Alternate Side(18)
Nora couldn’t help herself. She started to laugh. “Oh, can the hayseed act, Bob,” she said.
To her surprise and admiration he started to laugh as well. “What’s the favor?” he said in an almost accentless voice, as though he were an actor who had heard the director cry, “Cut!” and had gone back to his everyday way of talking.
“I already think one problem with your plan is the nepotism issue,” she said. “My husband works for you. So in the meantime, would you not mention to him that we’ve discussed this?”
Bob Harris shrugged. “Darlin’, I mentioned to him just this morning that we had a little meeting scheduled. Swear on my mama, I was amazed that he didn’t seem to know anything about it.” And before her opened a vista of the evening, and probably the week, to come: silent treatment, recriminations, questions, recriminations, silent treatment.
Which was precisely the way it went, Charlie at the dining room table with a drink and the greasy paper plate that meant he’d picked up a slice of pizza instead of heating up something Charity had left in the refrigerator. The bottle of vodka was on the table, too. That was the signal that Charlie Nolan was headed for blind drunk, when the bottle was on the table. Drunk. As. Hell.
Nora had stepped out of her heels in the foyer and walked barefoot into the kitchen, wondering how far down that road he’d traveled.
“I thought you had a business dinner,” she said.
“Canceled,” he said. “When were you going to mention your meeting with Bob Harris?”
“It just happened,” Nora said, pouring some white wine and reaching for a container of leftover Chinese. “So I was going to tell you about it once I got home. And now I’m home.”
“So you’re going to go to work for him,” said Charlie, declaratively, savagely.
“No, I’m not,” Nora said. “He doesn’t have a clear plan, and I already have a good job.”
“He won’t like that. He doesn’t like people who say no to him.” Nora sat down and looked at Charlie. She was thinking that Bob Harris struck her as exactly the kind of man who liked people who said no to him. Instead she said, “Too bad for him.”
“You don’t even know him,” Charlie said. The word don’t was a shapeless, slippery thing in the very back of his throat, and Nora knew that Charlie had gone way down the vodka road before she’d arrived.
“I’ve met him many times at your events.”
“Did he say why he came to you in the first place?” Charlie said, and while Nora had asked herself the same question, she shot back, “That’s insulting.”
“Come on, Nora. If you’re as big as Bob Harris and you’re starting a foundation, there are a hundred people you could pick to run it.”
“I repeat—that’s insulting. I’m insulted. Maybe you want to stop insulting me now.” Homer put his head in Nora’s lap and whined. “Did you walk him?” she asked. “Of course not. Come on, good boy.”
“At least one of us is a winner with that asshole,” Charlie said as he stumbled upstairs and Nora went down to the foyer. “Kiss. My. Ass,” she thought she heard as she snapped on Homer’s leash. His boss? His wife? The universe? Who could tell? On the stoop sat another tightly knotted plastic bag. “What next?” Nora asked loudly. “I mean, really—what next?”
There was no way Nora would speak to Charity about any of this, about the parking situation or the bags on the stoop or Charlie’s black moods. It was important that Charity be kept as contented as possible, or as contented as Charity ever got, which was not so much when the twins were not around. The Monday after Thanksgiving she came up from the basement, where she always changed into her work clothes, sweat pants and a T-shirt, and said to Nora dolefully, “My babies back at college now.” Rachel and Oliver had arrived toting enormous duffels filled with dirty clothes, knowing Charity would be happy to see, and launder, and iron them, even the boxer shorts. Charity had done just that, repacked them, and sent them back to school refreshed, as she always did. She was habitually downcast after the hubbub was over.
Charity had always been their nanny, arriving at their apartment only an hour after they had gotten home from the hospital, making clucking noises as the two handfuls of swaddle, one dark, the other fair, squirmed and whined. “Peace peace peace,” Charity had whispered, and Nora was all in.
Aside from the fact that Charity passionately believed Nora needed to drink Guinness in order to breastfeed successfully, and was sure that the twins were starving and so tried to sneak them bottles of formula larded with rice cereal, she had been a very satisfactory nanny. She was always on time, she never refused to stay late, and she adored the twins without indulging them. She taught Ollie the rules of cricket, arranged Rachel’s unruly hair, had muffins on the counter after school when they were young and then fruit juices when they both started playing after-school sports. There was no hint of equivocation or dispassion in her devotion. You couldn’t mention the word Harvard around Charity because Rachel had been denied admission, and Nora suspected she had found and destroyed all photographs of the girl who had broken up with Oliver senior year of high school.
Nora had only had to have a sit-down with Charity once, years before, when Charity had decided to let the kids know what a friend they had in Jesus. Charlie was a lapsed Catholic, Nora had grown up vaguely Presbyterian, but Charity belonged to the Church of the Living Risen Son of God, a mainly Jamaican congregation, which met in what had formerly been a movie theater. Nora knew this because Rachel had given her a full report after Charity had agreed to stay for a weekend when Nora and Charlie were obliged to go on one of those three-day golf and spa trips that a director Charlie worked with considered essential for team-building. The blood of the lamb seemed to have figured prominently in the service, as did the notion that everyone was a poor sinner.