The Queen of Hearts(89)
Drew let me go and looked at me.
“I don’t think I’d be able to do that,” he said.
—
I saw Emma before she saw me; she was already at our table, motioning to the sommelier for a glass of wine. Around her, the city twinkled through the glass walls of the restaurant. She sat with the pinched face and stooped shoulders of a much older woman, as if the ceaseless stress of the last few months had caused her body to turn in on itself.
She stood when she caught sight of me, and she held out her hand in an oddly formal welcome. “You came,” she said.
“Of course I came,” I said, wincing as I sat. Posset had embraced the farm-to-table craze a little too enthusiastically, settling on incongruous—and massively uncomfortable—rough-hewn log benches for seating.
A waiter materialized and filled our water glasses; another set down a little amuse-bouche of savory phyllo and took our orders. Emma swirled her wine. Her expression changed from weariness into something carefully neutral. “I have to tell you something,” she said, her voice modulated.
In the entire history of humanity, no good has ever come of the phrase “I have to tell you something.” Alarmed, I stabbed phyllo with too much force, causing it to violently hurl a little spray of cheese across the table. “Well, yeah. That’s why I’m here.”
The murdered appetizer escaped Emma’s notice; she appeared to be pondering her approach. I waited.
“There’s more than you know,” she said, adding, “About what happened with Nick.”
Cautiously: “Okay.”
“Zadie.” She set down her wineglass. “First, let me say, I’ll understand if you can’t forgive me. But I finally realized how selfish it is to keep hiding things from you. I want us to stay friends so badly it physically hurts, but I’ll never lie to you again.”
“Ah.”
“And I know you must wonder why I never confessed to you. It was an awful betrayal, but maybe you’d have forgiven me if I’d told you on my own. You’re so happy. You have the perfect all-American life: a doctor married to a banker; two beautiful girls, two handsome boys, and even a golden retriever. You’re so wholesome it’s nauseating.”
“Thank you?”
Emma cast her gaze to the heavens like she was looking for backup. Her eyes fluttered back down. “I’m jealous of you. I have always been jealous of you. It’s no excuse for what I did, but it is an explanation, or part of one.”
I focused on my plate, then looked up. I couldn’t process what Emma was trying to say. “This is getting kind of concerning,” I said. “I feel like you’re about to lunge across the table and spear me with your appetizer fork.”
“If anyone gets speared with an appetizer fork, I promise it will be me.”
“Whoa. Emma.”
“No, no.” Emma, granite-faced, ignored my attempt at levity, but she did set down her fork. “You know, Zadie, you’ve always represented everything I wanted.”
I considered this. “What do you want that you don’t have?”
“It’s not that I’m not grateful for what I have. It’s hard to explain. It’s—” She looked away, taking in something I could not see. I waited.
“I wanted to be normal,” she said finally. “I wanted people to like me without my having to try so hard.”
“I don’t know what you m—”
“You grew up in a regular home,” she said, so intently I startled. “You don’t know what it’s like to be different.”
“Emma, my parents were liberal hippies in an area where a significant proportion of people still refer to the Civil War as the ‘War of Northern Aggression.’ I had to sew my own clothes! We ate hummus before that was a thing! I wouldn’t call my childhood exactly normal—”
She held up a hand, stopping me. “My parents couldn’t read,” she said. “Until a library truck came to our county when I was eight, I barely knew there was an outside world.” The embarrassment in her eyes stilled me. “Everything you take for granted was foreign to me.”
I’d been to Emma’s childhood home once, on a weekend road trip during college. We’d left Louisville and headed southeast on the back roads, passing acres of the black-fenced rolling hills of the grand horse farms outside Lexington. This was the land of the Bourbon Trail, of Keeneland, of artisanal pottery and bluegrass music, of prancing Thoroughbreds with velvety coats and impossibly delicate ankles, everything lush and beautiful and tidy.
In the late morning, we got a flat tire. Apparently there was no pressing criminal action going down in Woodford County, because our breakdown was heralded by the arrival of no fewer than three police cars. The cops rolled up in sequence and swaggered out. Two of them changed our tire, oozing sweat and gallantry. The others lounged, chatting us up.
We’d rolled to a clackety stop in front of an enormous wrought-iron gate, behind which an imposing structure was just visible. I don’t remember Emma talking much until a lull in the conversation, when she glanced behind her and said, “The people who live there must be very rich.”
“Ay, yeah,” said a cop. He mentioned the name of the owner.
“What a beautiful house,” said Emma, nodding toward the building behind us, with its spires and turrets and meticulously painted trim.