from the Long Island Railroad
to the number 7 train each morning.

They started meeting regularly for lunch at
Houlihan's near their respective offices, moved into a Tudor City studio
apartment together a year later, and were married two years after that. They
were about to start trying to have a baby when she found the lump.

She sighs as the waitress comes out of the kitchen
with a foil-wrapped sandwich and a steaming take-out cup full of coffee. The
coffee smells wonderful—far more appealing than the cup of decaf she had with
Rose. She doesn't dare indulge in caffeine, just in case she might be
pregnant.

She doesn't want to get her hopes up, but her
period was due yesterday. She doesn't feel as though she's premenstrual, but you
never know.

“You want cream and sugar?”

“That's okay. He'll put it in at home.” Fumbling in
her wallet for money, Christine comes up short. Oh, right. She put a twenty into
the collection basket at mass earlier—a shameful attempt to bribe God into
answering her prayers.

“Do you take credit cards?” she asks, fishing for
her Visa.

“Credit cards, and checks, too, if you're
local.”

“I'm local, and that's good to know. But I'll use
my Visa today.”

Christine doubts that any diner in Manhattan would
take a check. That's the nice thing about living in a small town. People get to
know you. Especially in a place like this. Looking around, she decides that half
the population of Laurel Bay seems to be waiting for a booth here, most dressed
in their Sunday best, others in their comfy Sunday sweats or jeans. She even
sees a few familiar faces, including a middle-aged woman who walks a German
shepherd by the house every morning, and the guy who pumps gas at the full serve
down the block, now wearing a suitcoat and carrying a little girl in a pink
dress.

The waitress takes her card and runs it through the
machine, then hands the slip to Christine, along with a pen that's inscribed
with the name of the restaurant. It says Milligan's Cafe On the Bay, but she's
lived here long enough to know that nobody ever calls it that. It's just “the
diner.” Christine adds a tip, signs the receipt, and hands everything back.