7.
Rebecca
Rebecca took a bite of her scallops and thought, I don’t even know these women. She thought, These people are strangers to me. We were thrown together by happenstance, that’s all. Happenstance and geography. These were thoughts she’d been having more and more often lately. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her friends anymore, that wasn’t exactly right—it was that nobody here knew what to do with her sadness after Peter. Immediately after, sure: there was the food and the offers to take over carpools and so forth. But after a time, Rebecca could tell that secretly they thought (and maybe sometimes talked among themselves) that it was about time for Rebecca to get on with it. They wanted the old Rebecca back, the one who planned trips and organized sleepovers. They didn’t understand that that Rebecca was gone forever.
Brooke had invited an outsider to Esther’s birthday dinner, which was clearly vexing Esther, though she was trying her best not to show it. Rebecca considered the new woman, who was sitting next to her. She had seen her on the beach at surf camp, but Rebecca had been on the phone with Daniel for a lot of the morning. Daniel’s brother-in-law was having problems with his daughter, who was thirteen, and Daniel was trying to help him by having her stay with him while his brother-in-law went on a business trip to Cincinnati. Now Daniel himself was having trouble with the girl.
The woman was Sherri “with an i” (that was how she introduced herself, as though the i were of particular value, a bonus). All Rebecca knew about her was that she had a daughter the same age as all of the girls and that she had moved from somewhere (Illinois?) after a divorce.
“Nice to meet you,” Rebecca had said automatically, even though it wasn’t, not really. She’d been reared on a steady diet of politeness—thank-you notes for every gift, a kind word for any person she ran across—and she’d carried many of these habits into adulthood and tried to instill them in her own children. But manners were thing number 758 that no longer mattered to Rebecca after Peter.
“Oh, hey!” said Esther, who sat on Rebecca’s other side. Alcohol always made Esther’s fair skin flush the color of a spring radish. “I’ve been meaning to say, it’s really too bad, what happened with Alexa and her friends. I heard the three of them don’t hang out anymore.”
Rebecca, startled out of her reverie, was surprised into showing her surprise. “Destiny and Caitlin?” she asked. (Rebecca had been wondering for months what had happened between Alexa and those two, but the answer was somewhere in Alexa’s vault, locked away, unattainable.) “Nothing happened,” she added.
Esther assessed Rebecca’s ignorance too quickly. “Of course not,” she said.
“Why?” Faced with Esther’s knowing look Rebecca had no choice but to ask. “What did you hear happened?”
“Oh my gosh, nothing!” said Esther. “I didn’t hear anything.” She put a hand nervously to her earlobe as if checking for a lost earring. “I just meant—I mean, I heard it had something to do with Alexa’s plans for next year. But you know what? I could be totally off-base. I’m not even sure who I heard that from, now that I think about it. I’m probably thinking of someone else entirely.”
Rebecca concentrated for a moment on the buzzing of the other conversations going on around her. She heard Georgia cry out, with a loud laugh, “We’ll have to get rid of her!”
“Alexa’s plan for next year is to go to Colby.” Rebecca didn’t say as you know, and she didn’t say, obviously, but both were implied. Rebecca would not get caught up in the wasp’s nest of competing agendas. She would finish her scallops, and she would go home, and she would call Daniel to say good night, and she would be asleep by ten thirty.
Then she noticed that the woman on the other side of her, Sherri with an i, didn’t look quite right. Rebecca laid a hand on her arm and said, “Are you okay?”
“Completely fine,” said Sherri. “Really. It’s just a little warm in here, that’s all. Do you feel warm?”
“I do,” said Rebecca (she didn’t). She didn’t believe that it was the temperature. The woman looked to be in some distress. Her dress was droopy and her eyes were droopy and Rebecca could bet that underneath it all her soul was droopy. A divorce was a loss of a high order: not the death of a person, but the death of a union. Esther had turned away from Rebecca to talk to Dawn, and Rebecca leaned closer to the poor broken creature on her right.
“Tequila does that to me too,” she whispered. “I always have seltzer as my second drink. Sometimes I just can’t keep up.”
Sherri with an i said, “Smart,” and gave Rebecca a grateful glance, and Rebecca felt a small, empathetic, recently underused part of herself begin to unfurl.
8.
Sherri
She shouldn’t have ordered the second cocktail. After all, she’d already had the wine at Brooke’s house in the afternoon. But the first one had gone down so easily, especially after the shot, and everybody else was having another one, and the old Sherri could hold a lot of liquor. (She was thinner now, from the stress of the move, less curvy, more of a lightweight.)
Also, she shouldn’t have ordered the surf and turf. She’d been one of the first women to order, and for a moment she forgot where she was, who she was now. She’d never looked at menu prices before; she’d never said no to the best dish in whatever restaurant she was in. By the time she remembered, it was too late.
There were so many different conversations going on—the women had broken off into twos or threes, beautiful heads bent toward one another. She caught little snippets here and there, individual words—camp and horrendous and contractor and eyelashes—but couldn’t find her entrance into any single discussion. She heard someone at the far end of the table say, “We’ll have to get rid of her!” and her blood ran cold.
Only the woman next to her had spoken to her, and it was with such kindness that she felt tears unexpectedly prick her eyes.
She picked up her steak knife and looked at her plate: an eight-inch filet for the turf, and shrimp scampi for the surf. It had been Bobby who introduced her to good steak; when she met him she was familiar only with the cheap cuts: the chucks, the flanks. Bobby taught her about Kobe and tenderloin and porterhouse. He took her to Mastro’s on Sixth Avenue.
“Get whatever you want,” he said to her anytime they went out. It had given him great pride to be able to say that. He beamed like a little boy who’d just tied his shoes for the first time. Mastro’s was the first restaurant, but not the last, that Sherri had been to without prices on the menu. It struck her like a swift blow that she’d have to look at prices, and very carefully, for the rest of her life. She never should have ordered this dish. She had lost her appetite anyway. She cut into an asparagus spear.
We’ll have to get rid of her. No mirth when Bobby said that. Madison Miller was a piece of business that must be attended to, like filling out invoices and managing the fleet of trucks.
Eventually Sherri managed to eat her meal, and the good meat and the good shrimp got to work soaking up the alcohol, and so by the time she was driving the Acura back across the causeway she felt almost normal. (Many of the ladies seemed to have carpooled, so it was a lonely business, climbing into the Acura all on her own, though she did manage a quick good-bye to her savior.) The moon, almost full, was winking above the salt marshes, and she lowered the window to take in the very particular briny smell of the summer evening. She began to feel almost peaceful, and when she parked in front of the half-house on Olive Street she was looking forward to telling Katie all about the restaurant. Maybe they could go there one evening soon and sit on the more casual side, near the bar, and share two of the small plates. (The flatbread had looked very good.)