He’d barely noticed the woman in line behind him, wearing sweatpants and a long puffy white down coat, scraggly hair pulled back in a kerchief. At first glance she looked like some overscheduled Cambridge mom racing through her checklist of errands.
Andrea Messina had been his girlfriend senior year at Linwood. They’d gone out starting with the winter semiformal, continuing into the summer after graduation, when he’d broken things off before heading to college. He hadn’t seen her since. Just seeing her now gave him an uneasy pang of guilt. He’d been an asshole and had never paid the bill.
He hugged her, gave her a kiss on the cheek. She kissed the air. She smelled of a new, different perfume than he remembered, something more sophisticated, but after two decades a woman had the right to change perfumes.
On second glance, he realized that despite her general dishevelment, she was attractive, strikingly so. Even more than in high school. She’d always been cute, doe-eyed, winsome, graceful. A dancer. Her brown hair had honey highlights. Now her face was thinner, more contoured. She still had creamy skin; she’d always had, but in a woman in her midthirties it was particularly noticeable. She’d grown into her beauty.
“Great,” she said. “I haven’t seen you in like forever and I look like a bag lady.” She adjusted her kerchief and finger-combed a few tendrils of hair behind her ears. He noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.
“Not even close,” Rick said. “You look terrific. You live around here?”
“Off Fresh Pond, yeah. Don’t you live in Boston? Not around here…?”
“I’m doing some work on the old house on Clayton Street.”
“Is your dad still…”
“He’s still alive, yeah. In a nursing home.”
“I heard he had a terrible stroke.”
He nodded. “It sucks, but it is what it is.” He hated that empty phrase-what did that mean, anyway, it is what it is?-but it had just slipped out. It was what it was. He’d once done an interview for Back Bay with a local hip-hop celebrity who kept saying It is what it is and haters gonna hate and I just want to live my life. “Your mom and dad okay?” he asked.
“Charlie and Dora are still Charlie and Dora, so… yeah.”
He looked at her grocery cart full of Goldfish and graham crackers, juice boxes and applesauce, peanut butter and Fruit Roll-Ups. “Crazy guess here, but you’ve got a kid?” He bypassed the question of whether she was married or not; the absence of a wedding ring seemed conclusive. “Or maybe you’ve just gotten into snack foods in a big way.”
“Evan is seven.” She smiled. “It even rhymes. But not much longer-he’s about to turn eight.”
“Evan eats a lot of Goldfish, I see. The five-gallon carton.”
“He’s having a birthday party. And you’re still a health-food nut.”
“You mean Tostitos aren’t a basic food group?”
“It’s got the hint of lime, so you’re getting your vitamin C.”
He squinted, tilted his head. “Why did I think you were in New York?”
He remembered she’d gone off to the University of Michigan but lost track of her after that. He thought she might have made the obligatory postcollege migration to Manhattan.
“Yeah, I was with Goldman Sachs for about like two seconds.”
“Goldman Sachs?” Not what he’d expected. He’d pegged her for a more modest career track, working for the state or an insurance company. Less high-powered, anyway. Goldman Sachs seemed pretty high-test for the Andrea he knew.
“Yep. How’s the magazine business?”
“Eh, I’ve moved on, I guess you’d say.”
“Oh yeah? What are you doing?”
“Bit of this, bit of that.” He put his Golden Grahams and Cheerios and Tostitos on the conveyor belt and put the green plastic divider bar at the end of his items like a punctuation mark. He glanced back at her again and smiled. “Hey, are you ever free for dinner? Like maybe tonight?”
“Tonight? I mean… no way I could get a babysitter last-minute.” She blushed. He remembered now: Whenever she was embarrassed or excited, she blushed. Her translucent skin displayed her discomfort like a beacon. She could never hide it.
“Tomorrow night, then?”
“I could… I could ask my sister… but the thing is, I can’t stay out too late. My day starts ridiculously early.” She fingered a tendril of hair. “How about I let you know?”
Usually, he knew, that formula meant no. But something about her told him that this time it meant yes.
7
Rick’s ex-fiancée, Holly, had a small studio apartment on Marlborough Street in the Back Bay. She’d moved back into it once their engagement was broken. He should have realized from the glaringly obvious fact that she insisted on holding on to it even after they got engaged that she’d always had one foot out the door. She’d claimed one day they’d be glad “they” had the extra space, for storage and such. Maybe an office.
They’d lived together in a spacious three-bedroom condo on Beacon Street, in the same building where Tom Brady, the Boston quarterback, had once lived with his fashion-model partner. When Rick and Holly broke up, neither of them could afford it. They could scarcely afford it even when Rick had a job.
Holly’s tiny apartment was lovely, elegant, and jewel-like, like the woman herself, though also a bit cramped and impractical, like the woman herself. Or so he thought when she opened the door in a toxic cloud of recently reapplied Chanel No. 5. He was not in a forgiving mood.
She’d insisted he come over and take away his Wilson Audio floorstanders or else she’d sell them to the building super. She didn’t want those giant loudspeakers, and she was in a hurry. The movers were coming tomorrow to pack and move her out. She was moving to Miami. She worked in the fashion division of a luxury branding agency, and they’d offered her a promotion and a big raise, and besides, her mother and sister lived in South Florida.
“Oh, hi,” she said as if she didn’t expect him. As though he were a salesman, a nuisance interrupting her day. “Come on in.”
She’d taken her lunch hour to meet him here and didn’t look pleased about it either. She was dressed for work: a black leather motorcycle jacket over a white top that draped at the neck, skinny black jeans and studded black leather booties. Her ass was perfect.
She’d also recently reapplied her lipstick, so clearly she cared what she looked like to him, even though she had pointedly not kissed him. In her business, everyone was always kissing each other’s cheeks, even strangers’.
“I’ve got plenty of bubble wrap if you need it.” She waved vaguely toward a few big rolls in the corner next to her vanity. Her nails were painted ruby red. He rolled in the hand truck he’d borrowed from Jeff, navigating a fjord between cliffs of neatly packed and labeled boxes.
“Also, Rick, I’m sorry to have to ask, but you owe me like a thousand bucks.”
“For what?”
“The Amex bill. Remember, we had to use mine because your cards were full up?”
“Oh, right.”
“I’m sorry it’s come down to this. You can give it to me when you’ve got it. It’s not due until next week.”
He took out his wallet. “Like a thousand?”
“Eleven twenty-five, to be exact. One thousand, one hundred twenty-”
“I can do math.” He shucked out eleven hundred-dollar bills, searched for a twenty, found a fifty instead, and handed her the sheaf.
“Whoa, someone’s flush all of a sudden.” She smiled, displaying her perfectly upturned upper lip, her perfect teeth. Her parents had not stinted on their two beautiful daughters’ orthodontia.