The Queen of Hearts(12)
The entrance to the club reared up in my visual field, forcing me to make a sudden turn without braking. “Whoa there, lovely dear!” hollered Delaney, her head swaying.
You approached Emma’s club via a serpentine lane lined with sculpted trees and a median teeming with snapdragons. The golf course was visible on the left side, with its green hills undulating gently into the distance. As you got closer, the bright snapdragons gave way to orderly beds of pansies flanking clipped yew bushes. Twin wisteria-draped pergolas stood at the corners of the drive, bordering a white bricked guardhouse in the widened median, covered with climbing ivy and roses.
I slowed to a crawl and rolled down the window. I did not belong to the club. As a part-time physician, I made less than your average plumber, once you factored in childcare and taxes and various work-related expenses. Drew’s income, on the other hand, was growing nicely. You might think that he’d be willing to live it up a little, but no. Allocation of capital in the Anson household was tightly regulated. Drew was parsimonious, adhering to a strict budget that did not include dropping 100K on club initiation fees. He had all these spreadsheets and projections for our household expenses and had calculated basically down to the minute when we would reach a level of financial comfort sufficient for him to start blowing money on things like country clubs or luxury cars. Meanwhile, we went to the Y or mooched off friends when we wanted to swim.
The Colleys—Emma and Wyatt—were not subject to this degree of financial planning, or any degree of financial planning, as far as I could tell. Wyatt raked it in from his car dealerships and blew through it just as quickly. He was not one to overthink things, and he liked to roll large. Wyatt had joined the waiting list for the club even before he’d married Emma, and if he had any residual unease about having grown up as a dirt-poor kid in some blighted corner of Alabama, he hid it well. Hobnobbing with a bunch of old-money Southerners didn’t appear to faze him at all.
The guard knew me because I’d been the Colleys’ guest frequently, and he waved us through with a big smile. The clubhouse, a rambling Georgian of the same white brick as the guardhouse, was visible directly ahead. The circular drive led to a porticoed entrance under thirty-foot white columns, but I veered off before reaching it, turning right toward the pool and tennis courts.
The pool was old-school: a sky blue rectangle with a diving board at the deep end and stairs into the shallow end. There was a separate round bubble of a baby pool with a little fence around it, and an expanse of flat white concrete surrounding the whole thing. But what the pool lacked in zero-entry areas and infinity edges and flagstone terraces, it more than made up for in the sheer beauty of the view. It was built into a hillside, with a one-hundred-eighty-degree vista of rolling green hills and cerulean sky and weeping willows swaying gracefully into ponds. The club had bowed to modernity by adding an outdoor thatched-roof bar with a dozen flat-screen TVs built into the ceiling joists and a breezy open-air dining pavilion with the same stunning view.
After dropping Delaney at the baby pool with Emma’s nanny, I found Emma in a chaise near the bar. She was immobile, eyes closed behind gold sunglasses, her legs bent slightly at the knees so that the long taper of her calves into her delicate ankles was accentuated. She wore a broad-brimmed sun hat and a fuchsia bikini top with a wispy sarong.
She must have sensed me walking up, because she thrust off the sunglasses and sat up. “Zadie,” she said. “I thought you weren’t coming when you didn’t text back.”
“No, no,” I said. “This morning was kind of a flail, and also I had a . . . a phone mishap.” I held out my ruined cell phone, which I’d dropped in the morning’s chaos.
“Ouch,” Emma commiserated. “Did you text Marcus?”
Marcus, a seventeen-year-old nerd in my neighborhood, ran a thriving black-market business in iPhone repair. He could replace a damaged screen in ten minutes flat, and he charged half of the exorbitant Apple Store rate, with none of the hassle. With four device-addicted children, I had him on my favorites list.
“I did, but he hasn’t replied yet. Probably wasting time in high school or something,” I answered. I settled myself on the chaise next to Emma’s and kicked off my sandals. “Okay, Em . . . how did you find out Nick might move here?”
“He applied for an opening with my surgery group,” Emma said. She furled her limbs into a knot, lanky arms encircling lanky legs, resting her head gently on her knees.
“No way! When?”
“It happened while I was at that trauma conference—he interviewed with the hospital admin people last month apparently, and then with our practice manager and a couple of the partners while I was out of town. I almost vomited when I realized who he was.”
“But he’s not even a trauma surgeon. Is he?” I asked weakly, plucking at the untethered edge of my pool chair, where a plastic strap had worked its way loose from its binding.
“No, but the hospital wants to add reconstructive plastics and hepatobiliary and vascular to the group,” Emma said. “Make us multidisciplinary, instead of all separate, and that way they can tell the Eastway Surgery guys to fuck off. They’ve been wrangling for years over call issues and reimbursement for uninsured patients and all kinds of stuff.”
She paused and leaned back in her chair. Her once magnificent waist-length hair had been cut short into a stacked, sleek bob, but it flattered her, framing the planed bones of her face and her clear glowing eyes. She was lithe and smooth and perfectly maintained, every hair in place, not a single shaving nick or unsightly vein or blemish anywhere on her flawless skin. As long as I had known her, Emma had always managed to make everything look easy.