More Than Words(31)

Then Nina’s phone vibrated. She sat up on the couch, put on her glasses, and picked it up.

“The New York Times sent out an alert,” she said. “About my dad.”

There it was on her phone: Breaking News: Hotelier Joseph Gregory, Dead at 69.

And then a string of text messages and e-mails started coming in. From friends, acquaintances, colleagues. Everyone saying how sorry they were. Everyone asking what they could do to help. Pris offering to come over with a bottle of Brent’s best wine—her drug of choice—and to help respond to all of the messages Nina must be getting now. One of Leslie’s cousins offered a dime bag of marijuana. Nina politely declined both.

Then she scrolled down, looking for the one message she’d been waiting for a response to when she fell back asleep. Rafael. There he was.

I won’t try to convince you to stay on if you don’t feel like you can handle it right now. But if you change your mind, the door is always open. I never could have won the primary without you. Ciao for now, Palabrecita.

Nina felt another moment of regret when she realized she had no idea when she would see him next. But she was trying to make the right choice. It was too much. She had to cast Rafael from her mind and steel herself for the more serious things ahead. A wake. A funeral. A corporation to run. She looked over at Tim, making her lunch.

A wedding, too.





30



Nina and Tim spent the rest of the day together. After lunch they went back to Caro’s list. I’m a Gregory, I can do this, Nina thought, over and over, with every call, every choice she made. But her last name didn’t turn her into a superhero. She was still human, still in so much pain. Her phone kept vibrating, and finally Nina turned it off completely. She couldn’t talk to one more person about her dad. She couldn’t make one more decision.

The downstairs buzzer rang. When Nina picked up the receiver, the doorman told her that Leslie was on her way up.

Then the elevator opened into Nina’s living room, and Leslie walked out, her arms already open for a hug. Nina accepted it.

Maybe it was because her mom died when she was so young—or maybe it was just her personality—but Nina never had tons of close friends. She’d always had Tim. For a while she’d had Melinda, her best friend from lower school who moved away. And there was Pris and the group of girls she hung out with, who welcomed Nina as one of them in middle school, but who Nina never felt all that close to, except Pris. And then Leslie, who Nina was lucky enough to have been matched with as a roommate her first year at Yale, and who had become Nina’s closest friend, after Tim. And that was really it. That had always been Nina’s support network, her team. Other people were on the outskirts, the B-team, but her dad, Leslie, Tim, his parents, and Pris, they were the A-team. The major league. Her people. Always.

“Oh!” Leslie said, once she put her bags down on the floor. “I forgot, I have something for you.” She pulled a plastic bag out of her purse. Inside it were four drawings and an only-slightly-licked lollipop from Cole. “He wanted to make sure you’d like it before he sent it with me,” Leslie said, handing her the lollipop. It made Nina laugh through her tears.

As Nina held the candy, she realized that she and her father had never settled up their debts. She owed him dozens of Twizzlers and Hershey’s Kisses, he owed her just as many lollipops and Tootsie Rolls.

Nina put the candy in her mouth. In its sugary sweetness, she tasted her Monday nights with her father. She tasted comfort. She tasted home.





31



The next morning, Nina and Leslie got dressed and headed over to The Gregory by the Sea. Nina was wearing a black cashmere dress with a gray cardigan over it, black stockings, and black heels. She’d gone to her jewelry box and pulled out her grandmother’s diamond earrings and a sapphire drop her father had gotten her when she graduated from college. “It’s the same color as our eyes,” he’d told her. “I checked in the mirror at the store.”

She’d laughed then, at the idea of her father holding a sapphire up to his eyes in the mirror, maybe asking to see other stones to check their colors, too. The drop was the same color as the stones in the bracelet he’d gotten her for her birthday. The one she was wearing now, next to the diamond tennis bracelet he’d had made for her mother—his last gift to each of them.

“Do I look okay?” Nina asked Leslie, as they got out of the black car in front of the hotel. Gene, the driver she and her father liked best, had picked her up that morning with tears in his eyes. He’d made sure there was sparkling water for her in the back of the car. And butterscotch candies, too. Nina looked down and considered what her father would think of her appearance.

“You look as stunning as ever,” Leslie said, as she put her feet on the asphalt. She was wearing a gray pantsuit with a black silk shirt and heels that were slightly lower than Nina’s. It evened out their height.

As soon as they both stepped onto the sidewalk, into the cool fall sunshine, cameras started flashing. Nina wasn’t sure what to do with her mouth. Usually when someone took her picture, she smiled. But now that seemed like the exact wrong expression. So she pressed her lips together, looked away from the camera, and hoped that nobody would read anything strange into it.

Tim was waiting for them in the lobby and took Nina’s hand, squeezing it softly while they stood in the elevator. “I love you,” he whispered, so only she could hear.