The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [24]
And Tess had almost been Shirley. Could a name change one’s destiny? She could not imagine Shirley Monaghan sitting here, with a problematic pregnancy and an even more problematic dog, who was gnawing on something in his crate, possibly his own leg. Shirley Monaghan would probably be knitting booties right now, or making her in-utero progeny listen to Mozart.
Tess Monaghan, by contrast, was trying to figure out how to have another go at the man she now thought of as the Bluebeard of Blythewood Road.
Chapter 8
Giving away money was not as much fun as it used to be, Whitney Talbot decided, sitting at her desk and frowning at her in-box.
The job had been a blast when she started, four years ago. Who wouldn’t like being Lady Largesse, as she had thought of herself, dispensing cash to worthy people and their causes. Plus, she was the boss, a role to which she was temperamentally suited. Really, it was amazing she had ever managed to work for anyone. At the family foundation, the only person to whom Whitney answered was her mother, and she had bent that poor woman to her will long ago. She was the chief, the gatekeeper to millions, someone who funded solutions—and yet she found herself in a perpetually bad mood as of late.
Part of the problem was a paradox inherent in philanthropy. When the economy tanked, the demands grew, even as the principal shrank. The guilt engendered by the exponentially multiplying “Nos!” squeezed satisfaction from a now scarce crop of yesses. Just today a woman had pitched an interesting idea about trying to help the city’s poorest households use the local farmers markets. The earnest young woman had thought about her plan, deciding it wasn’t enough to provide transportation and ensure that more stands took WIC vouchers and food stamps. Poor women from East and West Baltimore needed to be taught how to prepare the foods they were likely to find, how to let the seasons guide what they put on the table, a big adjustment for rich and poor in today’s instant-gratification world.
“Once they learn to eat things like squash, eggplant, and kale, that will create support for our next phase, mass community gardens in which they raised their own vegetables,” the woman said.
“Kale?” Whitney had echoed, wrinkling her nose.
“It’s your bowels’ best friend.”
“I don’t think that’s the way we want to sell this,” Whitney said. She took stock of her applicant. The woman was wearing a fitted suit, one that must have been custom-tailored to provide such a perfect fit, and quite striking shoes—oxfords with killer heels. Her résumé showed an interesting combination of ivory tower academic work and hands-on restaurant experience. Yet Whitney didn’t like her.
Sandwiches arrived and the woman regarded hers skeptically, pulling apart the bread and even sniffing the mayonnaise.
“I never eat tomatoes this late in October,” she said. “They’re almost certainly shipped from Florida, or Mexico. And are you sure this bread is whole grain? The term is used quite loosely, I’ve found.”
Whitney decided then not to take the project to her board. It was a good idea, but the woman’s attitude was all wrong. For the people she was trying to serve, a slice of tomato, whatever its origins, would be an improvement over lake trout, chicken boxes, and fries. Kale, eggplant—those would be a hard sell. Even whole wheat bread was viewed with distaste and suspicion in Baltimore’s poor neighborhoods. Whitney had spent enough time in local soup kitchens to familiarize herself with the kitchens’ day-to-day needs, and she knew that most diners refused to touch even the heel of a loaf of white bread. This self-important young woman was too rigid to achieve what she wanted. Sorry, kettle, she wanted to say, this pot thinks you have the right plan, but the wrong temperament.
Instead, she rushed through the lunch and told her she would be in touch, then spent the better part of an hour on the phone with an emergency homeless shelter that always seemed to be reeling from crisis to crisis. “You have to develop some kind of long-term financial