Never Have I Ever(31)

That was another direct reference to the game, and exactly the conversation I wasn’t going to have with her.

I said, “Ease up on the language?” very mild. “I don’t want to have to convince my neighbors that Oliver’s first word is ‘truck.’”

She didn’t laugh at my joke, though. Not even politely. Her head tilted again, the other way. She was looking at me like I was a puzzle piece and I wasn’t going in my slot.

“Second-favorite fuck? Bankers,” Roux pushed on, as if I hadn’t spoken. Her tone was insistently breezy. This felt like yet another game—a familiar one. Suburban Mom Chicken. I’d seen Tate and Lavonda playing it, one-upping each other with toe rings and tattoos, seeing who would say or do the edgiest thing. “You should try a banker. They’re like practice for lawyers, because they aren’t as crafty.”

She was trying to provoke me, and since she wanted it, I had a perverse desire to keep my cool. I fixed her with a bored look. Shrugged. “You can have my share. I’m married.”

She shrugged back, mimicking the exact set and twitch of my shoulders, as if she’d decided to join my sex-with-lawyers moratorium. “I’m married, too.”

“Really?” I said, interested in spite of myself. Except that she didn’t eat carbs, this was the first hard, concrete information I had on Roux. “I’ve never seen him around.”

She smiled. “We’re separated.”

“Small wonder, considering how many lawyers there are in the world,” I said. It came out tart, barely south of bitchy, and a startled laugh escaped her.

“You don’t rile easy, do you?” she said.

I shrugged, and I liked this feeling, liked surprising her while she tried and failed to shock me. It made me want to be even calmer. I sank into myself, breathing like I did on deep dives, my face blank, my body still. She could do a donkey act on my coffee table, I decided, and I would blandly hand her the Lemon Pledge and ask her to clean up afterward.

She said, “I thought you’d be prudier. Maybe because when I met you, you were Kanga-adjacent. She’s wound pretty tight.”

I shrugged again, but she was correct. If she came on to Char or did that lawyer-humping monologue in front of Ruby, Char would have a stroke. I had opted out, though, and it had given me the upper hand. I liked the feeling of being one up on her. I breathed, slow and even, and I could stay like this forever now. I wasn’t going to break the silence.

She waited, too, her gaze measuring me. At last she said, “Okay, then.” She cocked one hand on her hip, almost posing. “Let’s try again.”

I wanted to say, Try what? Not being an asshole?

But that would be playing. This was grown-up time.

I gave her my best hostess smile, blank and friendly. “We have gotten off on the wrong foot. And we are neighbors. Maybe we should stick to what we have in common.”

“Okay. I have a pulse, for example. Do you? Because I’m beginning to wonder.” She said it wry, not mean, though.

“We both have pulses,” I assured her.

She sat down, sinking gracefully onto the leather sofa, and crossed her legs. Sunlight streamed in from the big picture window to land full on her face. Her forehead was as pale and smooth as an egg, and her eyes had a slight fixed brightness. She’d had a little work done, I realized. Fillers for sure, maybe a little Botox, though if I’d had a different mother, I might not have known. It was really good work. Subtle, which meant pricey, and also very effective. She was probably close to my age.

“We have something else in common,” Roux said. “We’re both one-percenters.”

I shook my head. My parents lived in a zip code that was one-percent-adjacent, but I hadn’t truly been a member of the Smith clan for years now. Davis and I lived solidly middle class. I did have close to three hundred thousand dollars left from Nana’s trust, but it was sitting quietly in a bank in Boston, waiting. It was more than a lot of people had, but it hardly put me on a par with billionaires. As for Roux, the only financial assets I’d seen were the red car and her designer wardrobe. And her expensive face.

I shook my head. “Hardly. We’re comfortable. . . .”

“I mean we’re both divers,” Roux said, gesturing over her shoulder at my pictures, and I got it. She meant the one percent of people who scuba.

Half the tension I’d been hiding ran out of me, and I felt a twinge of something that was akin to disappointment. Suddenly I wanted to laugh at myself. Was that all this was? Every afternoon Luca had asked me about scuba: how to get certified, what it cost, how long it took. He must be driving her crazy at home. She was here to ask about lessons for her kid, and I needed to calm my ass right down. Roux liked to stir up trouble, but it was my own uneasy guilt weighting the conversation.

Oliver was busily throwing his toys off the bottom shelves now, checking to see if gravity still worked. Rattle Bear, teething keys, soft cloth books, he grabbed them one by one and let them fall. I had a lot of toys stored there, enough to hold him for a few minutes. Long enough to work out scuba lessons. I walked over and sat down on the end of the other sofa, catty-corner to her.

“So Luca is serious about it, huh? Divers Down does an open-water class at least once a month, and I’m back teaching now. I think it’s a great idea, especially since you dive already.”