More Than Words(76)

Caro started walking again, and Nina followed. “It changed everything,” Nina echoed.

She wondered what her life would’ve been like if her father hadn’t had that affair, or if Veronica hadn’t dropped the Christmas present off. What if Nina herself hadn’t put it under the tree. Or her mother hadn’t decided to go to the country that evening.

“Your father never saw her again after that,” Caro said. “He felt too guilty.”

Nina couldn’t imagine what that must’ve been like. The guilt he must’ve been carrying for decades. She’d felt a piece of it when she broke up with Tim. Whose mother she was talking to right now as if she were her own.

“If . . .” Nina started, not quite sure of where to go next. “If Tim and I stopped dating,” she said to Caro, “would you . . . would you still be . . .”

“Oh, darling,” Caro said, “of course. We’re family. Are you and Tim still going through a rough time? I’d hoped you’d worked things out after the fund-raiser. I remember when my sister passed away, everything TJ said and did was wrong. For months. If you don’t want to talk about it, we don’t have to—if it seems too strange. But if you do, I’d be happy to listen and offer any advice I can.”

“I broke up with him,” Nina said quietly. “Yesterday morning. He wants us to be the same as we always were, but . . . I’m different now.”

Caro stopped walking. Nina stopped, too, waiting for her to say something. Anything. Caro’s face was blank, until she looked at Nina’s open, pleading eyes. Then she gave her a rueful smile. “If you were my daughter, I’d say, ‘You need to go after what makes you happy.’”

Nina hugged Caro. And as the older woman’s arms tightened around her, Nina felt tears overflowing her eyes. Caro had forgiven her. She loved her anyway. Through her tears, Nina let herself imagine that her father would have, too.





72



That Saturday morning, the third of the month, Nina put on one of her old black dresses, her grandmother’s pearls, and her mother’s diamond studs. I need your resolve, Mom, she thought as she slid her stockinged feet into a pair of black pumps.

When Caro had called last night to say that she was going to stay in 21-B for a while, the two women decided that the Gregory brunch the next day would be just them. Nina asked Gene to pick her up, and then get Caro, so they could enter together.

“Good morning, darling,” Caro said, as she got into the car, her eyes covered by a pair of large tortoiseshell sunglasses. She slipped them off once she got inside. Her makeup was impeccably done, as always, but that didn’t disguise the puffiness under her eyes or the raw spot on her lip beneath her lipstick. She must’ve been picking at it. Nina could never, in her life, recall Caro doing that.

“You don’t have to come today,” Nina said to her. “I can call Pris. I’m sure she’d be happy to have brunch with me.”

Caro gave her a sad smile. “Do I look that bad?” she asked.

“No one would know but me,” Nina said. “But if you want to go back and—”

“No,” Caro said. “I’ll be fine. And I’m not leaving you alone for this. I can’t stop thinking about your mother and what she would think of it all.”

The car stopped in front of the hotel, and Gene put it in park, exiting his door to open theirs.

“What would she have thought?” Nina asked.

Caro sighed, putting her sunglasses back on before getting out of the car. “I don’t think she would’ve been surprised.”

The brunch was just as bad as Nina had imagined it would be. From the moment she walked in, guests wanted to shake her hand, give their condolences, tell her a story about the hotel, or her dad.

But she was able to squash down her tangled emotions and keep her head up. In piercing her father’s myth, she’d found strength. In finding his flaws, she’d learned how to grow. With that knowledge, she was able to be the gracious hostess, the bereaved daughter, the role everyone expected her to play.

Neither she nor Caro touched their food. But they made it through.

As they left the hotel, Caro gave Nina an uncharacteristically tight hug. “You need me, you call,” she said. “Do you hear me, darling?”

Nina nodded. “I do. And if you need me, you call. Okay?”

Caro pressed her lips together and nodded. Nina could tell that behind her sunglasses, she was trying hard not to cry.





73



A few nights later, Nina was on the phone with Rafael, walking through her apartment, wandering from room to room. He’d just gotten home from yet another fund-raiser.

“This sneaking around is killing me,” he said.

Nina circled through her living room.

“Me too,” she said. She imagined what it would be like to walk hand in hand with him in Central Park. To sit next to him at a bar, enjoying a glass of wine. To have burgers and concretes at the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park.

“Where would you want to go?” Rafael asked. The sound of his voice made Nina crave his presence; talking on the phone was an exquisite kind of torture. “If we could go out right now. This minute.”

Nina thought about it.

“Maybe a museum,” she said. “We could look at paintings together, and then sneak off into a dead-end hallway and make out like teenagers.”