“Hmmm,” said Sadie. She had grown tired of Caitlin and was unsure of what to do now that Jack was suddenly—and without any effort on Sadie’s part—asleep. He hadn’t fallen asleep in his stroller in months. Could she move him into his crib without waking him? Could she even stop walking? If so, she could buy a second cup of coffee and sit in the park and read.
“It all came out when I married Osman. They were furious. I’m so out of touch with them that I thought they’d be thrilled. He’s a programmer. He works for, like, Google. Totally solid. But he’s Pakistani.” She pulled her sunglasses out of her stroller bag and clumsily slid them onto her face. “He worships Ed, you know. All those guys do.”
“Wow,” said Sadie, uncomfortably. “So what did his parents think?” She was interested against her will. “Were they okay with you?”
Caitlin nodded. “They’re professors, just like my parents. Class is the great equalizer, right?”
“I suppose.”
In silence, the women walked past Moishe’s Bakery, gazing at the black-and-white cookies and prune hamantaschen in the window.
“So you’re still in touch with Lil?” asked Caitlin as they reached the corner of Columbia Street, where they’d soon part ways.
Sadie shook her head. “No, not really. Not since she left Tuck.”
“Me, too,” she said, nodding her head solemnly. “We weren’t as close after she got out of the hospital. She was really in a bad way.”
“I was under the impression that there wasn’t really anything wrong with her,” said Sadie, keeping her gaze fixed ahead of her. “Emily saw her right after she was admitted and said she seemed fine. She was just upset about the miscarriage. And angry with Tuck.” She could not prevent herself from narrowing her eyes at Caitlin. “Emily said she got worse in the hospital.”
They had reached the entrance to Caitlin’s building and stopped. “That’s not how it seemed to me,” she told Sadie, with a shrug. “And remember, I saw her a lot more than all of you did right before she got sick.”
She wasn’t sick, Sadie started to say, but before she could, Caitlin had cocked her head toward the archway leading into her building. “Do you want to come in?” she asked.
“Oh, no,” said Sadie. “I really should get him home and try to put him in his crib.” Caitlin pushed a lock of yellow hair behind her ear. “He can sleep in Ismael’s crib.” She gestured toward her son. “And you and I can have some coffee.” A broad, almost loony smile suddenly sliced across her face. “Oh, and we have kittens! We just brought them home from the shelter. Do you remember our old cats? Those fat things.” Sadie smiled faintly. She did indeed. “They died a year ago. All three within a month. It was like they had a pact.” For a moment, her jaw softened. “I miss them. But the kittens are cute. If Jack wakes up, he can play with them!”
Sadie sighed and succumbed, as she’d known she would. She was too tired to argue. “That sounds great,” she said, and followed Caitlin down the ramp, through the brick archway, across the pretty courtyard, with its oblong fountain, and into the small foyer of the building.
“The contractor’s not here today,” Caitlin explained as they trundled themselves into the small, clunky elevator. “So it shouldn’t be too loud. The kitchen guy might be taking measurements or something, but he shouldn’t bother us too much.” The door closed loudly and Caitlin pressed the cracked black Bakelite button, the “4” long rubbed off its face. With a jolt, the ropes and pullies and gears started up their low thrum. The truth was, Sadie loved these buildings. Caitlin was right. They were the most beautiful in the neighborhood, modeled on a Parisian complex of the 1920s. Her own building, constructed some seven or eight years later, was a brute.
“Have you guys renovated?” Caitlin was asking her. “It’s total hell. We have, like, twenty guys. The architect. The contractor.” She began ticking them off her fingers. “The soundproofing guy. The cabinet guy. The stone guy. The concrete guy. The tile guy. The floor guy. The electrician. The plumber.” Sadie nodded sympathetically, though her apartment still had the original 1948 kitchen, complete with a monstrous white BiltRite stove and painted oak cabinets that leaked sawdust onto her pots and pans. She had to wash everything before she used it. “It’s not functional,” Rose had cried two years earlier, when they’d cleaned out the apartment after Minnie’s death, Sadie so pregnant she could barely bend over, and still with a month to go.
“I like it,” Sadie had insisted. It seemed barbaric, somehow, to just come into the apartment in which Minnie had lived for fifty years, nearly half her life, and start ripping things up. But then there was also, again, the money. They didn’t have forty grand on hand.
“No,” she told Caitlin as they landed, with a jolt, on the fourth floor. “We haven’t had any work done.”
“It’s such a pain dealing with all these people roaming around your house.” Woefully, she jangled her key ring in the direction of the green metal door to the right of the elevator. “Osman leaves for work before they arrive and I’m supposed to tell them what to do—and I have no idea. He’s used to ordering people around. He grew up with servants. But I just have no idea.” A couple of short bangs and the low murmur of voices issued forth from the apartment. “Steve is here,” Caitlin sighed, selecting a gold Medeco key, similar to Sadie’s own, and inserted it into the dull brass lock. With a thwack the tumblers fell—and Jack’s eyes popped open. For a moment it seemed as if he might close them again. Then his face contorted into a familiar expression—the silent scream, Ed called it—and it was clear things would not end so easily. The wail that followed seemed magnified a thousandfold by the hallway’s stucco walls; and yet, somehow, Ismael slept on.
“Oh, baby,” Sadie cried, as she struggled to unlatch the straps of the stroller. “You’re so tired. My poor baby. We should have gone home.” Jack in her arms, sobbing in great gulps, she followed Caitlin into a loftlike room of jaw-dropping size. Even Jack seemed stunned by the expanse of the space in which he found himself, for he immediately stopped crying, pointed to a wide floating staircase that presumably led to a second, lower floor, turned his face to Sadie, and said, “Oooooooh!” Large windows lined three walls. In one corner, the makings of a kitchen surrounded a short, whiskered man in paint-covered clothes, wrestling with a piece of wood.
“Hey, Steve,” Caitlin called.
“Hey,” he called back.
“We’re just home for lunch. We won’t get in your way.”
Steve laughed. “I’m starving,” he shouted. “What are we having?”
Caitlin shot Sadie a panicked look. “Well, actually, we’re just going to have coffee, but Meera can find you something.”
He laughed again. “I’m playing with you,” he said, and returned to the obstinate slat of wood.
In another corner sat a long, rustic table, lined with austere metal chairs, and overhung with three small crystal chandeliers all in a row, the spindly, deconstructed sort they sold at ABC. On the far side of the staircase, south of the kitchen, two long, spare sofas faced each other. A pelt of some sort lay between them, cow or gazelle or perhaps some unidentifiable Western sort of beast. Near its head—or where its head would have been—a sole, uncomfortable-looking chair, seemingly made of twigs, presided over the room with a certain hauteur, as if daring anyone to sit on it. The rest of the space was bare, as were the windows. And the floor was not oak plank, like all the other apartments in the building, but a flat, uniform red. “Colored concrete,” Caitlin told her. “It’s the ‘latest thing.’” She smirked, so Sadie might understand that she didn’t care at all—of course—about the latest thing in interior design, but was, rather, making fun of herself for installing a trendy floor. “People are using it for kitchen counters, mostly, but our architect convinced us to do the floor. It was a fortune. I can’t believe we did it.”