Charlotte can’t explain how it works, but after fifty minutes in Ted’s sunlit office looking down on Madison Square Park, she feels braver. More comfortable out in the world. More in control. Not that therapy isn’t hard, not that she doesn’t cry sometimes. But Ted knows what to say, or not say, to help her get through it—and get over the past. He’s helping her forgive herself for the things she’s done—well, for one thing she’s done—that she can’t seem to get over.
At the same time, Charlotte feels confident that she’s handling her life so well that sometimes therapy almost seems like an indulgence. Except she has to watch out for the lasting damage done by crazy neglectful Mom, who became a normal person only after a stay in a facility—and really only after Charlotte and Rocco were out of the house.
Ted says that Charlotte needs to remember that her fantasies aren’t real. She’s too quick to imagine catastrophe and disaster.
By the time Daisy’s old enough to come home on her own . . . who knows? Maybe they’ll live someplace else. Maybe—better option—Drew will live somewhere else.
Eli goes into Daisy’s room to help her pick out clothes for school. Charlotte hears the first sounds of a disagreement likely to escalate between her daughter and her husband. Charlotte needs to shower and get dressed, but she pauses outside Daisy’s door.
Daisy is insisting on wearing the gauzy shirt, embroidered with flowers, that her grandmother—Charlotte’s mother—bought her in Oaxaca. It’s great that she wants to wear Grandma’s present. But it’s still very cold outside. And she’s refusing to wear a coat.
The argument lasts until Eli throws open the window and says, “Not warm! It was warm in Mexico, but this is not that, here it’s cold, cold, cold, muñeca.” Charlotte likes when he calls Daisy “muñeca.” It means doll in Spanish. Eli is half Panamanian.
Daisy says she doesn’t care how cold it is, but finally she agrees to put on a blue cardigan over the flowered shirt. Her bright purple quilted jacket will go on top of that.
Charlotte would intervene if she had more energy, if she weren’t hungover. Anyway, Daisy will shed the jacket the minute she gets to school. Her school is still so overheated—Charlotte has been in greenhouses colder than Daisy’s school. She’s had to stop herself from suggesting jungle plants that would thrive in the urban microclimate.
Charlotte wriggles into her navy Jil Sander power suit, wrestling with the zipper that seems to be saying: Sorry, girl! One too many tacos at Mom’s house in Mexico!
A talking zipper means too much wine and too many sleeping pills. Charlotte changes shoes three times, ultimately deciding on a pair of Marc Jacobs heels, a bad idea if she plans to do any walking at all.
She keeps her favorite sneakers at the flower shop, where she’ll go after her meeting, to catch up with her assistant, Alma. Charlotte will answer her emails, do some work, and chill until it’s time to pick up Daisy from her after-school program at P.S. 131.
BY THAT AFTERNOON, Charlotte will wonder: What was Daisy wearing?
What did they finally settle on?
Was it the blue cardigan or the pink sweater? The purple jacket or the puffy white vest?
She won’t remember. Eli won’t remember.
Their whole lives will be on the line.
How could they not know?
JUST AS CHARLOTTE is getting out of the taxi at 39th Street and Eleventh Avenue—at the entrance to one of those brand-new skyscrapers that have popped up overnight while everyone’s back was turned, like forty-story steel-and-glass mushrooms—her phone beeps.
Her nine o’clock meeting is now a four o’clock meeting.
Sorry! Scheduling conflict! Let us know if you can’t make it!
Now Charlotte has a problem. Daisy’s after-school program ends at five.
Standing on the windy corner, shielding her phone from the glare and trying to keep the Hudson River wind from wrecking her hair completely, she types: RESCHEDULE?
Then she erases the text. In her experience, by the time a meeting is rescheduled—New York being the dog-eat-dog struggle that it is—someone else will have been hired.
Charlotte desperately wants this job, not so much because of the money, which is good, but mostly because it represents a career move up to a whole nother level—a level to which she has aspired, one that will call on all her skill, creativity, imagination, everything she’s learned about the way that flowers and plants and living things can transform a space.
They’re asking her to design the floral arrangements for a benefit dinner at Cipriani. A dinner for eight hundred. Eight hundred! She’s never worked on this scale, with this budget.
JUST YESTERDAY—WAS it really yesterday?—she’d been stuck in the Mexico City airport lounge when two emails came in.
The first was from Daisy’s school. Two second graders have head lice. The risk to other grades is minimal, but . . . Charlotte skims . . . Watch and wait. It’s the school’s duty to inform parents. Sorry for any inconvenience.
The second message was from Alma at her florist shop and floral-arrangement business, Buddenbrooks and Gladiola.
The header said: Good News!
“What’s that?” Eli was reading over her shoulder, not a habit she loves.
Charlotte tried to focus. When she travels, a delay always means: head to the business lounge and drink as much free liquor as she can. She can always sleep on the plane, and no one—except, she hopes, the pilot—is driving.
“It says ‘good news,’” Eli said. “That would seem to mean: good news.”
“So it seems,” said Charlotte.
The good news is: There is going to be a huge benefit dinner, in Manhattan, for hurricane relief in the Caribbean. An emergency response. A gala at Cipriani. They want to talk to Charlotte about the floral arrangements. Can she come in for a meeting at nine . . . tomorrow morning?
Tomorrow? Either the benefit really is an emergency response to an emergency situation, or—more likely—they’d hired someone else, and it hadn’t worked out. All of which sharpens Charlotte’s desire to show them what she can do.
She emailed back: Could they give her some idea of what they had in mind? No need to say she was in another country, relying on Aeromexico to get her back that night.
The organizers wanted something stark—maybe just bare branches—to reference how much land has been deforested. Maybe they could do something to suggest palm trees blown over.
The costs need to be low because they want the money to go to the islands, not the dinner. Charlotte (they said) has a reputation for thinking out of the box. They hope that the exposure will compensate for the modest fee.
If not for the margaritas, she would never have emailed back: WHAT’S “MODEST”?
It was twice what she’d ever been paid for any job. And the list of celebrities on the benefit committee was long and growing daily.
In the taxi home from the airport, Charlotte was already making sketches on the back of her boarding pass.
THIS MORNING, IN the cab ride from the East Village to Hudson Yards, where the meeting is being held, she’d rehearsed how she would communicate her enthusiasm and her ideas for the project.
But now that the meeting has been postponed . . . She’s still determined to go. If it threatens to run late, she has all day to find someone to pick up Daisy.