Alternate Side(75)

“First of all, Jenny wasn’t the one who used to talk about how terrible marriage was,” Nora said, looking around the table. “And second of all, I promise everyone, I will not fall apart if you mention marriage, weddings, husbands, or even boyfriends.”

“Is there a boyfriend?” Cathleen said, her eyes enormous, and someone kicked her, too.

“She bought a white couch,” Jenny said.

“You bought a new couch and didn’t ask to use my designer discount?” Suzanne said. “I’m hurt.”

“You’re busy. I saw it in a showroom window and bought it on impulse. I’d forgotten how much I wanted one.”

“It’s every mother’s fantasy piece of furniture,” Suzanne said. “You can tell who won’t let her kids in the living room by whether they order one. Some of them might as well have a velvet rope at the living room entrance.”

“My kids are too old for jelly hands,” Nora said.

“Have you lost weight?” Elena said. Kick. “What’s wrong with asking if she lost weight?” Kick. “I’m going to be black and blue by the time this lunch is over!”

A block away from Nora’s new apartment was a nice restaurant where she sometimes had business breakfasts, before she headed uptown to her new office, a restaurant where they now smiled and led her always to the same table in the corner. It was there one morning that she saw Alma Fenstermacher across the room, reading a thriller and eating an omelet with quiet concentration. The seat across from Alma was empty, and Nora threaded her way between the tables to stand behind it. Alma looked up and the delight in her eyes was immediate and unfeigned. She took a ballet class two mornings a week—of course, she did, Nora thought—and the studio was nearby.

Joe worked for the families on the block now, and Alma said she had heard he was good, although perhaps not quite as good as Ricky had been. The people who’d bought the Nolan house were lovely, although the younger boy was said to be a bit of a handful; the couple who had bought the Fisk house were doing a renovation and hadn’t moved in yet. Nora told her that Oliver was preparing to apply to graduate school, and that Rachel had gotten a promotion and was helping to oversee Christine’s new line of clothing. “It’s called Smaller Sayings,” Nora said. “It’s the same thing she did with workout clothes, but for children.”

“The future is now,” said Alma.

“Oh, my goodness,” Nora said. “That’s their biggest seller. Apparently they can’t keep up with the demand. That, and ‘Sleep tight.’ Both of those are Rachel’s.”

“I bought them both for a baby shower last month,” Alma said. “Does Rachel like living there?”

“I think she’s just happy to be away at the moment. If she says one more time that people are so real there, I’m going to scream.”

“Ah, yes,” said Alma Fenstermacher, who had children in St. Louis and Chicago. “The much vaunted western authenticity.”

“Not like New York.”

“Not a bit,” Alma said, buttering her toast. “Perhaps they’re right about that. I knew a woman here who talked ceaselessly about her years at Wellesley. How happy she’d been there, what a wonderful classical education she’d received, how beautiful the campus was. I was actually with her at a tea when she ran into two women from the same class at Wellesley. They both said they remembered her. One even said they’d been in a seminar on the Lake Poets together. I won’t go into chapter and verse about how I came to know this, but the closest she’d ever been to Wellesley was a secretarial school on Twenty-third Street.”

“Oh, that’s so sad.”

Alma smiled slightly. “I admired her when I found out. What a production, to create a life from whole cloth. Although maybe that’s what we all do. Tell me about your work. From what I can gather, that horrid woman never deserved you.”

The schools she visited, the projects she was thinking of funding, the kids who had so little and needed so much: Nora wouldn’t have gone on so long if Alma hadn’t seemed so interested and even ordered another cup of coffee. She told her about the first grant she’d made, creating a computer lab at a school that had been relying solely on a pair of aged desktops, and how the principal had started to cry when she’d seen the room finished, the students sitting at the new computers. Nora had started to cry, too, because after all those years of asking rich people for money she realized how much more pleasurable it was to give it away where it was really truly needed. The thing was, Bob Harris had come with her for this inaugural gift, and he’d wept, too. “Thank you,” Nora had said to him when they came out of the school building onto a littered street with a cracked blacktop basketball court. “Let’s get these people some decent playground equipment,” Bob had said.

She didn’t mention to Alma the day that she had realized she was in the neighborhood and had steeled herself to stop by Ricky’s apartment. When she knocked at the door, a tiny girl in denim cutoffs with an infant on her shoulder and a toddler wrapped around her shin answered. “Oh, they’re gone,” she said. A young guy buying lunch in the corner bodega said, “Ricky? He won the lottery, man. He got so much money now, he can’t spend it. He’s got millions.”

The old man outside by the hydrant in the folding chair said, “That fool inside don’t know what he’s talking about. Millions, millions—anytime anybody gets some money around here, they say it’s millions. Ricky didn’t win the lottery. He got money from some big lawsuit. A lot of money, but not millions. Maybe four, five hundred thousand. It’s a nice piece of change, I will say that. The man limps, but come on. I’d limp for a couple hundred thousand dollars and a nice house. You want a Dr Pepper, miss? I got a whole cooler of them here.”