Lawrence shook his head vigorously. “We have to go home right now. We need a phone. Where’s the phone?” He spun the computer around so that Charles could read the e-mail. Charles took the reading glasses off Lawrence’s face and put them on his own.
“Oh my God,” Charles said. “Alphonse.”
Lawrence started to cry. “We have a baby boy.”
“A baby!” Charles shouted. “A baby!” He put the computer down on the kitchen table and pulled Lawrence into his arms, dipping him, murmuring names into his ear. Walter. Phillip. Nathaniel. It didn’t matter where Alphonse came from, what the circumstances had been. What mattered was that they were going to take him home.
With all the commotion of booking new flights and helping Charles and Lawrence pack and get out of the house, everyone was awake and alert much earlier than usual. Franny decided that pancakes were in order, as they were a celebratory breakfast food. Jim stayed close to her, cracking eggs when instructed, and searching through cabinets for vanilla extract. Bobby sat at the table alone while Sylvia made the coffee—it had always been her favorite activity, the French press. She timed the brewing on the oven clock, no longer even missing her phone. She could have thrown it down the mountain and watched it crack into a thousand pieces and she wouldn’t have cared. Whenever she closed her eyes, she could feel Joan’s mouth on her body.
“They’re going to be really good, don’t you think?” Bobby was starting to look more like himself—he’d been sleeping better and eating like a teenager.
“I do,” Franny said. “I really do.” She whisked the batter and then slid her finger around the edge of the bowl and stuck it in her mouth, nodding with self-approval. She knifed a small pat of butter and melted it on the hot griddle. “Are you making coffee with your eyes closed for a reason, Syl?”
Sylvia’s eyes flew open. “I was just testing myself,” she said. “Yep, three minutes.” She carried the French press to the table and released the plunger. Bobby held out his cup. “Pour it yourself,” she said. “I’m busy.” Sylvia slid down the bench toward the wall and closed her eyes again, a half-smile on her face.
“You are a weirdo,” Bobby said.
“Oh, yes,” Sylvia said, eyes still shut. “I am.”
That was exactly what his sister had always been good at—being herself. Bobby thought about the slick suits in his closet that he wore when he showed expensive apartments, the hi-tech fabrics he wore to Total Body Power, the faded jeans he’d had since college that he wore when Carmen wasn’t around because she called them “dad pants.”
“You know, I don’t even like real estate that much,” Bobby said. “Or working out. I mean, I like working out because I like to feel healthy, but I don’t really care if I have the best body in the world.” He paused. “I wonder how hard it is to adopt a baby.”
“Let’s just deal with one thing at a time, sweetie, okay?” Franny said, swanning over with a plate stacked high with thick pancakes, some dotted with blueberries.
“Okay,” Bobby said, and forked three of the pancakes onto his plate.
“Okay,” Sylvia said, finally opening her eyes. “These are the best pancakes I have ever seen.” She looked up at her mother. “Thank you, Mom.”
Franny wiped her hands on her skirt, slightly flustered. “You’re welcome, my love.” She turned around to get the syrup, which Jim was already holding.
“I don’t know what happened to our children,” she said. “But I like it.”
Jim kissed Franny on the forehead, which Sylvia and Bobby pretended not to see. All four Posts held their breath simultaneously, each wishing for the moment to last. Families were nothing more than hope cast out in a wide net, everyone wanting only the best. Even the poor souls who had children in an attempt to rescue a dying marriage were doing so out of a misguided hopefulness. Franny and Jim and Bobby and Sylvia did their silent best, and just like that, for a moment, they were all aboard the same ship.
Sylvia had been thinking about Joan every minute since she’d left his company the day before. She wanted to have sex again and again, until she felt like she really knew what she was doing, and Joan seemed like a good partner. He could pick her up, for fuck’s sake. He knew about secluded beaches. Who cared if he listened to terrible music and wore shirts with fleurs-de-lis printed on the shoulder when he went out dancing? At home, Sylvia would never in a million years have been interested in anyone who went out dancing, period, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that she needed to figure out a totally natural way to sneak Joan upstairs to her bedroom without her parents noticing.
In the few minutes before he rang the bell, Sylvia opened her laptop at the kitchen counter. There was a message from Brown with her rooming situation—Keeney Quad, what she’d been hoping for, where most of the freshmen lived—and contact information about her new roommate (Molly Krumpler-Jones, of Newton, Massachusetts). It was the e-mail that Sylvia had been waiting months for, but she barely even looked at it, because right above it was an e-mail from Joan.
S— Sorry to cancel our second to last session, but I won’t be able to come today. I will see you tomorrow at ten to say good-bye. Had fun at the beach.—J
He could easily have sent it in a text message, but if he’d texted, she would have seen it faster and responded. The e-mail was a time bomb, waiting for her to open her computer in order to detonate. Sylvia felt her cheeks go up in flame, but then she heard someone at the door and was instantly relieved. He’d been joking! Obviously, Joan wasn’t that much of an asshole—he was just playing with her. Sylvia scrambled to the door. She considered flashing him when she opened the door, but her breasts had never been particularly impressive, and decided against it. She was laughing as she pulled the knob.
A tall woman—taller than Sylvia by several inches, which meant she was close to six feet—was bent in half on the other side of the door, rooting around like an anteater in a gigantic leather purse.
“Can I help you?” Sylvia asked. She put her hands on her hips in hopes that her posture would communicate that she was not the slightest bit interested in doing anything of the sort.
The woman looked up startled. “Oh, Lord. You must be Franny’s daughter, are you? I saw the car in the drive and knew that I must have mixed up the dates. Isn’t that just like me,” she said, as if Sylvia would be able to corroborate. She stood up and gave her long, wavy blond hair a shake. “I’m Gemma,” she said. “It’s my house!”
“Oh,” Sylvia said. “Then I guess you should come in.” She gestured toward the foyer, stepped inside, and screamed for her mother before retreating to her bedroom.
Franny hadn’t seen Gemma in person in a decade and was horrified to find her remarkably unchanged. Gemma got herself a glass of water—Oh, you’ve been using the filter? I just drink straight from the tap like a cat. I think it’s what keeps my immune system in such top shape—and then they went out to sit by the pool. Gemma had just come from her house in London, a limestone in Maida Vale, but before that she’d been in Paris for two weeks, and before that, Berlin.
“It’s so exhausting,” Gemma said. “I really envy that you have this lifestyle. You can pack up the kids and just go somewhere for two weeks and no one will even bother you.” She widened her eyes at the word bother. “You can just get away. I would pay a million dollars for that. Even when I do go on vacation, the gallery is always calling me, or one of my artists, and then I have to get on a plane just to massage someone’s fragile ego, and I want to say, you know, I was just about to have a snorkel in the Maldives.” Gemma ruffled her hair with both hands, laying it over the back of the chaise longue. “It’s a nice house, isn’t it? Quaint.”