“You’re a lucky man, Bert. Your kids have turned out beautifully. You should be very proud.”
“I am, of course.” Funny, he didn’t look proud. “Lorraine deserves the credit, though. For the children. For our life, really. It’s all been Lorraine. She said our boys would turn out fine and they have. And Sydney-I couldn’t ask for a better daughter.”
“They say you’re only as happy as your least happy child, so you’re in good shape.”
“I guess I am. I guess I am.” But he sounded more game than convinced, someone putting on the happy face expected of him. Probably just tired at the end of what had been an even longer day for him.
“It would have been my forty-fourth wedding anniversary,” Bambi said. “I guess it still is.”
Linda was at the valet stand, five people behind her own sister. There was a man hovering close to Michelle, but he was a fool if he thought he had a chance with her. The quarter-size bald spot alone would disqualify him.
“Should we keep going?” Henry asked. Their youngest was thirteen now, and it was still relatively novel for them to be out and not running up against the babysitter’s clock.
“And do what?” Linda asked. Not peevishly or meanly, merely curious. What was there left to do? They had gone to a party, eaten a meal, danced, drunk.
She watched the man who was not quite with Michelle lean into the car, argue with her. No, not argue-entreat.
“I don’t know. Let’s just go sit in the hotel bar until this line calms down. It’s cold out here.”
That seemed reasonable. Pleasant, even. And when they were settled at the bar, drinks in front of them, Linda was reminded how much she enjoyed her husband’s company, one-on-one, and how long it had been since she had had it. Soon, in the blink of an eye, it would be just the two of them again, all the time, for the first time in almost twenty years.
“We met in a bar,” he said.
“You hopped for me.”
“I’ve been hopping ever since.” Said with the easygoing demeanor that she loved, when she didn’t find it absolutely infuriating. “I remember thinking, ‘Why is that pretty girl so sad?’ ”
“I remember being sad.”
“Over John Anderson, of all things.”
“Anderson and-I don’t think I ever told you this.”
Henry perked up. It was a rare gift, a new story twenty-four years into a relationship.
“The bartender. He knew my father. And he told me that he had seen him with my older sister from time to time.”
“You don’t have an older sister.” A beat. “Oh. Wow. I’m sorry. Did he mean-that one?”
“I think so. I didn’t ask any follow-up questions, that was for sure.”
The man from the valet line, the one who had been with Michelle, came into the bar, waved at the younger members of the wedding party, and asked the bartender for a beer. But he didn’t go over to his friends, not right away, just sat at the bar, shoulders slumped, a picture of dejection and rejection.
“Don’t let my sister get to you,” Linda said, leaning across Henry. She could imagine Noah being hurt by a girl like Michelle. Just thinking about it made her angry. “She’s a diva.”
“She shouldn’t be driving. She had a lot to drink.”
“No, she probably shouldn’t, but it’s a straight shot down Boston Street, more or less, and she’ll never get above twenty-five miles an hour.”
“I live thirty minutes from here and I got a room for the night. They have a rate.”
It occurred to Linda that she and Henry should have gotten a room, made a little getaway out of it. Why didn’t she ever think of such things? Maybe she could start.
“She’ll be fine. She always is, Michelle.”
“Look, you’re her sister-should I call her? Or is she seeing somebody?”
“Call her,” Henry said, even as Linda said: “I think she’s seeing someone.”
“She gave me her card.” He pulled it out. Sinergie. Linda still cringed at the name and was still unsure what the company was supposed to do. Something to do with nightlife?
“Well, if you’re going to call her on her work number, do it quickly,” Linda said, feeling a little loose, not so much from alcohol but just from the unfamiliar sensation of being unfettered, at no one’s beck and call, although she was technically always reachable on her BlackBerry.
“Because she’ll forget me?” the man asked.
“Because Sinergie is going down the tubes.” And, yes, because she’ll forget you. She’s already forgotten you. You could carry Michelle out of a burning building and she wouldn’t remember you.
He tapped the card on the bar, lost in thought, then went back to his friends, looking a little more resolute and confident. She assumed he was going to call Michelle next week and get shot down.
March 25, 2012
Sandy didn’t work for a couple of days, not on the file. Again, he couldn’t fool himself about his own motivations. He was avoiding an unpleasant task, trying to talk to Bert Gelman, by throwing himself into another unpleasant task, cleaning out the house in Remington and preparing it for a new set of tenants.
Not that Bert would be rude or unkind to Sandy. He just wasn’t going to tell Sandy anything. One thing to let your wife share some old gossip, quite another to implicate yourself as an accessory to a fugitive’s flight. Sandy was stuck. He couldn’t figure out where to go next. So he cleaned.
The old Remington rowhouse was in crap shape, trashed. Again. No matter how carefully Sandy chose his tenants, they all went out the same way, as if they had done some sort of cost-benefits analysis and decided that they’d rather forgo the deposit than, say, clean out the vegetable crisper, which was always full of soggy surprises. This batch had had a cat, too, although that wasn’t allowed under the terms of the lease. Sandy was going to have to flea-bomb and replace the carpet in the finished basement.
Over the years, Sandy had done everything he could to make Nabby’s house bright-painted all the walls eggshell, installed a transom above the front door, switched out the curtains for neutral bamboo blinds chosen by Mary-but it was hard to pull light into a north-facing row house. He was struck anew by the darkness every time he crossed the threshold. Didn’t help that the latest tenants had removed all the lightbulbs, even the ones in the overhead fixtures.
But the house was also dark in his memory of his arrival there, a starless December night when he couldn’t quite see the woman who inspected him and said, “Oh-I was expecting someone younger.”
“Abuelita?” he asked. Little grandmother? He thought he had been going to a relative, at least a distant one.
“No,” she said. “No abuela.” Then shouting, as if he were deaf. “NO ABUELA. NO ABUELA. NO ABUELITA FOR YOU.”
And that was how Hortensia Saldana became Nabby.
Sandy had come to her through a program known as Operation PedroPan. Cuba had fallen, but the Catholic Welfare Bureau persuaded the government to allow kids to enter the United States and stay in foster homes until their parents could join them. At first, almost everyone went to Florida, but eventually other cities offered homes as well. Sandy was one of the last ones placed, convinced by his parents that it would make it easier for them to follow if they had a son in the States.
Hortensia Saldana had no use for Cubanos, but she liked the idea of being paid to care for one. She was a social worker, although years later, when Mary got to know her, she would describe her as the least-socialized social worker she had ever known. The day they came to tell him his parents were dead, killed in a car accident, an improbable catastrophe-they had a car, but seldom the gas to drive it-Nabby had just looked at him blankly, like a bureaucrat refusing to do a job above her pay grade. She wasn’t paid to offer him comfort. She received a check to feed him and clothe him. And they both knew there was no way she was going to adopt him, this teenage boy who wasted hot water and left the milk on the counter sometimes. But he could stay on until he was eighteen, she said, as long as he made himself useful-and as long as the checks kept coming.