Authors: Meg Mitchell Moore
Gabe! Look, honey, look what Angela did at school today. Best in the class, her teacher said.
Angela, did you study?
Angela, did you pick up your room?
Angela, sing louder!
“No,” said Maria serenely. “No, I don’t think so.” She tipped her head back and lifted her face to the sun.
“Um,
no,
” said Henrietta. She crossed her arms over her chest like whatever form of craziness Angela had just confessed to might be contagious.
“Okay,” said Angela. “Never mind, it’s stupid. Forget I said anything.”
Who’s the one in the blue shirt? What’s your name, young lady? Angela? Last name, sweetheart? That was a fabulous race you ran, very tough, ever thought of going out for cross-country?
Did you, Angela, did you? Have you, Angela? Will you? Angela! Angela!
3:12 a.m.
Dear Marianne,
Do you know I still haven’t told Gabe about what happened all those years ago?
Some people say it’s normal for spouses to have at least one secret from each other. Do you think that’s true?
This is why I worry so much, why I always have. One mistake, Marianne! And a lifetime of worry.
“How long until I don’t need a car seat?” asked Maya.
“You have to be eight,” said Cecily. “California state law.”
“Not true. Hannah doesn’t sit in a car seat and
she’s
not eight.”
“Then she’s going to get arrested.”
“Girls!”
said Nora. She would have rubbed at her temples like a harried mother in a movie but she had both hands on the steering wheel, ten and two, just the way she’d taught Angela.
“But she has to be eight,” said Cecily. “I’m not making it up, I’m just telling her.”
“Mommy?” said Maya. “Is Hannah going to get arrested?”
“Actually,” said Cecily, “Hannah won’t get arrested. Her mother will.”
“Mommy!”
“Cecily,” said Nora sternly. “Don’t tease your sister. That isn’t like you at all.”
“I’m sorry,” said Cecily. “Maya, I’m only kidding. Really, I’m sorry. Nobody’s getting arrested, promise. Come on, let’s do your math facts. Do you have your flash cards?”
Nora was only one-eighth involved in the conversation. They were on their way to Cecily’s orthodontist appointment. The other seven-eighths of Nora was trying to (surreptitiously and illegally) check her email to see if an offer was going to come in on the Watkins home, concentrate on the late-afternoon traffic, make a mental to-do list for the auction project for Cecily’s class, and work her way through a troubling dream.
At a stoplight in the rearview mirror Nora looked at her two daughters, one dark, the other light. One sturdy, one light as a cloud. Cecily was holding up the flash cards for Maya. Maya’s concentration was utter; she looked the way Gabe did when he was trying to tame a thorny situation at Elpis. She even chewed on her thumbnail in the same way. Funny, wasn’t it, how two parents combined the same stuff and it came out in completely different ways in different children.
“That’s it,” said Cecily. “Done, you got them all.”
For a moment there was blissful silence from the backseat.
Then Cecily said, “Albert Einstein couldn’t read until he was ten. Does that make you feel better about Maya?”
Maya said, “Hey!”
Nora glanced in the rearview mirror. “I don’t feel badly about Maya.”
Bad,
or
badly
? She could never remember. She’d have to ask Angela.
“Einstein was dyslexic. Maybe Maya’s dyslexic.”
“She’s not dyslexic. Remember? We had her evaluated, that man with the square glasses came over to the house. She’ll get there, eventually. Everybody’s different. You’ll get there, honey.” It never helped Nora to hear about Albert Einstein, and yet people were constantly trotting him out as a reason not to worry about Maya. Albert Einstein also never combed his hair and had trouble tying his shoes and evidently couldn’t keep track of any of his personal items—he was forever losing things. Umbrellas, apparently, presented a special problem. He lost a lot of umbrellas. This was supposed to make her feel better? Nora didn’t want Maya to be Albert Einstein. She just wanted her to be a second grader who could make her way through a
Ramona
book on her own.
“A kid in my class has braces.” Maya said.
“Well. That’s crazy,” said Nora. The sun was hitting her eyes at a very inconvenient angle. Where did it end? Was everything going to continue to come toward these kids earlier and earlier so that they emerged from the womb with their teeth wired, wearing glasses and helmets, scheduling math tutors?
“Mom? What do you think will happen if Angela doesn’t get into Harvard?” That was Cecily.
Nora shifted and signaled into the right lane, preparing to exit the freeway. No more three-thirty appointments; it was too tight after school. She’d try for four o’clock next time.
“Nothing will
happen.
Life will go on, as it does. She’ll be fine.”
“But what will she do?”
The car in front of Nora, a silver Tahoe, slowed, then came to a dead stop. All around her, cars came to a dead stop. Traffic, at three thirty in the afternoon. This couldn’t be rush hour. But it was. Rush hour, like orthodontic treatment, was coming earlier and earlier.
“I don’t know, Cecily.”
She exited. Not far now.
“I think she’ll do something really bad.”
“Really
bad
?” The Tahoe lurched ahead a couple of feet and stopped again. A ball of dread sprouted in Nora’s chest. “Cecily, that’s ridiculous. Don’t talk like that. What do you even mean?”
“Sorry,” said Cecily. “Nothing.”
Then Maya said, “Why does Angela cry in the afternoons?” Clear out of nowhere.
Nora almost sideswiped a car pulling out of the orthodontist’s parking lot. She took a deep breath, pulled into a parking space, and said,
“What?”
“She does,” said Maya. “When Maddie’s there, she cries in her room.”
“No she doesn’t,” said Cecily. “I’ve never heard her.”
“You’re not there,” said Maya. “You’re at Irish.”
There was a little man with a hammer tapping away on Nora’s skull. Now she could take her hands off the steering wheel and rub her temples properly. Only for a second, though, because they were ten minutes late to the appointment.
“I think she’s crying about college,” said Maya. “I think she doesn’t want to leave us and go live somewhere else where she has to share a room.”
“That’s probably it,” said Nora, and the man with the hammer tapped harder. Why
was
Angela crying in her room? She thought of Angela as a little girl with the fat legs squatting down to look at a sand crab on a Rhode Island beach and her heart tore a little bit.
“Okay,” said Nora. “Here we are. Unbuckle, Maya, come on, we’re late.”
“Is Cecily going to have to get braces?” asked Maya. Languidly she reached for the buckle of her seat belt.
“Faster,” said Nora. “Come on, Maya.”
“You’re always
rushing
me,” said Maya tranquilly, and Nora, who wanted to say, “Everybody else is always rushing
me
!” said calmly, “I’m sorry, sweetie, you’re right, I’ll try not to rush you. Take your time.”
“I hope so,” said Cecily. Pinkie got her braces at the end of third grade and ever since then Cecily had been trying to construct her own version from paper clips and earring backs, both of which she insisted were
totally clean
and
completely safe.
“I want blue ones. They would match my solo dress. That would be
awesome.
”
Nora stole a glance at her email.
“Can I get blue ones? Mom? Mom?”
“Just a sec—”
“You always tell
us
to put down our technology and pay attention to the person who’s talking.”
Damn it. Fair point. Anyway, there was nothing on the Watkins home.
“So can I? Get blue?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know, Cecily, we have to wait and see what he says.” Did blue braces even exist? Could an email have come in just now, while she was locking the doors? Could she check again? Was she letting work take over her life again; had she learned
nothing,
that time? For just a second, Nora allowed her mind to wander. Back to that moment when her entire world could have changed in an instant, in the dash of a head against the floor.
That’s why she held on to it so tightly now.
She took Maya’s (sticky) hand and led her across the parking lot. Was it terrible that she had never told Gabe about that day? No. One secret, they were each allowed one secret. That was okay. Everybody said so.
At the table in the conference room, Gabe waited for the prospective clients.
He was early to the meeting—the first Elpis guy in the room, he was there even before the snacks—so he stared for some moments at the giant circular graph that was the centerpiece of the Elpis philosophy. It was divided into thirds, and each third was labeled with one of the three magic words. Align. Prepare. Execute.
Kelsey, the firm’s super-young, super-hip office assistant, who wore clothes that looked like cupcake decorations and who lived in up-and-coming NOPA and regularly went to places in the city that Gabe had never even heard of, much less visited, stuck her head inside the conference room. “They’re running late,” she said. “You don’t have to wait in here. Go back to your office—I’ll call you in when they get here.”
“I’m good here,” he said. “But thanks.”
The word
Elpis
itself was, in Greek mythology, the personification and spirit of hope. When Gabe first joined the company, when he was a young man with a single pair of Dr. Martens wing tips and a serious Nirvana habit, Elpis was a gutsy, scrappy little firm that had no business competing with the likes of McKinsey and Bain, and yet chose to anyway. They’d had a tiny office back then, in Outer Sunset. This was patently ridiculous. Nobody did business in Outer Sunset. They made their name in the dot.com boom, advising the heck out of the companies that sprung up in the Bay Area like slugs after a rainstorm. Now they had the twentieth floor of a building on Sansome Street, right near the Transamerica building. From the conference room where Gabe now sat he could see the Oakland Bay Bridge.
When he first came to San Francisco he’d lived in a shithole in the Mission with two idiotic, half-baked roommates, and his rattrap Subaru was broken into three times before he finally abandoned it. Now he lived on a quarter acre in Marin in a town with some of the best schools in the country. Three beautiful daughters, a wife. Everything had changed.
Gabe’s strength now was exactly what it was back then. He’d barely gotten that first interview (the economy was struggling and it seemed like no one was looking to hire; thank God for Nora’s friend). But once he was sitting across from the founding partners, he knew exactly what they were looking for in a candidate, he handed it to them on a silver platter—and he’d been delivering on it ever since. That counted for something. Didn’t it?
Companies came into Elpis and sat at this very table and ate Danishes and drank gourmet coffee and claimed to want all sorts of things. They wanted to bring a new product to market, or they wanted to undergo a dramatic reorg, or they wanted to engender a culture change or become proactive in e-commerce or develop a cross-functional initiative.
And typically they did want at least one of those things, sometimes more. But really what it all came down to was that they wanted someone to listen. It was that simple; that was, at heart, what every single person walking across this green earth wanted. That’s what the ranch hands wanted back in Wyoming, when they bitched and moaned to Gabe about how hard it was to hand-feed the cattle in the winter. They didn’t want to stop doing their jobs; they just wanted someone to nod and furrow his eyebrows and offer a Bill Clinton–like expression of sympathy and understanding so they could go back to doing what they did best.
The door opened again. This time Kelsey had a woman with her, even younger than Kelsey herself. The woman had chin-length, swinging dark hair with blunt bangs. She wore a silk blouse and a pencil skirt. She was tall, nearly as tall as Gabe, and yet somehow she looked like a child who had dressed up in her mother’s work clothes. Not that the clothes were too big, it was just that—well, they sat oddly on her, as though somebody else had picked them out. The client? Impossible. She didn’t look so much older than Angela.
“I forgot,” said Kelsey. “They wanted the intern to sit in on the meeting. Gabe Hawthorne, Abby Freeman. Abby Freeman, Gabe Hawthorne, one of the partners.”
Abby Freeman said hello and shook the hand Gabe offered, and Kelsey left. Abby Freeman’s handshake said,
I wrestle alligators in my spare time.
“We have something in common,” said Abby Freeman. She had a face that was not conventionally attractive—her eyes were small and far apart, and her lips weren’t generous. But she was
unconventionally
attractive, in that intense, feline way that some women were. Gabe had never gone for that sort of look. (Most women with it scared him.) Abby stood there with plenty of confidence, like she didn’t know her clothes looked wrong on her. In fact—you could argue—she stood there in a way that did not say,
I bow down to you, partner in the firm.
Gabe said, “Oh, yes? What’s that?”
“Same alma mater.”
He said, “Is that right?” He tried to smile but his lips seemed to be stuck weirdly to his teeth. He hated it when people brought up Harvard when he wasn’t expecting it. Made his eyelids itch.
The door opened again. The clients, the members of his team, all coming in together, led by the indomitable Kelsey. A rush of blood to the head. Gabe lived for this part. He was Don Draper when it came to meetings like this. He cleared his throat. Abby Freeman stood next to him, as though they were man and wife, greeting guests at a dinner party.
“Ah,” said the leader of the client team, holding out a hand, grasping Gabe’s firmly. “The man we’ve all been waiting to meet.”