Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [69]
I felt my lips curl. “Satya. They’re paying some woman to donate her egg. They’re paying another woman to carry a baby for them. And this woman, Dad’s new wife, is seriously no good.”
She reached forward, placing her cool hands on mine. “Change is the only constant,” she intoned. “Sorrow is like a leaf in a stream. Sit on the banks. Watch it pass.”
“You may recall,” I said, with some asperity, “offering me slightly different advice before the Barneys sample sale.”
She smiled. Serenely. Indicating her plain robes, she said, “Suffering ends when craving ends,” like this was a message of incredible profundity instead of something her guru had probably cribbed from a Starbucks cup. “I was lost to myself in New York. Now I’ve come home. So what about you, Bettina? What is it you crave? How can you find your way home?”
“I’ve got a ticket on the five-thirty flight to LaGuardia,” I said. It wasn’t like I could tell her that home was forever lost to me, because home was the five of us, together, the way we used to be. Nor did I mention that, hoping against hope, I’d bought a ticket for her, too.
She rose easily to her feet and walked me to another fountain, this one outdoors, a verdigris-green bowl into which water trickled from a sculpted flower. We sat there in silence, smelling sage and some flowers I didn’t recognize. “Be well,” she said. I knew it was a dismissal. She kissed my cheek and glided off to her chores.
It wasn’t until I’d dropped off the rental car and was flying back to New York that I figured out what else I wanted: my father’s safety, his happiness, an assurance that he would not get his heart broken again. These were perfectly reasonable things to desire. Trey was too wrapped up in Violet’s new teeth and soiled diapers to care; Tommy was too busy chasing women who thought it was witty when a man sang a heavy-metal cover of “Sunny Came Home”; my mother had renounced the world entirely; which meant that I would have to keep my father safe. If I did that, maybe I could keep India’s bony, grasping hands off our money ... and maybe I could have a chance at the thing I most missed and most wanted: my family back.
The Monday after my trip to New Mexico, I was down in the Crypt, wearing white cotton gloves, working with a Tensor lamp and a magnifying glass and tweezers to determine the value of an antique silver locket that was part of a new lot of jewelry. “These things are precious to me,” the woman who’d brought them in had said. “They were my mother’s.” I’d dug out a reference book, trying to determine the age of the locket and whether the chain was original to the piece, when Darren Zucker called.
“Just checking in,” he said. “How was your trip?”
“Fine,” I said automatically.
“I was wondering what you decided to do.” His voice was high, a little nasal, the voice of a Woody Allen wannabe for whom the whole world was a joke.
“Are you billing me for this?” I asked.
“You have a suspicious and untrusting nature. But I respect that. And no, this isn’t business. I was just curious. It’s how I wound up in this line of work—being curious. And I was thinking you might want someone to talk to. You know, do the Franklin list.”
“Pardon?”
“Ben Franklin. Draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper. List the pros and cons. We could have lunch.”
I closed my book and gently replaced the necklace in its box. Darren Zucker was not my ideal confidant, but he’d been a good sport about our trip to Hoboken, and besides, I did need to eat. There were no windows in the Crypt, but when I’d arrived that morning the weather had been a beautiful day, the sky deep blue, a light breeze stirring the treetops. September in New York City always felt, to me, like the year’s true beginning. It made me think of the last days of summer, loading up the station wagon in Bridgehampton for the ride back to the city. We’d stay in the Hamptons as long as we could, wringing every last minute out of August. My parents would throw a barbecue on Labor Day, inviting anyone who was left: the neighbors, our staff, their kids,