Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [57]
When I woke up, she was gone. The sheets were still warm from her body; the pillow still smelled like her hair. I gathered it against me, telling myself that she’d come back and take me away, to the house with the lemon tree in the backyard, to the beach with the surfers and their bonfires. We would eat fried shrimp and salty French fries and listen to music all night long. I didn’t see her again until I was seventeen.
In the hospital, with my husband in surgery, with a ring worth more than my grandparents’ house on my finger, I stared out the window and thought about slicing up that pie: Trey and Tommy, Bettina and the baby. What would be left for me? Then I pictured Marcus waking up, how I’d lean over him, backlit by the sun, looking like an angel as I whispered in his ear, Honey, I want us to have a baby. I was ready now. I’d be a wonderful mother, not like Raine. If I made promises, I would keep them.
“Miss?”
An older woman in a Yankees T-shirt had tapped my shoulder. When I turned, she smiled, showing teeth that could have been improved with a few visits to a dentist. I recognized her from the waiting room where we’d sat that morning, me next to Marcus and her beside her husband, who was, from the sound of it, having his hip replaced. “I just want to tell you,” she said, hands clasped at her waist, “that it’s lovely, the way you’re taking care of your father.”
JULES
Have you ever . . . you know?” Kimmie ducked her head shyly. It was ten o’clock on a hot August Saturday night in New York City, eighty degrees and still humid in spite of the darkness, but the window air-conditioning unit chugging away kept Kimmie’s place deliciously cool. We’d gone to a screening of Blade Runner all the way downtown at the Angelika, and now we were sitting on the futon that took up most of the space in her grad-student-housing apartment, a studio on 110th Street and Riverside with a doll-size kitchen, a refrigerator the size of an orange crate, and a single window that afforded her a delightful view of the brick of the apartment building three feet away. It was a vast improvement over my place, in a no-name neighborhood in midtown, a fifth-floor walk-up that I shared with two other girls, where the single bedroom had been chopped into three prison-cell rectangles by particleboard walls that didn’t make it all the way to the ceiling.
Every morning I took the subway down to Wall Street, to my job as a junior analyst at Steinman Cox, the investment and securities firm, which had recruited me with a six-figure salary and the promise of rapid advancement. One hundred thousand dollars a year had sounded like untold riches, but the money didn’t go as far as I’d hoped, not when I was dealing with New York City rent, paying off my loans, and trying to send a little something to each of my parents every month. The egg money had already gone to pay for rehab . . . and “junior analyst” turned out to be finance-speak for “slave.” I worked for an analyst named Rajit, a dark-haired guy with deep-set eyes and bristling eyebrows who came to work every day in a suit and tie, with a gold chain-link bracelet on his wrist and an eye-watering amount of cologne clouding the air around him. Rajit advised clients on investments in the Eastern markets. Every day I’d spend endless hours “building a book,” putting together research about the tin trade in Taipei, or automobile manufacturing in Hong Kong. Once a month I’d be traveling with my team for client presentations, not to the glamorous destinations featured on the firm’s website but, usually, to the Midwest.
Kimmie’s place was tiny, but it was all hers, and she’d filled it with colorful touches. There were brightly colored prints, Kandinsky and Frankenthaler, thumbtacked to the walls,