The Never Never Sisters (7 page)

“She runs it!” Giovanni was almost crowing, and Sloane and Adonis started to laugh
and shake their heads as though Giovanni’s exaggerations were a familiar comedy to
those in the know. “It’s the best chocolate.”

“It is pretty good,” Adonis said.

They watched me expectantly, and I saw no way out of opening the box and nibbling
one—something toffee with dots of nuts all over its square top. I pretended to be
in heaven, but really I was preoccupied taking it all in: the candy box, the open
smile on everyone’s faces, Sloane’s hand in Giovanni’s back pocket, the friendly street
corner Greek God endorsing the chocolate. None of it was what I expected.

When my eyes clicked with the Adonis’s for a third time, I wiped my hand on my skirt
before sticking out my hand. “I’m Paige.”

“I know,” he said. “For days all anyone’s been talking about is meeting you.”

I assumed he was making fun of me. “Yes,” I said drily. “My exploits are the stuff
of legends.”

I sensed something from Sloane and Giovanni—worry? Giovanni said, in an apologetic
tone, “Percy’s one of my oldest friends, so I call him first whenever I’m coming to
New York.” Had they feared they’d offended me? It was so far from the truth, I felt
like I’d been flipped into upside-down world.

“It’s fine,” I said. “Nice to meet you all.”

“We’re going to breakfast, if you want to come,” Giovanni said. “Please come.”

“Yeah,” Sloane echoed with sufficiently less enthusiasm.

I checked my watch deliberately. “I’ve got clients coming, so I should run.”

“Clients?” Percy said.

“I’m a marriage counselor.” I braced myself for the questions. People loved talking
about my job—they were fascinated by others’ marriages, but Percy just laughed, his
mouth opening far enough that I could see the luminous white tops of his back teeth.

“Honestly?” said Giovanni. “That’s pretty funny.”

“It’s a real job,” I said defensively. Now that I really was offended, no one seemed
to care.

“Of course it is,” said Percy. “It’s just that I’m a private investigator. I should
give you my card so you can send the suspicious ones to me when it doesn’t work out.
We can work like an assembly line.”

I wanted to say something smart and snappy to put him down, but I couldn’t come up
with anything aside from assembly lines being why Detroit was in financial ruin. I
wasn’t sure that was accurate, or even logical, so I noted to myself that he wasn’t
quite as good-looking as I’d originally thought. Then I smiled my phoniest smile and
told Sloane I’d see her Monday before walking away as quickly as I could.

Slouched in my office desk chair, I listened to Helene’s cancellation voice mail message.
No explanation, just an apology and a halfhearted request to reschedule to July 8.
I could call this one from a mile away: the Jacobys were never coming in for another
session.

I pushed against the desk with my bare feet—sorry, Dr. Max—and returned a phone call
to my friend Lucy who was out in the Hamptons.

“When are you coming out?” She had started every phone call this way since leaving
the city six weeks before.

“I don’t know, Luce.”

“What’s that? Tomorrow? Tomorrow’s great!”

“I can’t. Sloane’s here.”

“Bring him along, whoever he is.”

I had to laugh. “Sloane’s my sister.”

“What?! The crazy one?”

“She’s not crazy. She has substance abuse issues.”

“So how’s the visit going?”

“It just is. Not much to report from here. How are things at the beach?”

Her voice got muffled. “I’m on the phone. Yes, but I’m on the phone.” Then louder.
“Paige, can I call you back? We’re trying to leave in time for the farmers’ market
so we can barbecue later.”

“Of course.” I had to admit it sounded nice, but there was nothing stopping me from
doing the same thing in the city. I could go to the Union Square farmers’ market,
buy some fixings and plan my very own barbecue. Then I could invite over my distracted
mother and Sloane, intense and sulky. And surely Dave would be delighted to cohost—he
was in top form this week, a hint of color having just returned to at least one of
his cheeks. Stove-top corncobs and mildly depressed mindless chatter on the seventeenth
floor. Fun, fun, fun.

I opened the box of Giovanni’s chocolates and stuck an entire round truffle in my
mouth. What I should do was go home to my husband.

I bit down and caramel oozed out over my tongue.

Not bad. I stuck in another one and tasted the tang of passion fruit sharp behind
the smoothness of the chocolate. Not bad at all.

I knocked on the door to Dave’s home office. “I’m baaack,” I sang, opening it a crack.

He was better today, still in the same gym shorts and T-shirt, but he appeared happy
to see me as he turned around in his chair. “How was the big reunion?”

The Jacobys’ absence was still fresh on my mind, so it took me a while to realize
he meant the get-together with Sloane. “Fine, I guess.”

“Do you think she’s using?”

I shook my head. “She seemed very with it. Not entirely pleasant, but with it. And
she has a fiancé.”

“Really?”

“His name is Giovanni.”

“What’s he like?”

“He gave me chocolate.”

“So he essentially bought your soul?”

“Ha.” Something was still bugging me about the Sloane visit—like a little divot in
a manicured green lawn. “Don’t you think the timing of the visit is odd?”

“Summer?”

“After Moonstone’s public offering. All of a sudden, my parents have gone from worrying
about the mortgage to being loaded.”

“That happened three years ago.”

“Right, but still . . .”

“So, what are you saying? She waits three years to contact them, meets Giovanni of
the boxed chocolate and then all of sudden becomes a grifter?” I shrugged. “There’s
this song, by Styx, I don’t know if you know it, but it’s called—”

“Please stop.” The first time Dave had done this, we’d been in a cab after our fourth
date, heading to my apartment. I still hadn’t decided what was going to happen when
the car stopped there, whether he’d be coming in with me or not. At dinner, as on
the three dates prior, he’d done everything perfectly: made the right reservations,
ordered the right appetizers, whipped out his credit card before I even had a chance
to reach for my purse, lifted his arm to conjure cabs from thin air. He’d asked me
questions about myself, he’d made witty jokes, spoke about current events in a way
that made them feel accessible and like I wasn’t a moron for not getting each reference.

Something was stopping me, though, from falling all over him in the cab, as cute as
he was. Did I like
him
or just his collection of attributes and achievements? He was practically my mother’s
wish list for me in human form.

We smiled at each other in the backseat. I didn’t want the lightness of his brown
eyes to lure me, so I stared out the window on my side of the cab. About two blocks
up, a runner made his way up Madison Avenue in the dark. His body bobbed with each
step, his gray sweats flapped loose around him, his ears were covered by headphones
so large they looked like Princess Leia’s buns. The guy was booking it, sprinting
full on in a way that made me want to cheer for him, and next to me, in perfect unison
with the runner’s steps I heard a soft voice: “Bum. Bum ba bum. Bum ba bum. Bum, bum,
bum
.”

“The Eye of the Tiger.” After we stopped laughing, Dave kissed me, right there, and
with that spontaneity, I knew any hesitation on my part was ridiculous. Why question
that we locked together like a jigsaw puzzle? My supportive family jutted out where
his was just a curved indent, and his ambition was rock solid where mine tended to
wilt. This was it: game over, as though every other guy I’d dated had been a rehearsal.

His repertoire for sound-track humming was usually eighties pop: “Hit Me with Your
Best Shot” to stave off a fight, for example, or, as cringe-inducing as it should
have been but wasn’t, “I Want Candy” before fooling around. In the past year, he’d
aired out this Styx one before—“Too Much Time on My Hands.”

“Not funny,” I said. But it was. It always was.

I would never have admitted to any happiness that Dave was suspended, but there was
something cozily indulgent about the two of us being home together in the middle of
a workday. I realized how much I’d missed just having him close by, sharing the same
space, and instead of going back to my office, I decided to stay in and unpack those
boxes from the closet.

I started on the easier box, Dave’s, piling the photos into two groups, Dave before
me and Dave after me, with the thought that maybe I could organize them or even put
together one of those bound books for his birthday.

I hadn’t seen one of the pictures before—Dave hiking, probably about age seventeen,
based on how beanpole-skinny his legs were—but the rest were familiar: him at twenty-eight,
smiling in front of the keg on the porch of the beach house he’d rented; the shot
of earnest, save-the-world Penelope, his girlfriend from college, standing awkwardly
in the middle of the quad, her hair pulled back severely. I’d first seen it years
before, clipped inside a greeting card of a cartoon hand holding a fist of posies.
I’d opened the card to read the inscription:
Thank you for loving me like that
.

“Excuse me.” I’d pushed the card at Dave from my cross-legged position on the floor,
surprised that such a buttoned-up-looking girl wrote
that
message. “How exactly did you love her to inspire this card?”

“Like this.” Dave had stuck out his hand formally.

“Yeah, right,” I’d said.

He’d replied, “Really. I swear,” before putting his arms around my waist and lifting
me onto the couch. End of discussion about bland Penelope.

The box also contained several photos of Gemma, Dave’s drop-dead gorgeous girlfriend
from law school, who was obviously a romantic counterreaction to poor Penelope. That
one didn’t seem to hate posing: pursing her bee-stung lips, hair strands across her
face, stretching her hand up (midriff exposed) in the one where she tried to touch
the
WELCOME TO TEXAS
sign.

I had always pretended to be slightly suspicious of her—how does a man get over someone
that beautiful?—but Dave had never made me feel insecure about an ex, and I’d long
before subscribed to the nauseating theory that all of his ex-girlfriends had turned
him into the man I met.

Also floating in the box was our wedding announcement from the
Times
. There’d been a massive snowstorm the week before our wedding with airport and subway
closures. All of the details we’d sweated over evaporated like steam. Our band: canceled.
Our guest count: halved. Our flowers: botched and sparse.

Some style section reporter had called us up afterward for an article about the storm’s
impact on area weddings. I’d been quoted: “It ended up being a perfect day. And the
good news is that if we can get through the stress of that week, we can handle anything
that marriage brings up.”

I put the clipping aside to show Dave. Then, stall tactics over, I regarded the second
box.
Do it quickly,
I thought,
like ripping off a Band-Aid
:
just open the lid, pull out the journal, flip to the first page and read:

Dear Me,

So, Dr. Pressman is making us write letters to ourselves. But you knew this already
because you’re me.

Love,

Paige

I could still conjure the image of Pressman’s waiting room in precise detail in my
memory: the walls were light brown and ornamented with generic beach paintings, one
of which had footprints imprinted on it, recalling that Psalm about the Lord carrying
someone through hardship. I used to stare at it, wondering if Pressman was a closet
Jew for Jesus. I had all but ignored the tiny little pencil sketches of a bunny and
an old lady hanging on the wall to the right of his door.