The Queen of Hearts(4)
Jerrie, Emma’s Australian nanny, had agreed to watch Delaney this morning. She let us in and led me back to the massive kitchen, where Emma sat straight-backed at the breakfast table. She peered over a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses and rose to greet us.
“Okay, hit me,” I said, after Delaney had scampered off with Jerrie and Emma’s son, Henry. “Maybe this will help startle me awake.”
Emma handed me coffee and a spoon, clearly reluctant to start talking. “Okay, but I don’t want you to get worked up. It . . . may be awkward, but we’ll handle it. It’s nothing to worry about.”
“When people say it’s nothing to worry about, it’s generally the preamble to catastrophe,” I pointed out. “Spill it.”
Emma nodded, but got up to make another cappuccino. Her kitchen was immaculate. Even though I’d been here at least once a week since we’d both moved from Kentucky to North Carolina more than a decade ago, I never failed to appreciate the pristine room, especially compared to my own house. I was not a particularly piggish person, but I seemed to have lapsed into a life where every surface in my home was coated with kid paraphernalia and metastasized mail. Drew was tidy, but his finance career required slavish devotion—the sacrificing of one’s firstborn, the swearing of blood oaths, and the total surrender of his balls. He was gone for sometimes as much as twenty hours a day even when he wasn’t traveling, so any mitigating influence he might have had on the domestic disarray produced by four kids was wiped out. Not only could he not help with anything related to the household, but it was pointless to complain about your own fatigue to someone being slaughtered himself.
Emma, on the other hand, was one of those people who’ve achieved an aggressive level of organization. In the kitchen, the glass-fronted bisque cabinets revealed handmade pottery, lined up smirking at you like the valuable art it was. And if you opened a drawer, you were confronted by spice jars and oil dispensers of the same watercolor blues and greens, all facing the same direction, their labels in a complementary old-Americana font. The walls, painted a glowing pale gold, exploded in the daylight to look like an incandescent arm of the sun itself before an evening retreat into a gleaming fire-lit jewel.
“This is difficult,” she called over the noise of the steamer. “I don’t really know how to start.”
“Could you be a little more cryptic? I’m already doomed to have a bad day. Delaney bit Sumner Cooper yesterday and is on some kind of double-secret preschool probation. And I’m behind on paperwork, which is going to murder my afternoon.”
Emma rolled her eyes, grasping at the chance to stall. “I don’t think you need to be concerned about the biting. It’s a perfectly normal developmental stage, as you yourself would be the first to assure everyone. Of course no one wants their child to be bitten, but—”
“Oh, I’d love it if my child got bitten. I’d be able to comfort her and feel virtuous at the same time. It’s humiliating to be the parent of the biter, especially when you are the biter’s parent who is also trained in pediatrics,” I groused. “People think I’m professionally incompetent.”
“Biting is a rational approach to a threat when you’re three,” said Emma. “She’ll learn. The real problem here is that Sumner’s mother is a stone-cold shrew who is vindictive about everything. Plus she never wears anything except yoga pants.”
“Hey,” I said, since I was fond of yoga pants myself.
Emma returned to the banquette, fortified with caffeine, and faced me. “About Nick,” she said, without preamble. “He might be moving to Charlotte.”
For a moment her words hung in the air, scrambled and incomprehensible. Then they rearranged themselves into coherence and walloped me, stealing my breath.
“What?” I managed. “Please, tell me that’s a sick joke.”
Chapter Two
BLISSFULLY UNCONCERNED WITH WRINKLES
Emma, Present Day
Zadie and I met two summers before college, when we were randomly assigned to be roommates at a camp for students interested in medicine. At the time, I had few female friends; in high school I associated with a loose confederacy of oddballs—a lank-haired D&D gamer, a pudgy fiddle player, and a sexually confused, eternally tormented Goth wannabe; all boys—so I was nervous about rooming with a strange girl. The camp had been designed by some crafty bureaucrat in hopes of stemming brain drain from the state of Kentucky, which needed more primary care doctors to practice in the eastern Appalachians. In theory, the plan held merit since they were offering combined scholarships to college and medical school. In actuality, it might have been a mistake to invite the prospective rural doctors to live for the summer in Louisville. I’d been in the city for thirty minutes, accompanied by Mrs. Varner, my science teacher, who’d volunteered to drive me, and already I was reeling from the urban, bohemian-flavored sights on display as we proceeded cautiously along the cacophonous Bardstown Road. I gaped at the juxtaposition of neon and hand-lettered signs, the warm, well-lit bars and shops, the dozens of restaurants of every ethnicity clustered along just this one road. It might as well have been a different planet.
When I arrived at the dorm, Zadie was already in the room, unpacking. I noticed her face first: bright, animated, inquisitive; the kind of expression you’d expect on a person who enjoys everything. She wore a T-shirt with an EKG tracing that had two normal beats followed by a flat line and then a third normal beat.