Pineapple Street(73)
If she could go back in time, she would do so many things differently. She would have had Malcolm sign the prenup. She would have told her parents she wanted the house. She would have watched her sister more closely. And she would have made herself keep working when she got pregnant with Hatcher. She would have thrown up every morning in the trash can at the Canal Street subway station. She would have carried her cooler of breast milk past the bullpen of associates mooing like cows. She would be deep into a career, she would have her own income, and she would hold all the cards, no longer entirely at the mercy of a racist, nepotistic system blackballing her husband for a foolish boy’s mistake.
* * *
Darley was awake after midnight, lying on the sofa in the living room scrolling endlessly on her phone, when an email from Cy Habib popped up on her screen. Darley scrambled into a seated position and swiped it open.
Darley,
I found your email in the Henry Street School directory. I hope you don’t mind me writing out of the blue. It was lovely talking to you at the auction. It’s not often I meet people as smitten with SR22 avionics as I am. Any chance you and your husband are free for a drink next week?
Cy
Darley had, of course, Googled Cy after the auction. She had studied his LinkedIn profile, the mentions of him in The Wall Street Journal, the photos of him smiling at a charity gala at Lincoln Center. She contemplated waiting until the morning, but instead she quickly, impulsively replied.
Cy,
How wonderful to hear from you. We’d love to meet up next week. Just let me know where and when.
Darley
* * *
The next morning Darley dropped off Poppy and Hatcher with her parents at Orange Street. Malcolm had driven to Princeton to go to church with his parents, and Darley had foolishly signed on to chair the Henry Street School Holiday Book and Toy Fair and had to attend the first of about seven hundred meetings.
At half past noon, Darley jogged over to her parents’ to pick up the kids, and her mother fairly shoved them out the door before waving her off. They had agreed to babysit with even less enthusiasm than usual, and it made Darley wish all over again that the Kims lived in the neighborhood.
Poppy and Hatcher each wore a giant backpack with a water bottle tucked in a mesh outer pocket, keychains with stuffed animals and beaded lanyards dangling from the zippers. They moved along the street like little bouncing turtles, homes on their backs, Hatcher dragging his feet so that yet another pair of shoes would be scuffed across the toes.
“Did you have fun?” Darley asked Poppy as they galumphed the three blocks home.
“It was the worst day of my life,” Poppy said.
“Why?” Darley laughed.
“Glammy doesn’t know how to turn on the TV and for snack they only had olives and machine cherries.”
“Maraschino,” Darley corrected. Her parents had fed the kids from the bar cart. “What did you play with?”
“Glammy let us watch YouTube on her phone so she and Gramps could have an argument.”
“What were they arguing about?”
“Auntie George.”
“Oh,” Darley sighed. Her parents really needed to watch what they said in front of Poppy and Hatcher. The kids had turned into expert eavesdroppers, and they gossiped with the fervor of middle schoolers.
“Auntie George wants to give away all her money and Gramps says over his dead body. Is Gramps almost one hundred?”
“No, honey, Gramps is sixty-nine,” murmured Darley. What had her parents been talking about? When she got home, she called her father’s cell phone.
“Daddy, Poppy told me Georgiana is trying to give away her money.”
“Hold on a moment,” he said, and she heard her father walk down the hall and close a door. “Georgiana has gotten this idea in her head that having financial advantages is somehow an abomination and that the only way to move forward is for her to give it all away like some kind of millennial communist saint. This is why I didn’t want to send her to Brown.”
“She wants to give her whole trust away? When? And to who?”
“As soon as possible. She went and made an appointment with Bill Wallis behind our backs. She’s planning to set up a foundation.”
“Dad, you know she’s having a mental health crisis, right? This is all related to that married guy. You can’t let her do this.” Darley was pacing the hall and possibly yelling.
“The problem is, it’s beyond my control. She’s over twenty-five and I’m not a trustee. Your mother is. Talk to her.”
“Mom won’t talk to me! I tried to tell her Georgiana needed therapy and she said, ‘What happened with that friend of Georgiana’s is her business,’ as though I’m a complete stranger!”
Darley hung up the phone and felt adrenaline coursing through her body. Georgiana was barely an adult. She had no idea what money even meant. She’d never worried about it, she’d never been without. But who knew what the future might hold? What if she fell in love with an artist? What if she one day had a child with disabilities? What if Georgiana needed some medical treatment herself? What if there was a nuclear war and she needed to escape to another country? What if her husband was fired? What if, what if, what if? There were countless things that could go awry, and money was the best way to shore yourself up against tragedy. Darley couldn’t stand by and watch her baby sister throw it all away.