*In which characters from RIVERSIDE PARK previously appeared.

*In which characters from RIVERSIDE PARK previously appeared.

*In which characters from RIVERSIDE PARK previously appeared.

*In which characters from RIVERSIDE PARK previously appeared.

*In which characters from RIVERSIDE PARK previously appeared.

*In which characters from RIVERSIDE PARK previously appeared.

*In which characters from RIVERSIDE PARK previously appeared.

*In which characters from RIVERSIDE PARK previously appeared.

*In which characters from RIVERSIDE PARK previously appeared.

*In which characters from RIVERSIDE PARK previously appeared.

RIVERSIDE PARK

Riverside Park
Laura Van Wormer

For

Dianne Moggy

whose gifts as a publisher are many.

And with much love and appreciation to Loretta Barrett, Nick Mullendore, Gabriel Davis and Christine Robinson.

In thy face I see the map of honor, truth, and loyalty.

—William Shakespeare,

King Henry VI

CONTENTS

THANKSGIVINGI

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

DECEMBERII

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

JANUARYIII

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

FEBRUARYIV

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

MARCHV

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

APRILVI

CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 50

CHAPTER 51

CHAPTER 52

THANKSGIVING

WHILE CASSY COCHRAN wrapped her hair in a towel, she felt a kiss on the small of her back. She straightened up and smiled as arms slid around her waist to hold her from behind.

“So where do they think you are?”

“The office, to pick something up.” Cassy turned around, allowing herself to be kissed. “As soon as they take off I’ll come by to pick you up.” She wanted to say something else but was prevented from doing so. For about twenty minutes.

And then she had to shower all over again.

1

Thanksgiving Dinner at the Darenbrooks’

BEFORE DINNER CASSY asked everyone to please hold hands during grace.

“Who’s Grace?” someone said.

“Wait, wait!” pleaded a young second cousin of her husband’s. “Look, look,” she cried, jumping up to show everyone around the table the most recent issue of City Style. While Cassy exchanged looks with her husband, the fifteen guests politely admired the sight of the Darenbrooks splashed across the cover like movie stars. “Marriage of the Media,” it said above their smiling faces. “Cassy Cochran and Jackson Darenbrook,” it said below.

Their photograph might as well have been shot through linoleum for all the reality quotient it possessed. Instead of fifty-three and fifty-eight years old, the Darenbrooks looked on the far side of thirty. (There’s nothing worse, in publishers’ minds, than a life of grace, ease and luxury wasted on people readers could not imagine sleeping with.) The article was flattering, too. Cassy was billed as the stunningly good-looking woman of humble Iowa beginnings who dodged a career in front of the camera to become the founding president of the DBS Television network. Jackson was described as the brilliant Georgia heir who turned his father’s newspapers into the massive empire Darenbrook Communications was today.

The Darenbrooks, according to City Style, had the world at their feet.

The article breezed over Cassy’s divorce from producer Michael Cochran (and altogether skipped his alcoholism and how, the minute he got sober, he had dumped her), and mentioned the tragic accidental death of Jackson’s first wife, Barbara (and graciously omitted how Jackson dumped his children on his sister so he could become an international playboy).

“Perhaps we can look at it after dinner,” Cassy suggested.

The second cousin reluctantly took the hint (she did not get out much in East Binsley, Georgia), and leaned over to drop the magazine under her chair.

“Oh, Lord,” Jackson began, his drawl pulling farther South than usual, “we thank you for this food we are about to receive and we thank you for allowing us to spend this special day of Thanksgiving together.” Cassy’s husband had wonderful cornflower-blue eyes and a ready smile. He was a tall, very well built man with an enviously thick head of hair that was real. “We ask that you bless and watch over our loved ones who cannot be with us today, both in heaven and on earth.”

Jackson’s voice trailed off and everybody waited.

“Merciful God,” he continued, “please help the United States to be healed as a nation, and teach us to bring light and love to places of darkness and hate. Thank you, Lord, for your love and countless blessings for which we are so grateful. Amen.”

“Amen,” Cassy murmured, opening her eyes. “Very nice, Jack.” She pressed the button under the carpet with her foot to signal the caterers in the kitchen. The twenty-six-pound turkey came out first and was set down in front of Jackson accompanied with several ooo’s and ahhh’s. He started to carve while a detail of three out-of-work actors began the rounds with serving dishes.

Henry Cochran, Cassy’s only biological child, was seated to her immediate left. He had arrived two days earlier with his wife and young son. They were staying in the old Cochran apartment Henry had grown up in and which Cassy kept separate from the penthouse Jackson had created with the rest of the floor. Once there had been five other apartments on the top floor of 162 Riverside Drive, but one by one Jackson had acquired and added them to his new urban family manse.

At twenty-eight years old, Henry Cochran was still a good deal like his mother. He was tall, slender, blue-eyed and fair-haired (the latter, however, rapidly thinning, she noticed), but fortunately Henry had also inherited his father’s deep voice and broad shoulders so that he had not (as he had feared while growing up) turned out to be a ninety-eight-pound weakling. He was ecstatic to be a family man and doing extremely well as an architect. The only problem was the younger Cochrans were moving from Chicago to San Francisco to be near Maria’s parents, and Henry had been offered a new position that had made the move possible. Cassy felt she could not say anything because Maria was expecting another child and wanted more family around her, and living next door to the Darenbrooks in New York was not what Maria had in mind.

Cassy almost winced at the pain she felt in her heart at that moment. Having Henry living in Chicago had been hard enough; San Francisco seemed like the end of the earth.

“Good food, Mom,” Henry said.

“I’m sorry, Henry,” Cassy said, snapping out of her thoughts, “what did you say?”

“I said, ‘Great food, Mom.’”

“I’m glad you’re enjoying it,” she said automatically with a smile, but looked down at her own plate with dismay. The food her in-laws had requested—including sweet-potato pie with marshmallow topping and mushy string beans cooked with fatback pork—was severely at odds with the regime Cassy’s mother had pounded into her head as a child: six glasses of water a day and as much vegetables, fruit, fish and lean meat as she wanted. (Cassy’s mother, in her glory days, had been a beauty queen representing the great state of Iowa. That is until, as Mrs. Littlefield was always careful to phrase it, “my horribly cruel and unfortunate marriage.”)

Cassy had been blessed with beauty and a healthy body and, at fifty-three, was extremely grateful for both. She worked out with a trainer three days a week and thus far had only made some minor concessions to plastic surgery involving her face and eyes. It wasn’t that she wanted to look younger, really; she just wanted to continue resembling herself. Her face always caught her by surprise when she had a moment to study it in the mirror. When had that happened, and that and that?

She had worn her long blond hair (now with occasional silver) up on the back of her head forever. Whenever she considered cutting it everyone around her freaked out, some declaring it was who she was while others maintained it best highlighted her features. Others said it was the promise of what that hair might hold—when and if it ever came down—that still kept eyes on Cassy when younger beauty was around.

Henry leaned over to say, “I love you, Mom,” in the same way he used to as a child when he thought his mother might be upset. But Cassy wasn’t upset, just tired. And sad, already missing her son.

She reached to give Henry’s hand a squeeze. “I love you, too.”

Suddenly mashed potatoes and peas splattered over the side of Henry’s face and there was a screech of delight.

Ah, William. Cassy’s grandson. If ever someone resembled her first husband, Michael, it was he. William had the blackest hair, was built like a tank and was shy about nothing. His current vocabulary consisted of No, Mine and Rrraaarrrr (Henry and Maria had two dogs), and his favorite pastime was throwing things at people. If they didn’t sit on the child soon Cassy knew they would regret it. And as much as she loved Maria, she couldn’t help but wish she had a little more steel in her mothering. Hopefully Maria’s mother would help with that.

Cassy heard the deep laughter of her husband from the other end of the dining room table. Jackson had seen what William had done.

Sitting to Jackson’s right was his alternately anorexic and bulimic daughter, Lydia, who, like Henry, was twenty-eight. Sitting on Jackson’s left was his son, Kevin, who at twenty-six was six-foot-three and at least three hundred pounds.

After early go-rounds with Jack’s children when they were first married, Cassy had pleaded with Jackson to go into therapy with them. He never had. On the other hand, Jackson had always taken Henry’s word over that of his own children, never doubting that it was true, for example, that Kevin was stashing cocaine in Henry’s room or that Lydia tried to have sex with Henry.

While Henry and Maria tried to cope with their screeching, food-throwing son, Henry’s water glass was upended on the table. All of the out-of-work actors rushed into the kitchen and then rushed back out again with dish towels to blot up the water. William, at this point, was crying crocodile tears because his plate of ammo had been taken away.

“I would spank him,” Cordelia Darenbrook Payne, Jackson’s half sister, loudly advised from across the table.

“Right, Aunt Cordie Lou,” Lydia cried, pushing her chair back to stand up. “We all know how much good your spankings did me! Excuse me,” she added in exaggerated politeness to her father.

“Lydia,” Jackson started to say, but she ignored him and walked out of the dining room.

Then Kevin excused himself and left the dining room, as well.

William was now screaming and Maria, blushing heavily, pulled William up out of his high chair. “I’ll take him into the bedroom.”

“Why don’t you give him to me?” Cassy suggested, pushing her chair back slightly and holding out her arms. Maria seemed happy to hand him off. (At this stage of her pregnancy Cassy didn’t blame her.)

“William,” Cassy said sharply as she plopped him down in her lap. Her grandson stopped screaming to look up at her in a kind of awe. She handed him a dinner roll and picked up her fork, managing to take a few bites before she caught Maria’s bewildered expression. “At this age they’re better with anyone but their parents.”

“He gets mad because he can’t bounce on Maria’s lap anymore,” Henry explained.

If you think he’s mad now, wait until the new baby comes, Cassy thought. She used her napkin to catch drool dripping from William’s mouth as he gnawed on the roll, which killed her appetite.

Lydia reappeared and made her way to her seat smiling defiantly down the table at Cassy as Kevin came back in, as well. They were both high on something. Probably cocaine.

Jackson simply did not want to see it. Cassy supposed he was not unlike other fathers, figuring that by their late twenties it was none of his business what his kids did.

William fell asleep in Cassy’s arms, the remains of the roll clutched in his fist. When she kissed the top of his head and stood up, everyone took it as a signal that Thanksgiving was officially over and they were excused. Lydia was out the door first. Henry, Maria and William were next to leave in a car for JFK, Cassy fighting back tears. Then she hurried to help her Southern relatives organize their bags. Everyone except Cassy would board a limousine bus to take them to the Darenbrook Communications plane in Newark. They would drop Jackson and her stepson off in Savannah and then conclude their flight in their home city of Atlanta.

“I don’t know how you do it, darlin’,” Jack said under his breath to Cassy as he gave her a hug and kiss, “but we almost resembled a family today.”

Kevin kissed Cassy on the cheek. “Thanks, Cass, it was great.”

She smiled, taking Kevin’s arm and pulling him back a step. She leaned close to his ear. “If you ever bring drugs into this house again, I promise you, Kevin, you will never cross the threshold again. Have I made myself clear?”

Startled, Kevin stepped back.

“Oh, Cassy,” Cordelia Darenbrook Payne said, swooping in, “it was vunderbar, vunderbar as always. And the black-eyed peas were so good we’re taking them to eat on the airplane during the ride home.”

“Okay, guys, we gotta move,”Jack called to the group, tapping his watch.

“Mrs. Darenbrook?” The caterer appeared from the doorway. “We’re almost finished in the kitchen. I want to make sure everything is the way you want it before we leave.”

“Bye, darlin’!” Jack shouted over the crowd, waving to her.

“Safe journey, everyone!” Cassy called before closing the front door.

The kitchen looked better than it had when the caterer arrived and Cassy told him so. She gave everybody a small envelope (containing tips), and thanked them for such a lovely dinner.

“You made almost all of the food, Mrs. Darenbrook,” the caterer pointed out.

“I hope you young people are taking the leftovers home,” she said, addressing the group.

The workers held up bags of disposable food containers and thanked her.

Cassy saw the crew out the service entrance and walked down the long back hall toward the master suite, peering in at the state of the guest bedrooms, but not worrying about them since housekeeping would be back in full force in the morning. There was no trick to running any of the Darenbrook households, really. All it took was money.

The burden of Thanksgiving had been lifted and she felt her energy and spirits rising already. She vigorously brushed out her hair and then put it back up. She went into the bathroom to wash up a little and brush her teeth, then came back out to sit at the vanity to put on a little fresh makeup. She also exchanged the pearl earrings she had been wearing for two large diamond ones and took off her wedding rings. She threw a couple of things into a shoulder bag and hastily ran a lint brush over her dress. She went out to the front hall closet to retrieve a coat and suitcase and took the elevator down to the subterranean garage.

“I could have brought those down for you, Mrs. Darenbrook,” the attendant said, rushing over to take the shoulder bag and suitcase.

“No worry,” she said. She watched him put the suitcase in the trunk of her silver Jaguar. “I’m sorry you have to work today.”

“I’m not. I get double time.” He closed the trunk and hurried around to open the driver’s-side door for her. “I’m through here at eight and then we’ll have our big family dinner.”

“Oh, I’m glad.” She slipped down behind the wheel.

“So your house is finally quiet again, huh? That was a lot of people staying with you and Mr. Darenbrook.”

“Indeed,” she said, smiling.

“Mr. Darenbrook said he’s racing his boat in the Caribbean this weekend.”

“Yes, he is. With his son.”

“Think he’ll win? Oh, why do I even ask? Even when Mr. Darenbrook loses he still always seems to win somehow. Do you know what I mean?”

Cassy nodded, starting the engine. “Oh, yes, I know what you mean,” she assured him.

2

What Happened to the Darenbrook Marriage

AFTER THE HUMILIATING defeat of her first marriage, falling in love with Jackson Darenbrook had seemed close to a miracle. Cassy remembered the day Jack realized he was in love with her very well. They’d been arguing (they had always been arguing in the early days of the fledgling network), and suddenly Jackson stopped talking and stared at Cassy with a sense of dawning revelation. Cassy knew then how he felt about her. And in that moment she knew that she had been falling for him, as well.

She was forty-four when they married and Jackson forty-nine. His family and friends were astounded by the changes in him by the time he stood at the altar. “He’s a happy man, again,” Cordelia told her. “Thank God he’s a happy man again.”

Cassy took her vows as sacred. She felt blessed and reborn to have such a commitment come to her at that point in her life, and she was determined to appreciate every nuance of it. With the exception of ongoing problems with Lydia, those first couple of years were blissful. When not traveling on business—which both did rather extensively—they were together at West End (the corporate headquarters of Darenbrook Communications on the Hudson River at Sixty-fifth Street), here at home on Riverside Drive, or at the house in Litchfield. They sailed and skied and traveled continents; they worked out together and often spent downtime just lazying around, reading newspapers, watching TV or movies, eating good food and making love.

Cassy felt loved, respected and redeemed.

She never tried to compete with the memory of Barbara, Jackson’s first wife, because she knew she could never win in comparison to a saint who had died in her thirties.

Henry came home for brief periods while in college and he got on very well with Jackson. Kevin appeared erratically. They were married about two and a half years when Lydia tried to kill herself. Jack was away so Cassy hurried downtown to the emergency room of St.Vincent’s where the police told her Lydia had slit her wrists and then had been walking around Sheridan Square. The doctor said Lydia was on a combination of alcohol, painkillers and cocaine.

Lydia was crying for her dead mother when Cassy saw her. Cassy tried to soothe her, explaining her father was rushing back to New York and would be here as soon as he could, that her father loved her so much—

Something akin to The Exorcist then occurred. Lydia’s tears vanished and her eyes took on an eerie glitter while she told Cassy what a fool she was, what a stupid idiot she was. Didn’t she know that Jackson was incapable of caring for anyone except himself? That he had conned her like he conned everyone? And the only reason he had married Cassy was that Aunt Cordie Lou had thrown in the towel?

“Don’t you get it? He married you so you’d deal with me and Kev! You are so fucking stupid! You’re a glorified housekeeper, taking care of things while he runs around getting his rocks off!”

Cassy gratefully agreed with the doctor that Lydia be held in psychiatric for observation for the three days they could legally keep her. Or at least until her father arrived.

Jackson ended up not flying straight home but continued on his trip because, he said, Cassy seemed to have matters so well in hand.

In retrospect those two and a half years of marital bliss had been a gift from the heavens above. If Cassy’s world had exploded any sooner, she wasn’t sure what would have happened to her.

“I came to say goodbye,” the outgoing publisher of the Darenbrook newspaper in Charleston told Cassy, coming into her office at West End not long after Lydia’s suicide attempt. “I handed in my resignation. I’m going to be the publisher of a new magazine in D.C.”

“Well, I’m happy for you and miserable for us,” Cassy said, coming around from behind her desk, holding out her hand. “Congratulations, Sheila.”

“Thank you.” Sheila glanced back over her shoulder at the door. She was an attractive woman, in her early forties, with dark hair and green eyes. “Do you think we can talk a minute?”

“Sure,” Cassy said, going to close her office door, hoping Sheila was not going to try to pick her brain about how to effectively compete with the D.C. magazine Darenbrook Communications published.

They had scarcely sat down when Sheila burst into tears. Cassy didn’t know her very well and felt a little embarrassed for her. She got up to get Sheila some Kleenex and thought, I hope nothing’s happened to her child. Sheila had brought her little girl to West End on bring-your-child-to-work day the year before.

“I’m sorry,” Sheila said, trying to pull herself together. “It’s just been so stressful.”

“I understand. It was hard when I left my old job at WST.”

“You are such a wonderful person, Cassy,” Sheila said then, sounding miserable.

“I don’t know about that,” Cassy murmured. “Do you think you might have made the wrong decision, Sheila? That you’d like to stay on with us after all?”

Sheila looked at first stunned and then deeply pained. She brought the tissues up to press against her mouth.

“I might be able to help,” Cassy said gently.

Sheila slammed her fist on her knee. “I can’t stand it! I can’t stand by and watch how he’s deceiving you!”

It had hit her like a physical blow to the diaphragm. Cassy couldn’t breathe and then an icy fear started down her spine. She gripped the arms of the chair and forced herself to resume breathing, to sit there and breathe, and to listen.

Sheila told her. That she and Jackson had been having an affair. For a while. Since before he had married Cassy, in fact, while Sheila had still been married. She told Cassy about traveling with Jack on business trips, about meeting him once for a quick tryst in the side yard outside Cordelia’s mansion in Hilleanderville between dinner and dessert.

“For a long time I thought it was just me, and then you, too,” she told Cassy. “I finally wised up when my secretary warned me that she would probably be leaving soon because, even though she had only slept with Jackson a few times, she was sure he was the man for her. Then she asked for my opinion of how long I thought it would take for him to divorce you.”

Cassy excused herself, went in her private bathroom, quietly threw up, rinsed out her mouth and came back into her office.

“It’s almost every day,” Sheila said, starting to cry again. “He takes whatever attractive woman he can find. I don’t know, maybe he buys them off, I don’t know.”

Jackson didn’t deny a single thing Sheila had said. His eyes only took on deep, weary sadness. When Cassy had finished and was waiting for an answer, he took her hand, squeezed it and held on to it. “But it’s you I love,” he said simply. “That’s why I married you.”

She did not let herself cry. “Then why, Jack?” Oh, she had thought she knew why and it burned. He obviously found her sexually inadequate. (“How many times do you think a guy wants to screw Snow White?” Michael used to say.)

He had no explanation for his sexual exploits except to say that it had nothing to do with his love for her.

What alcohol is to the alcoholic, Cassy’s therapist told her, sex is to the sexaholic. Then she went on about endorphins and about the brain chemistry of the drinker, the drug abuser, the gambler, the bulimic—and the sexaholic.

Cassy had held her face in her lap. “You’re telling me I’ve done it again? I’ve married another addict?”

Like alcohol, the therapist told her, there was treatment for the disorder. Even rehabs specifically to treat it.

“No, I don’t think so,” Jackson said when Cassy asked him to see someone, a specialist that had been recommended. “I mean, not right now, Cass. I need to focus on this encyclopedia deal. I promise I won’t—you know—until I go.”

They continued to share the same bedroom in New York and Connecticut, and even started having sex again on the proviso he wore a condom until he was cleared of any possible sexual diseases. The encyclopedia deal had dragged on and he kept putting off going to the counselor but Cassy remained hopeful, particularly when after six months the tests came back negative. Lydia went off her rocker again in Mexico and they went there as a team this time, a united front. They resumed a more active sex life, no longer using a condom.

During this period she remembered why she had fallen in love with him. Jackson was infinitely kind and funny and endlessly interested in anything he sensed might interest her. He was also very affectionate, an element that had been sorely lacking in her first marriage, and they often held hands and almost always lay down together while reading or watching TV. He could also be extremely thoughtful about little things. He always tried to keep the newspaper fresh for her because he knew how much she liked a crisp paper. And if he had a cold and was coughing, he would quietly take himself off to a guest room in the night so as not to keep her awake.

He said he thought there was no need for them to go to counseling anymore. Didn’t she agree? That things were good? They were happy? She had hesitated but then agreed, mostly because he had said this on a Friday and she didn’t wish to ruin their weekend sailing.

When Jackson came back from a meeting in Atlanta the following week she knew. She knew because he had seemed distant and depressed and could scarcely look her in the eye. She said as much out loud while they were lying in bed, waiting to fall asleep. He said she was crazy, he hadn’t done anything and snuggled closer. Instinct prevailed and she sat bolt upright in bed and told him she did not believe him. He protested he was too tired for this tonight. Then she got out of bed, wearing one of the red (ugh) nighties he liked her to wear, and said they might as well have it out, because if he was not going to counseling then he was moving into the guest room.

“Fine,” he said in the darkness.

“Fine what?”

“Fine, believe what you want to believe, Cassy, but I don’t need a therapist so I’m not going. If you want to sue me for divorce over it, then go ahead. I’m tired and need some sleep.”

She hesitated, standing there in the dark, crossing her arms against the cold and feeling warm tears rolling down her face. (In the first years of their marriage she had only cried tears of gratitude. She had felt so good about the world, about herself, about their future. How had she not seen this side of him?)

“I mean it, Jack, if you won’t go to counseling…” She wasn’t sure how to finish the threat. She wasn’t sure how she wanted to finish it. They had already built so many things together, their families, their homes, the network. And what would she say? How would she explain? To Henry, to everybody? Oh, and would Michael ever get a good laugh out of this!

“I’m sleeping in the guest room,” Jackson announced, sighing heavily as he hauled himself out of bed.

She let him go and took a sleeping pill to knock herself out. The next morning when he came in to get dressed, she told him that if he valued their marriage at all he would at least go with her for counseling.

“I love you,” he said, frowning at her. “But I’m not going.”

“So you’re saying that our marriage is over?”

“I think that’s up to you,” he told her, walking into his dressing room.

That was where they had left it six years ago. If she hadn’t been so adverse to yet another public humiliation she would have left him then. The women, she had come to realize, had never stopped for more than three months in their entire marriage. A year later she sought the advice of a divorce attorney but then Henry announced he wanted to get married and the thought of that, of having to participate in the celebrations by herself in front of Michael and his young wife, had been too much. To his credit, Jackson had acted the role of the perfect husband to a T.

Cassy was moving toward leaving him again when Maria had announced she was pregnant. Henry was so happy and scared and elated that Cassy didn’t have the heart to do anything that would further worry him. And Henry would have worried about her. (If Henry had said one more time, “I’m so glad you have somebody, too, Mom,” she thought she’d lose her mind.) So with Jackson acting the part of devoted and attentive husband (which reassured Henry and incensed Michael, whose second marriage had since broken up), and with Cassy acting the part of devoted and attentive wife (which elated her in-laws, who also happened to make up the Board of Directors of Darenbrook Communications), Cassy didn’t know how she could ever get out of it. Or if she even really wanted to. So much, it seemed, relied on their pretense.

Perhaps the worst aspect of the situation was that their marriage was not always such a pretense. They still had their moments. Cassy wasn’t particularly proud of the fact that, on occasion, usually around some family event, they would look at each other with great fondness and sometimes, sometimes, they would make love.

With a condom, of course.

This last part, that once in a while they still had sex, remained the Darenbrooks’ special little secret, offering a little ghostly reminder of what Cassy had hoped their marriage would be.

Jack swore he still loved her more than anyone. Since there still were so many women coming and going, Cassy could not see how this could be true. She did not say the same to him, though, that she loved him best. Because she didn’t. She was very much in love with someone else, but that relationship was fraught with obstacles of its own. Still, it was wonderful to love and be loved.

Somehow Cassy was going to have to figure all of this out.

3

Amanda Miller Stewart’s Family, a Pretty Girl, and an Attentive Young Man

THE PRETTY GIRL lived in their building and came and went at odd hours. Amanda knew this because their eight-month-old precious accident, Grace, was cutting her teeth and sometimes in the wee hours Amanda would take her down to the lobby so she could talk to the concierge and the night security man while walking the baby back and forth, patting her little back. (It was best, Amanda had found, to let the children’s nanny, Madame Moliere, sleep through the night so she could get their two older children—Emily, age ten, and Teddy, age eight—organized in the morning.)

Grace had begun to fret at three-thirty in the morning on Thanksgiving, and since Amanda’s parents and Howard’s mother were staying with them, Amanda had quickly thrown on slacks and a sweater to scoop Grace up and pay a visit to the lobby. About fifteen minutes later a cab had pulled up to the entrance of the building and the pretty girl had come stumbling out of it. She had been rather astonishingly drunk. She was not as tall as Amanda, but taller than average, and had lovely dark brown hair. She also had a sleek body that only a girl in her twenties can possess. The girl had sworn under her breath as she banged her shoulder on the doorway, but did so in a manner that told Amanda the pretty girl was both well-spoken and probably well-educated.

Of course, if the girl lived in their building Amanda knew she must be a young woman of means.

The pretty girl had then almost collided with Amanda and Grace. She had reeled back, her large brown eyes trying to focus. She had looked at the baby and then back at Amanda. “You’re always stuck with the kids,” she’d said. “You should make Howard do more.”

The night security guard, who was an off-duty NYPD police officer (who once showed Amanda’s son the derringer he carried in his boot), had stepped forward to say he would see the girl upstairs to her apartment. Just as the elevator doors were closing, Amanda had heard the girl say, “Thank God I don’t have any kids.”

Amanda didn’t speak of it—the fact that the pretty girl evidently knew her husband on a first-name basis—until they had returned from the Thanksgiving Day Parade and she and Howard were in the kitchen trying to pull things together for dinner.

“That must have been Celia,” Howard said, squinting through the blast of oven heat, trying to see the meat thermometer.

“Celia who?” Amanda asked.

“Honey, I can’t read this thing.”

“Rosanne thinks we should sneak in a turkey with a whatchamacallit,” she said, looking over his shoulder into the oven, careful to hold her hair back. She still wore hers long, basically because her husband liked it that way. (Sometimes when Amanda turned around on the street or in a store she could see the surprise in people’s eyes that she was forty-four and not twenty-four. She had such beautiful hair still.)

“Fresh-killed turkeys from Ohio don’t come with whatchamacallits.”

“I know, darling,” she said. “I think Rosanne meant that, when your mother isn’t looking, we should just switch turkeys.”

“But then it wouldn’t taste awful and she’d know it wasn’t the one she brought and then she’ll start crying.”

This was not the first time they had discussed the mysterious fresh-killed turkey Mrs. Stewart insisted on bringing with her from Ohio every year, or the meat thermometer she extracted from wads of tissue paper as though it were an irreplaceable heirloom. But Amanda felt bad for Mrs. Stewart, who was a widow and lonely, and wanted to make her mother-in-law’s visits as pleasant as possible.

“Well, it is Thanksgiving,” she murmured. “We can do it once a year.”

Howard muttered something and used a dish towel to shove the turkey back into the oven and slam the door. “Okay, it’s done.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Amanda, we go through this—”

“Please just cut into it, Howard. We don’t want to poison anybody.”

They looked at each other and started to laugh. Howard slung the dish towel over his shoulder and moved over to Amanda, sliding his hands around her waist. “You must be exhausted.”

“I am tired,” she admitted, resting her head on his shoulder as he pulled her closer. She used to have such a narrow waist it was hard for Amanda to let Howard feel what she was carrying around now. She had been watching what she ate and exercised like a mad woman, but after Grace she could not seem to pull herself together like she had after Emily and Teddy. “How do you know this Celia?” she asked quietly from his shoulder.

“That girl? She’s a bartender at Captain Cook’s.”

“A bartender?” Amanda raised her head to look at him.

“Once in a while I’ll stop in and have a burger. And watch a game.”

Amanda walked over to retrieve the kettle, fill it with water and put it on a burner. She needed to warm the silver serving dishes with hot water before filling them. (She had inherited the silver from her grandmother and it made Amanda’s mother happy to see her using it.) “I didn’t realize you frequented bars while we were away.”

“Oh, that’s me all right,” Howard said, “in the bars, day and night. We’re talking maybe once in a blue moon, Amanda. It does get a little lonely around here sometimes.”

Amanda did not point out how, as a literary agent, and a very successful literary agent at that (president of Hillings & Stewart), Howard was inundated with people, phone calls and e-mail all day long. And when he did not have some professional soiree at night to attend, he always told her all he wanted to do was go home and collapse. He never said, “I’m lonely so I’m going to a bar.”

Their living arrangement was becoming an increasingly unhappy situation for Amanda. After 9/11 Emily and Teddy were frightened of tall buildings, airplanes, staircases, fires and crowds. Like so many families, the Stewarts had gone into counseling with the children, but neither parent could bear the idea of not doing everything they could to make their children feel safer. So Howard found a gorgeous house and property in Woodbury, Connecticut, and after some discussion, Amanda and the children moved out there. Before this, it had never occurred to either one of the Stewarts that they would ever live anywhere but in their beloved adopted hometown of Manhattan.

The children were enrolled in school, and Howard hoped that when Emily and Teddy were older they would attend Taft as day students. There was a wonderful horse farm next to them, Daffodil Hill, where Amanda boarded a horse for herself and a pony for the children. Madame Moliere lived with them as well (the house was huge), so that Amanda could still get some work in on a book she was under contract to write, about the court of Catherine the Great. Howard tried to come out on Thursday nights and go back into the city on Monday mornings. Amanda would bring the children into New York at the slightest excuse; she did not want them to be afraid of the place their parents loved above all others, Manhattan, and more specifically, the neighborhood of Riverside Park.

Howard grew up in Ohio, where his father had a landscaping business, and Amanda grew up in Syracuse, where her parents were still both professors at Syracuse University. Howard had attended Duke and then book publishing lured him to Manhattan; Amanda attended Amherst and her (closet) gay husband had dragged her to Manhattan.

Howard’s first wife had money, so he had not been pressed to make a lot of money while he worked his way up at Gardiner & Grayson to become an editor. He quit his job around the same time that his marriage broke up, started a literary agency, and had never looked back. It was with great pride that Howard had bought the Woodbury property on his own; Amanda knew her husband still considered this apartment as belonging to her, and that Howard wished as a family they did not still rely so heavily on the trust fund Amanda’s grandmother had left her. The money Amanda had earned (and still earned) from her first book, a biography of Catherine the Great, was different, Howard said.

Amanda was extremely proud of Howard. Men liked his well-defined masculinity and sharp, well-educated mind, and women liked his curly hair, beautiful manners, deeply expressive eyes and easy smile. And while Howard appeared to be every inch the sophisticated New Yorker, he was, at heart, still a boy from the Midwest who loved life.

The Stewarts had come a long way in their marriage. Certainly Amanda had. When she had met her future husband she could scarcely leave the neighborhood. She had suffered a complete nervous breakdown in her first marriage and had retreated into her work and this apartment. Besides her parents, there had only been two people who she trusted enough to let in. One was her housekeeper, Rosanne DiSantos, and the second, her elderly friend Mrs. Emma Goldblum, who would come for high tea. They were still very near and dear to her, and were, in fact, present this day at the Stewarts’ Thanksgiving dinner. If anyone had told Amanda that someday she would be running after three children, driving everyone all over hell and high water in a Lincoln Navigator and volunteering for The Parents and Teachers Organization in the Connecticut suburbs, she would have told them surely they were mad.

But that was exactly what she was doing.

Of course, had anyone told her she would ever agree to live apart from Howard for at least four days a week she would have said, “Never!” And lately it was more like six or seven days apart and getting worse.

“You can do whatever you like while we’re away,” Amanda said to Howard, trying to sound carefree. “I trust you completely.”

Howard looked at her from across the kitchen. “Ditto, my dear.”

Amanda only wished she knew why that pretty girl who called her husband by his first name kept parading around in her head.

Dinner finally reached the dining room table, and given the unusual collection of people they were entertaining went off rather well. Conversation with Amanda’s parents, the professors Miller, could be difficult to follow when Mother got lost in life’s metaphors and Papa wandered through lost civilizations, which is to say, to speak in their respective fields of English and history. Mother Stewart tended to talk about soap operas, so Amanda’s older friend, Mrs. Goldblum, could help out a little there. There were Emily and Teddy, of course; Grace snoozing in her carrier; Madame Moliere, and Miklov, the assistant director of the children’s soccer league in Connecticut. He was from the Czech Republic and the children called him Mickey-Luck. Also present were Rosanne DiSantos, no longer a housekeeper but a hospital LPN, Rosanne’s beau, Randy, a detective in the Bronx, and Rosanne’s seventeen-year-old son, Jason, who had to leave dinner early to go to work at Captain Cook’s. Amanda walked Jason to the door.

“The tips are really, really good on Thanksgiving,” he explained. Amanda had known this strapping young man since he was two years old. He was attending Bronx Poly Sci, hoping for early acceptance to the University of Pennsylvania to study engineering.

“Will Celia be bartending today?” Amanda casually asked.

Jason’s head jerked in her direction. “You know Celia?”

“She lives in our building.”

“Oh. Um, yeah, I guess she’ll be working,” Jason said, his face ringing with red.

Amanda returned to the dining room wondering if Jason was sweet on Celia or if he knew something about Celia he didn’t want Amanda to know. Like the fact that Howard went there while she and the children were in Connecticut.

Amanda had never entertained uncomfortable thoughts like these until Grace was born. She didn’t care what anybody said; carrying a third child at forty-three had almost finished her. Unlike her first two pregnancies, with Grace she’d been chronically tired and ill. She had also grown immensely heavy and the birth had been difficult, ending in an emergency cesarean. Mercifully Grace was fine, and after a few weeks, Amanda started feeling better. Physically anyway.

Most of the weight was off now, but Amanda’s hormones—or something—were still out of whack. Her considerable sex drive seemed to have utterly vanished. And there was no way, not with how well her husband knew her, that she could pretend otherwise. And she knew this hurt Howard’s feelings, that whatever sex life they could manage at this point was so one-sided.

Dinner flowed into dessert.

“Mickey-Luck’s going to play us tomorrow,” Teddy told Rosanne.

“He’s going to play you for a fool?” Rosanne kidded.

“No, in soccer!” Teddy said, laughing.

“Is that your real name?” Mrs. Goldblum asked the soccer coach. “Mickey-Luck?”

“Miklov,” he answered.

“Miklov,”Mrs. Goldblum rehearsed.

“I’ve got a new recipe for it,” Mother Stewart told Mrs. Goldblum. “Hot or cold, it makes no difference, it’s wonderful meat loaf. Just ask Howard.”

“With soccer and riding and music lessons,” Amanda’s mother was saying, “I’m beginning to wonder when these children have an opportunity to play.”

“I told you I didn’t like the play,” Amanda’s father said.

“Do you watch All My Children?” Mother Stewart asked Mrs. Goldblum.

“I watch all the children,” Madame Moliere answered in her heavily accented English.

“The cheeldren are great,” Miklov said, nodding. “They leesen, they practice and they do goot.”

Amanda and Howard tried not to laugh but it was difficult. There were so many conversations going on there simply was no thread to follow. Everyone seemed happy, though, which was all that really mattered. Even Miklov, who usually featured a deep sort of Slovak scowl, was smiling.

He was a good-looking young man of twenty-six whose professional career in soccer had ended in his own country with an ankle injury. Amanda never really understood how Miklov had come to their soccer league but she hoped it would lead to better things. The job did not pay well at all, which was why Howard had engaged Miklov to conduct private sessions with the children, to give him some pocket money. (Well, and to make the children better players.)

Mrs. Goldblum, Rosanne and Randy departed shortly after dessert and the wife of the building superintendent arrived to clean up. Madame Moliere prepared the children to leave for Connecticut while Amanda endeavored to sort out her parents. Mother Stewart was flying out of JFK very early in the morning so Howard was staying in the city with her tonight. After he dropped her off at the airport he would join his family and in-laws in Woodbury in time for the children’s holiday indoor soccer tournament.

Howard and Miklov took the bags down to the building’s garage and secured them under a tarp on the Navigator’s roof. Amanda’s father sat in the front seat; Amanda’s mother, Madame Moliere and Grace sat in the backseat; and poor Miklov was crammed into the rear jump seat with Teddy and Emily. Howard made sure everyone had their seat belts on and then walked to the driver’s window. “Drive carefully,” he murmured, giving Amanda a kiss on the lips.

“I shall,” she promised.

One of the greatest surprises of their marriage had been Amanda’s excellence as a driver. She loved it. Getting behind the wheel of a car gave her the same quiet thrill as when as a child, she had discovered someone had left the paddock gate open at her grandparents’ farm. It was the thrill of freedom, of suddenly having the way and the means to go wherever she wanted.

The drive to Woodbury was pleasant and the traffic not too bad. They swung into a rest stop for Emily to use the bathroom and get some gas but then everybody except Madame Moliere and Grace got out for one reason or another and it took a while to load everyone back in.

When they reached the house, Ashette, their black Labrador retriever, was overjoyed to see them. Amanda dismissed the house sitter, got her parents settled in their room and made sure Madame Moliere had her eye on the children. Then Miklov climbed into the front seat and Amanda drove him home to the Waterbury housing complex where the league had put him up. They talked a little bit about the tournament that started tomorrow. A lot of the children were away for the holidays so Emily and Teddy would probably play their whole games, which was great since Amanda wanted her parents to watch them in action.

“How are you getting on, Miklov?” Amanda asked him. She had been surprised when Miklov had accepted Howard’s offer of a bus ticket to join them for Thanksgiving dinner. Emily had not been, though. (“He’s all alone, Mommy, oh, so very, very alone!”)

“I miss my family,” he admitted, brushing his hair out of his eyes.

“Of course you do,” she said. “And I’m sure they must miss you.”

“My mother.”

She glanced over at him.

“My mother meeses me.”

“Will you go and see her? For a visit, I mean.”

“Not yet,” he said, turning to look out his window.

He probably couldn’t afford it yet. Maybe she and Howard could find some other parents who would engage him for private lessons.

While they drove through downtown Waterbury Miklov suddenly said, “This is a very happy day.” When he smiled he was very handsome, although his teeth needed some work. She had no doubt that would come in time. Perfect-looking teeth was still a very American thing.

When she pulled up in front of the dreadful-looking building where he lived she said, “Here we are.” She kept her foot on the brake, waiting for him to get out. She needed to pick up some milk on the way home. Her parents now only drank soy milk. What store would be open on Thanksgiving that would carry soy milk?

Mickey-Luck undid his seat belt and shifted to face Amanda, making the leather creak. “I will tell my mother about my American Thanksgeeving. I haf—”He looked down a moment and then raised his head to meet her eyes directly. “I say how kind you are.”

“Our family is very fond of you, Miklov. You’ve made a big difference in our children’s lives.” Because out here they miss their father terribly. So do I.

Miklov’s eyes traveled down to Amanda’s mouth for just a second and then he turned away, searching for the door handle. When he found it he stopped again and turned around. “You understand how beautiful you are, yes?”

Amanda’s eyes widened. And then she laughed a little. “Why, thank you.”

He made a fist and pounded his heart twice. “I feel it there. For you. You are so beautiful.”

Oh, save it, Mickey-Luck! she thought. It is being American that you think is beautiful, our money is beautiful, this ridiculously expensive truck is beautiful, having a family is beautiful!

“See you tomorrow,” she told him.

He looked disappointed as he got out. Then he turned around, ducking his head back into the truck. “People think I am a peasant but I am not,” he said in a rush. “My great-grandfather was a great general. My father went to school, he was a teacher. I am not a peasant, Mrs. Stewart!”

Somewhat startled, Amanda said, “Everyone knows you are a champion soccer player, Miklov, and an excellent teacher. And in America that is all that matters.”

Miklov was searching her eyes and it made Amanda uncomfortable. But then his dark mood seemed to lift and he smiled, closed the door and walked away from the truck. He did not look back.

Amanda took a deep breath and regripped the steering wheel. Miklov was very attractive.

She set out to find soy milk.

4

Celia Cavanaugh

IT SUCKED BIG-TIME that she had to work. This was the first time in four years that Celia had the apartment to herself over a holiday weekend. But she did have to work, three until eleven tonight, three until two Friday and Saturday, and then three until ten on Sunday. Normally she cleaned up in tips over the weekend but on Thanksgiving? It might be okay today but she knew it would be dead over the weekend. To meet December’s rent she was going to need an extra shift this week.

Celia and Rachel had been assigned as roommates in a freshman dorm at Columbia University. Celia did not have many Jewish friends in the Connecticut suburb she had grown up in, and Rachel did not have many white Anglo-Saxon Protestant friends in the New Jersey suburb she had grown up in, but they had hit it off in a big way and learned a lot from each other. For example, Rachel introduced Celia to lox and bagels, while Celia, Rachel joked, had introduced her to margarine and instant mashed potatoes. Both girls came from affluent families, had parents still married to each other, and had done well in their suburban training in piano, tennis, skiing and keeping secrets.

Celia’s father was a partner at a Wall Street law firm, while Rachel’s last name was synonymous with the largest independent truck leasing company in the world. Her father was really, really rich. So rich, in fact, that he had bought a two and a half bedroom apartment on Riverside Drive so his daughter could move out of the dorm her sophomore year. Celia was welcomed to move in with Rachel as along as she paid sixteen hundred dollars a month toward expenses. Celia’s father asked why the heck should they pay sixteen hundred dollars a month to let her run wild when Celia could stay in the dorm for six hundred dollars a month and let her mother sleep at night. The girls put their heads together and figured out if they could just find someone who’d pay Celia’s rent for the full-size bedroom, Celia could pay Rachel six hundred dollars a month and cram herself into the tiny maid’s room off the kitchen, and then Rachel would have extra cash her father didn’t need to know about.

They advertised in the Spectator and the son of a country-western star was happy to pay sixteen hundred dollars to live in such a nice apartment. After Celia’s mother checked it out and the building and the neighborhood, she told Celia’s father she had no objection to Celia moving in. If Celia wanted to live in a closet that was her business, but the Riverside Park neighborhood was now very in, Mrs. Cavanaugh told her husband.

They moved into the apartment in August and it was really great. Celia’s father built her a loft bed so she could turn around in the maid’s room. Then, on their third night in the apartment, Celia and the-son-of-a-country-western-star shared a couple of bottles of wine, one thing led to another and Celia never slept in the maid’s room again. The next thing she knew, she was smoking cigarettes like the-son-of-a-country-western-star (Rachel put a huge standing fan in the hall to blow smoke back into their bedroom), and suddenly it was November and Rachel was calling Celia at the country-western star’s palatial home outside of Nashville to say that if Celia didn’t withdraw from their English class she was going to get an F because of her absences. Celia wasn’t going to be able to make the time up, the teacher was an asshole. So Celia called the university from Nashville and withdrew from the class. Later when her parents saw the I on her report card she said she had actually gotten a B but the teacher had handed in the grades late.

The lies came easier and more often. Celia and the-son-of-a-country-western-star were drinking a lot and smoking a lot of pot. Rachel said after this school year that was it, Celia was out. Celia said that was fine, they were going to get their own place anyway. In February the-son-of-a-country-western-star wanted to take Celia to Aspen where his country-western-star parent had a place, but Celia explained she had a huge test coming up in history and couldn’t go. But as she watched the-son-of-a-country-western-star packing his bags she changed her mind and went with him, deciding she’d just figure out what to do about her classes later. The solution she came up with was to call the school from Aspen and explain that she had broken her leg in three places skiing, was being forced to stay for medical treatment and could they please tell her what portion of her tuition could be applied to the following year since it looked like she would have to withdraw from school.

“Oh, Rachel’s great, Mom,” Celia would say, dragging on a cigarette outside one of the Aspen ski lodges. “And she says hi. We’ll probably go to the new place on Broadway for pizza tonight.”

When Celia and the-son-of-a-country-western-star finally got back to New York in late March, Celia knew she had better get a full-time job so she’d have some money saved toward school; she had to somehow soften the blow to her parents that she had dropped out. She figured she would pay them back, start school again in the fall and be only fifteen credits behind.

That was five years ago and Celia hadn’t been back to school since.

The week before Celia’s twenty-first birthday, the son-of-a-country-western-star ran away with the newlywed wife who lived on the fourth floor of their building. Celia was at first stunned, then disbelieving, and finally devastated. (The newlywed husband wasn’t so happy about it, either, although he did keep asking Celia if she wanted to come over to talk about it over drinks.)

Not long after that Rachel came into Celia’s bedroom for a talk. Rachel made a great show of wafting through the smoke and sat down on the foot of Celia’s bed. “You don’t have to pay me for the maid’s room anymore but someone has to pay the $1,703 for this room this month.”

“I start bartending at Captain Cook’s next week,” Celia said, blowing smoke to the ceiling. (She had just smoked a joint with one of the doormen on his break and was still a little out of it.)

“Celia—” Rachel jumped up and kicked her way through the clothes and junk all over the floor to retrieve a handheld mirror from the dresser. She’d brought it back to shove in Celia’s face. “Look at you!”

She hadn’t wanted to particularly, but Celia did. Her shoulder-length brown hair was unbrushed and her brown eyes had purple circles under them. Celia had also gained about fifteen pounds since she had replaced the-son-of-a-country-western-star with Oreo cookies, Cheez Doodles and Guinness in bed.

Celia sat up to stamp out her cigarette. “I’ll move if you want.”

“Oh, Celia, you never sleep anymore, you just keep doing drugs and drinking and locking yourself up in here.” Rachel’s eyes welled up with tears. “I want my friend back.”

Since Rachel had threatened to throw her out the year before Celia didn’t put too much on this threat. For whatever reason Rachel wanted to save their friendship, and did so with persistency which at that point had evoked from Celia mild contempt. Still, there was something about Rachel’s near hysteria that got to her.

“My littlest angel, what is wrong?” her mother asked Celia the next night in Darien, as Celia lay sobbing on her old bed in her old room.

“Everything,” she wailed. “I just feel like killing myself.”

The next morning she found herself in a psychiatrist’s office in Stamford. When she saw her mother’s hopeful expression when she came out she felt enraged. She wouldn’t tell her what she had told the man (which had been pretty much nothing). In the car, when her mother asked if they had discussed an antidepressant, Celia went ballistic, screaming, “I’m not going to be a high-tech zombie! So just forget it!”

“But, Celia—”

“The doctor said if I get all this sugar and nicotine and caffeine out of my system I’m going to feel better. And he said I had to exercise more and get more sunlight.”

“And what about the drinking, Celia?”

“He didn’t say anything about that,” she lied. Actually what he had said was how much alcohol would increase her depression when it wore off.

“I’m going to cut way back anyway,” she told her mother.

“Since you’re only turning twenty-one next week and are already vowing to cut back on your drinking I’m not sure how to take that, Celia,” her mother said, trying to remain focused on the road. This was how Celia remembered her childhood, her mother always driving Celia and her brothers somewhere. “But if you find changing these things doesn’t help, you have to promise me you’ll see the doctor again.”

Although Celia said nothing about it, the doctor had lectured Celia on what a death sentence cocaine could be for someone like her. “You lose the ability to experience wellbeing because the cocaine burns up the chemicals that create it. That’s why so many cocaine addicts kill themselves. They become physically incapable of feeling sensations of wellbeing. Think of a turtle whose shell has been ripped off.”

Rachel was irritatingly elated when Celia said she was going to reform her evil ways. She quit smoking, started running in the park and Rachel went with her to a couple of Weight Watchers meetings so they could both get their food under control. (Rachel tended to be on the heavy side.) Celia started working at Captain Cook’s and was amazed at how well the men tipped her; she was also perversely fascinated by people who drank too much. She swore off cocaine, stayed away from pot and began to sleep again.

All in all she started to feel whatever it was starting to lift. At least she could breathe without wanting to hang herself.

Her stint at Captain Cook’s had worked out well. Mark Cook, the owner (who had sailed on nothing but the Staten Island Ferry), liked Celia from the start because she was really popular with the customers. She also didn’t steal from the register like the other bartenders. Celia was made assistant manager of the bar. Not too long after that, when Celia lied to the other bartenders that the new guy was an undercover cop and the two worst offending thieves quit, Mark promoted her to manager of the bar.

In the meantime, Rachel got her B.A. and entered the master’s program at Columbia in American studies. Although Celia looked and acted a thousand times better since her more wayward days, Rachel still worried about her.

“Oh, Rach, now what?” Celia said, making a strawberry-banana smoothie in the blender. “I’ve given up smoking, drugs and junk food. What else do you want me to do?”

“It’s the stuff you’re dragging home. All this junk all over everywhere.”

It was true that Celia had found a renewed interest in well-made old things again. Finding and dragging home old things was something she had done even as a child. (Her parents said in her last life she must have been Queen Victoria.) “It’s not junk,” she protested, pouring some of the smoothie in a glass and sliding it to her roommate. She looked around and then snatched up a glass inkwell that had been drying next to the sink. “This is a mid-nineteenth century inkwell. It is not junk.”

“It doesn’t have a top, Celia, it’s just more junk. But at least that’s small. What are you going to do with that old window you dragged home the other day?”

“I’m taking it to storage,” Celia said.

“It’s weird, Ceil,” Rachel continued. “I don’t know anybody else who has a stone fireplace mantel lying on their bedroom floor. Do you?”

That made Celia laugh. And then Rachel laughed, too.

“We used to laugh all the time,” Rachel said. “Remember?”

Celia nodded, feeling a little sad. When had everything gotten to be so hard?

“You spend too much time alone,” Rachel continued. “If you didn’t go to work I don’t think you’d speak to anybody.”

It was true, she had gone from being outgoing to wishing most of the time that people would leave her alone. She made all kinds of excuses to get out of family things. Her oldest brother was a lawyer like her dad and the other was a research scientist. This did not leave a whole lot of room for Celia to talk about her career in bartending. Even her mother was working on a master’s degree at night at Fairfield University, in what Celia didn’t even know. (She was almost afraid to ask what a Cotillion debutante who hadn’t held a job in thirty years wanted a master’s degree in.) The whole Cavanaugh family was so programmed for success Celia’s throat tightened whenever she was around them.

At one time she had been a success in her family’s eyes. She had made the National Honor Society in high school and made the varsity soccer and tennis teams. She had always been a class officer, and as a senior had been voted most popular, most likely to succeed and best legs. She remembered being happy, feeling full of energy.

Now, even in her reformed state of living, Celia felt as though everyone she had grown up with had run ahead and she couldn’t catch up. It was as if she was stuck behind a wall of glass. She could see them but could not reach them. Rachel saw it because Rachel was the one who had to make up excuses for why Celia always ducked calls from old high school friends.

Celia pretty much ducked calls from everyone at this point.

After Celia encouraged Rachel to sign up for Match.com, the roommates’ relationship improved because Rachel had something exciting going on in her life to focus on and all Celia had to do was listen to her talk about her experiences.

Celia’s alarm went off at 2:15 p.m. She dragged herself out of bed, showered and put on her Captain Cook’s uniform, which consisted of tight-fitting black jeans, a long-sleeved blouse (with billowed sleeves and plunging neckline; aye, like a pirate), and tucked a clean black-and-white bandana in her back pocket, which she would put on at the bar. She knew she should call home to wish everyone “Happy Thanksgiving,” but if she did then she’d have to talk to all the relatives and deal with the questions her parents had not come up with satisfactory answers to: When was Celia going back to school? Was she seeing anyone special? Had she decided on her career?

She called her mother’s cell phone. She knew it would be turned off but she also knew her mother would check it later when she hadn’t heard from Celia. “Hi, everybody. I just wanted to say Happy Thanksgiving and tell you that I had a very nice day here but missed you guys and now I’m going to work. I hope dinner was good and Uncle Keith didn’t break any chair legs in the dining room or anything again. Love you!”

A cold wind blew at her back as Celia walked to Columbus Avenue. Sometimes the wind off the Hudson was so strong between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive people had to walk backward to reach their buildings. And this was only November. Just wait.

The restaurant was busy but the bar was slow. “Three Diet Pepsis, a Shirley Temple and a zombie,” one of the waiters said, putting in his order. “Identify the unhappy patron at that table.”

It was a nice group that worked here. Most of them had come to New York to be actors.

Celia flicked the channels of the two TVs over the bar. She turned the sound up on the NFL game and turned the sound off on the college game. The busboy brought in a couple racks of clean glasses and set them down on the bar. “Do you want me to put them away?”

“Not until you’re twenty-one,” she told him, smiling. Jason was terribly shy and young for his age, but he was a good worker.

Celia hefted the trays down into the bar and started putting the glasses away.

“Um,” Jason said.

She looked up. “You’ll be in the back?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Thanksgiving is the first day of Suicidal-Thoughts Season,” a regular sighed to Celia. He was divorced, this one, and had moved into the city after his wife in the suburbs threw him out of the house. Why, he was not saying, but Celia suspected it had something to do with the way he drank. Celia almost never expressed an opinion about anything that mattered to her customers—like the way they drank—because the tips were much better if she didn’t.

“I’m just thankful Thanksgiving’s only once a year,” another regular said from across the way, a heavily made-up woman with many miles on her. She’d been working at the Board of Ed for twenty-five years. She drank the house rosé over ice. She once told Celia she hung out at Captain Cook’s because it was a nice place, the people were nice and if she should happen to find a man in here sometime then she would feel a lot safer about getting to know him.

Another regular, the unpublished writer, came in and sat down at the bar. He had on a tie and jacket, which was unusual for him.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” Celia said. “What may I get you?”

“Arsenic or new in-laws,” he said, loosening the tie. “Irish Mist on the rocks.” He rested his elbows on the bar, watching her. “My agent’s going to fire me,” he said glumly, “I just know it. Asked me if I wanted to meet him for a beer. He lives around here.”

“You’re meeting him here?” Celia asked, pouring the whiskey. “On Thanksgiving?”

“I figure he wants to get it over with and tell me I’m going to be a fucking insurance salesman for the rest of my life.”

“And with that kind of language not a very successful one,” Celia observed, making everyone, including the writer, laugh. She wiped down the bar in front of him and slid a saucer of Chex Mix toward him. “He’s not going to have anything bad to say,” she said, “not on Thanksgiving Day. He wouldn’t have called you.”

“You think?” He was looking up at her with a kind of gratitude that translated into excellent tips. But that was not why Celia had said it; she meant it. She felt sorry for him. He’d been trying to sell something he’d written ever since she started working here.

“When’s he coming?”

“I haven’t called him back yet.”

“Call him,” Celia told him.

“You think?”

“It’s Thanksgiving, I’m telling you, he must be calling with good news.”

“I don’t know what it is you should be doing for a living, Celia,” the guy thrown out of the house in the suburbs said, “but it’s sure not this.”

Celia tossed the towel into the laundry bin and gave him a saucer of the peanuts she knew that he liked. “Why not this?”

“For starters, you sound like Martha Stewart and look like one of those women on Friends.”

“She does,” agreed the lonely Board of Ed lady.

“Thank you,” Celia said.

“Celia used to go to Columbia, you know,” the writer said. Celia imagined he was building her credentials up in his mind so he would do what she had advised and call his agent back.

“Ceil,” a waitress said breathlessly, careening into the bar. “I need two margaritas, a strawberry daiquiri and a mudslide as fast as you can make ’em.”

“Got it.”

A cold blast of air came in when the door opened. Celia glanced over and saw a man in overalls and a parka coming in. Keeping his coat on, the man slid onto a stool and briskly rubbed his hands. “Tenant blows uppa his stove and blamesa me. On a Thanksgivinaday, this I don’t need.”

Celia poured him a draft.

The second bartender for the night shift appeared. “Sorry I’m late, Celia.”

“You haven’t missed much,” she said, putting ingredients for the daiquiri, margaritas and mudslide in three of the bar’s six blenders and passing the order on to him because it was time for her break.

“Think it’ll get busier?”

“Not until nine, when people get back into the city,” she said, untying her apron and putting it under the bar. She went into the kitchen where, as usual, the crew was careening about swearing in different languages. (Their chef’s dyslexia was pretty bad.) Celia walked over to the dishwashing area. “Jason,” she called, and then she left the kitchen and headed for Mark’s office. She unlocked the door and went in.

She was standing examining the shift calendar on the wall when he knocked. “Come in and close the door,” she told him.

He did as he was told.

“And lock it,” she added, walking over. While he was turning the dead bolt Celia placed her hand on the small of his back and felt him freeze. “Yes, I want to,” she whispered into his ear. “Very much.” She let her hand slide down and smiled to herself. Amazing.

She led Jason over to the low filing cabinet that also served as a makeshift table in the office. She sat down and pulled him to stand between her legs. And looked up at him. And smiled.

The teenager’s eyes were half-closed and his breath ragged. It had been two weeks since the last time. While he just stood there Celia undid his belt, his pants, worked his zipper and then pulled his jeans down.

She took a sharp breath when she looked down. He tried to help her take his Jockey shorts down but his hands were trembling and Celia pretty much had to do it. As she sat back up it brushed the side of her face. She took hold of him and smiled, looking up. “You’re really something,” she whispered. Then she hastily stood up to take off her jeans and panties and moved back down onto the file cabinet. Jason grabbed at her thighs to pull her legs up and she scarcely had time to guide him into place before he shuddered and caved.

One of the hazards of an inexperienced teenage boy. The upside was Jason had been a virgin, free of disease, and now only knew the most acute desire to get into her. Which was fine with her.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“It’s okay,” she whispered back, pulling his head down to rest on her shoulder, “because you still feel so good inside of me.” She was looking up at the clock. She had maybe ten minutes. She shifted, tightening her legs around Jason to keep him there, and started to whisper things to him. Nice things. About him, about his size and how he felt inside of her, about what she wanted him to do to her. It was not long before she felt him growing large again. The progress was slow but steady, and although he was not quite yet fully erect, she started moving against him because she had grown tremendously excited. He began thrusting back, making her moan a little, which got him more excited, and his increasingly harder thrusts made Celia’s hips start to rise. She told him what was happening to her, what she was feeling, and then Jason became almost frantic, rhythmically banging the cabinet into the wall. She cried softly into his neck as she came and then shuddered violently; moments later he grunted loudly and collapsed on Celia, damp with perspiration.

Celia rolled out from under Jason and went into Mark’s toilet to get some paper towels. She dampened some and used them to clean herself up and then wordlessly brought some out for Jason. She went back for the can of Glade and sprayed the air. It smelled of fake roses and when she looked at Jason they both laughed.

5

Rosanne DiSantos and Mrs. Emma Goldblum

“I HATE IT when you say things like that, Mrs. G,” Rosanne told her eighty-nine-year-old former employer, longtime friend and roommate.

“I only said that it appeared the young foreign gentleman has a crush on our dear Amanda.”

“And Amanda’ll never notice because she never does,” Rosanne said. “But now you’re gonna make me worry about what’s gonna happen when Mickey Muscles makes his move out there in wherever the heck she is.” Having only lived in Detroit and New York City, Rosanne DiSantos was not a fan of the country.

“Connecticut,”Mrs. Goldblum supplied, sipping her cocoa. “Amanda is quite capable of taking care of herself.”

That shows how much you know about how she used to be, Rosanne thought. Amanda was like another person since she met Howie, and even like a third person after the kids started coming. As much as Rosanne wanted to believe the old Amanda was gone forever she still worried a bit now and then.

Rosanne had known Amanda and Howie for over fifteen years. When she earned her living as a housekeeper, they had been separate clients; Amanda was living by herself and Howie had been married to a first-class bitch that Rosanne hated.

Mrs. Goldblum’s forehead furrowed slightly. “What is it, dear?”

“Oh, nothin’,” Rosanne said quickly, forcing a smile. “I was just thinkin’ how guys are always gaga over Amanda’s boobs so she must be handling them, just like you said.”

Mrs. Goldblum carefully replaced her cup into the saucer with a smile. “I might not have expressed it in quite that way, Rosanne dear, but I do understand what you mean.” After a moment her smile faded. “And perhaps it’s nothing.”

Rosanne shot a look across the table. “Perhaps what is nothing?”

Mrs. Goldblum withdrew the lace hankie she kept tucked in her sleeve and patted her nose with it. “It’s just that I’ve lived such a long time.”

Oh, no, here we go again, Rosanne thought. Everyone got older, of course, but somehow she never thought it would happen to Mrs. G. She had always been a little frail, yes, like a little bird, but these “talks” she had started giving lately were giving Rosanne the creeps. Like she was trying to cram things into Rosanne’s head at the last minute.

Rosanne couldn’t think about life without Mrs. G. (How dumb was that? A licensed practical nurse who can’t deal with people dying?) What had begun as a solution to the problem of an older widow with a rent-controlled apartment far too large for her and a single mother without a proper place to raise her young son had become over the years a very real family. Mrs. G had been one of her housekeeping clients, too, back in the days when Rosanne’s husband, Frank, had been alive. (The Stewarts had been on Monday, Amanda Miller on Tuesday, the Wyatts on Wednesday, Mrs. Goldblum on Thursday and the Cochrans on Friday.) This apartment had been Rosanne and Jason’s home for over a decade and Mrs. G was like a mother to her and a grandmother to Jason. Jason even called her Gran.

And what changes had unfolded! Jason went from six to seventeen years old and Rosanne went from housekeeping to night school to becoming an LPN at Hudson Hospital. The fact that Rosanne hated nursing was besides the point. She had risen from a blue-collar living to become a professional. People looked at Rosanne differently now. And no one seemed surprised that one of Bronx Poly Sci’s academic stars was her son.

Living in an apartment overlooking Riverside Park and the Hudson River had been quite something, too. Particularly since Mrs. G had been living in this three-bedroom apartment for like sixty-five years and her rent was only $1,450 a month, half of which Rosanne paid. What would happen after Mrs. G died was not hard to imagine; they’d already seen it innumerable times. Rosanne and Jason would be evicted and the apartment would be renovated and sold as a condo unit for well over a million dollars.

What would she do then? Rosanne had no idea. Everyone expected her to marry Randy eventually but she preferred the relationship the way it was. Randy was a great guy and everything but while Rosanne worked steadily to improve herself and her lot in life, Randy wanted to keep everything the same. Change upset him. He wasn’t stupid, but he wasn’t motivated. He was a detective, but worked mostly behind a desk in an administrative capacity. Randy did his job, then left his shift on the dot to have a beer with the guys, maybe throw some darts and watch NASCAR. He had two kids by his ex-wife that he regularly saw and supported. The thing that really bothered Rosanne was how Randy never seemed to initiate any action on his own; if there wasn’t someone always there to tell him what to do next he would basically do nothing.

Randy liked the way their relationship was. They went out on occasion, always saw each other on Saturday night (at which time they very pleasantly got on sexually), and Rosanne always cleaned his apartment so she could stand being there.

So they just went on and Rosanne found it reassuring to have him in her life.

“Okay, Mrs. G, you’ve lived a long time,” Rosanne prompted.

Mrs. G moved her lips around a little before she spoke.

This had started recently, too.

“It’s not good for a husband and wife to live apart,”Mrs. G finally said.

“Amanda’s not going to do anything.” At least I sure hope not, Rosanne added to herself. “She’s got the three screaming-mimis and Madame DeFarge to keep her busy.”

“Hmm,”Mrs. G said somewhat gravely.

Rosanne counted to five. “What do you mean, hmm?”

She adjusted her glasses to look at Rosanne and, eventually, stare Rosanne down. “When you live apart, you begin to think outside of the family circle. It’s asking for trouble. A wife requires a certain amount of attention and Howard seems otherwise very occupied.”

“Oh, Mrs. G!” Rosanne objected, wrapping her arms over the top of her head in frustration. She let her arms drop. “This is Howie and Amanda we’re talking about. They both made mistakes the first time around and they knew exactly what they wanted when they got married. Which was each other. And the kids. They wouldn’t hurt those kids for anything and I think it’s rotten to even be talking about this!”

“I just worry,”Mrs. Goldblum said vaguely, preparing to rise from her chair.

Rosanne had forgotten to steer Mrs. G into the kitchen chair with arms on it so now Rosanne needed to help her get up without Mrs. G realizing that she was helping her get up. Mrs. G had become extremely irritable whenever she tried to help her and had thrown an absolute fit last year when Rosanne installed bars in her bathroom and along the hallways (although, Rosanne noticed, she started relying on them at once).

“At what time may we expect Jason?” Mrs. G asked, now on her feet and reaching for her walking stick. (That’s the way Mrs. G was—she didn’t use a cane like normal people; she used a walking stick, a skinny little black ebony stick with a silver handle that her granny or somebody used ten million years ago.)

“A little after eleven,” Rosanne said, glancing up at the clock. “They won’t close the kitchen until ten.”

“How we will miss him when he goes away to school,” Mrs. G said, moving toward her favorite seat in the living room to pick up her book. As was her habit she would take her book with her into the bedroom to read before going to sleep, but lately she had been falling asleep before getting to the book—or even turning off the light.

The phone rang and Rosanne picked it up and held it under her chin as she cleared the cups and saucers from the table. She’d have to wash them by hand because they were Wedgwood bone china that had belonged to some other ancient relative of Mrs. G’s. “Happy Thanksgiving,” Rosanne greeted whoever was calling.

Very carefully she put the dishes in the sink and held the phone with both hands, taking a quick look back over her shoulder. “Yeah, sure. Don’t worry about it. I’ll be right down. I know it’s hard, but you gotta do it. And I’ll go with you.” She swallowed. “Don’t think about it, we’ll just do it and get it over with. I’ll be right down.”

“Who was that?” Mrs. G asked, appearing in the doorway.

“Samantha Wyatt,” Rosanne said, replacing the phone in the cradle.

“Is she home from school?”

“Yeah. And I’m just going to run over with her to see her parents. To say Happy Thanksgiving. Leave the dishes in the sink and I’ll wash them when I get back.” She kissed Mrs. G on the cheek and headed for the front hall closet.

6

Sam Wyatt

“WHERE DOES SHE find these guys, in a catalog of the weird and the strange?” Sam Wyatt asked his wife.

“I think she met him through work somehow,” Harriet said quietly, putting the finishing touches on a second platter of hors d’oeuvres. They were on a second round because their youngest was two hours late and they were starving. They also had to entertain the latest boyfriend their older daughter had brought home to share their Thanksgiving meal.

Sam Wyatt’s eldest daughter, Althea, was thirty-one, black, Methodist and worked on Wall Street. The guy in the living room had gray hair, was white, and with a name like Donnelly was probably Catholic and had some kook job on Seventh Avenue. Sam always knew they would regret having sent Althea to that Muffy-Buffy school on the East Side for rich girls. Althea had grown up with so few black friends it was no wonder she dated white guys.

Admittedly, Sam and Harriet revolved in a somewhat rarified circle of New York. He may have started life as the youngest of six dirt-poor kids of an army sergeant who died young, but Sam had earned a college degree and today, at sixty-one, was a senior vice president of Electronika International, the second largest manufacturer of electronic office equipment in America. Harriet, whose skin was much lighter than Sam’s, began in the training program at Gardiner & Grayson book publishers and today was Vice President of Publicity, Marketing & Advertising.

“Be polite, Sam, that’s all I ask,” Harriet murmured, picking up the tray of hors d’oeuvres.

“Yeah, yeah.” He finished pouring the old white Catholic guy a second glass of wine. Sam hadn’t had a drink in over twenty-one years, which was a good thing since it had been under only that one condition that Harriet had allowed him back into her and Althea’s life. That was why there was an eleven year age difference between their daughters. Althea was from Round 1 of their marriage while Samantha was their AA baby, the child from Round 2 who benefitted most from her parents being in Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon.

Where the heck was Samantha? he wondered, looking at his watch. Traffic, he supposed. Harriet said after the scolding they gave Samantha about her last cell phone bill she would probably claim it had been “uneconomical” to call them from the road.

“Cliff was just remarking on the boat,” Harriet said when Sam came in, nodding in the direction of the framed picture of their sailboat.

Sam handed the old white guy his glass of wine.

“Thanks, Mr. Wyatt. Althea says you moor it in Manhattan for part of the year.”

“At the Seventy-Ninth Street Boat Basin,” he confirmed. He sat down and took a sip of Crystal Lite. (It wasn’t half-bad compared to the other low-calorie crap Harriet was always trying to get him to drink.) “This time of year we keep it at our place in South Carolina.” One of the reasons they had been anxious to get the girls together was to tell them he had finally worked out early retirement with Electronika; he and Harriet could afford to stop working in the spring. They were planning to downsize from this apartment (thank God they had made the stretch to buy it) to a two bedroom and spend half the year in South Carolina and half up here in Manhattan.

Althea would be fine with not having them around half the year. After breezing through Columbia at their expense, Althea had gone off to Berkeley with her boyfriend at the time to get an MBA. With the degree (and without the boyfriend) Althea came back to New York and took a job on Wall Street, something she said she would do until she paid off her student loans from graduate school. She became an investment analyst, one of those brainy people who researched companies to see if the firm should underwrite a bond issue for them. If the analyst’s recommendations were correct, the firm often made a ton of money; if the analyst was wrong, though, the firm might still make some money up front but its reputation could take a hit which ended in long-term loss. The analyst responsible tended to vanish.

When Althea had told Sam she wished to stake her career on specializing in alternative energy, Sam’s heart had filled with dread. Leave it to whacked-out Berkeley to prepare his daughter to be the only person on Wall Street who would never make any money. But then, of course, the oil crunch came and a drawing of Althea’s face appeared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal as the high scorer in a suddenly enticing field. Her recommendation to underwrite a bond issue for a small company holding a patent that promised to revolutionize the production of hybrid engines was a grand slam, while earlier bond issues—in wind turbos, micro-turbines, corn refineries and municipal thermal-dynamic energy plants—were sent flying around the bases. Her latest venture was underwriting an outfit reopening abandoned sugar factories.

Althea was going to make partner in January. Last year Sam and Harriet had been agog to learn Althea’s salary was ninety thousand dollars—supplemented by a $650,000 bonus. To his daughter’s credit Althea gave over seventy-five thousand dollars a year away, paid something like three hundred thousand dollars in taxes (three hundred thousand dollars in taxes!) and moved into a two million dollar loft in SoHo.

This kind of money seemed insane to Sam and Harriet. And yet their own apartment, overlooking Riverside Park, had been appraised at over a million five. (They had bought it for two hundred and fifty thousand!)

But that was the nature of the great have and have-not divide of the new America, wasn’t it? The whole country seemed morally out of whack. You had everything or you had very little.

However lucrative Althea’s career might be, she was paying for it in other ways. Her work was wildly intense and geographically complicated. When she was in New York she worked a minimum of twelve hours a day and otherwise was on the road for the better part of each month. It was not fun travel, either, or even sequential. It was “go to Sacramento to pitch a bond issue to the California state pension fund, then get back in time for the meeting with the partners and then get down to Knoxville to scout that company before anyone else gets there and don’t forget next Monday is the public hearing on the Nova Scotia wind project, and Thursday is the Westminster Bank summit in London, and the following week you must get in to see that nutcase in Venezuela” kind of travel.

The Wyatts were also particularly proud of Althea’s personal agenda in her work, to generate jobs, products and energy options in places where there were few. Why not use the earth’s earliest and most bountiful foods like corn and sugar to stretch our oil reserves? Why not harness desert winds to make electricity? Or turn the endless summer sunshine of Alaska into the electricity needed to run air conditioners in the continental United States?

Now as for Samantha, the Wyatts’ nineteen-year-old, she was a very different matter. Frankly speaking she was a little spoiled and being that much farther away from them for six months of the year made both Harriet and Sam a little nervous.

“How much longer do we have to wait for Sammy?” Althea wanted to know, reaching for a piece of celery. She crunched down on it, showing the beautiful teeth from childhood orthodontics. Althea was a good-looking woman, tall, slim, with great cheekbones Sam recognized as his own. But it was Samantha who was the beauty of the family. Samantha looked like her mother.

“We’ll give her another ten minutes,” Harriet said.

Althea sighed, grabbed a piece of cheese and sank back into the cushions.

“So what exactly do you do on Seventh Avenue?” Sam asked the guy. (He wished Harriet would go into the kitchen to check on something so he could eat some cheese, too.)

“I’m a textile designer.”

“Samantha will be so interested,” Harriet said. “She’s in a theater group at school and loves making costumes.”

What the hell kind of job was it for a man to be a textile designer? Sam wondered. “I guess you have to be, uh,” Sam said, “inclined toward that kind of work?”

Althea rolled her eyes.

“I’m afraid my husband gets slightly deranged when he’s not fed,” Harriet explained.

The white-haired guy was laughing. “It’s okay. My dad had the same reaction.”

“Your father’s still alive?” Sam blurted.

Althea picked up a carrot from the tray and gently threw it at her father. It bounced off Sam’s barrel chest to the carpet.

“It must be my hair,” the guy said to Althea. He looked at Sam. “It’s a family trait, Mr. Wyatt. A lot of us go silver before thirty-five.” He smiled, looking hopeful. “I’m only thirty-four, sir.”

“Don’t bother explaining anything to him,” Althea told her boyfriend, “because I won’t be speaking to him again as long as I live.” She glared at her father. “You got it now, Dad? Cliff is not gay, he is gainfully employed and he’s thirty-four, okay?”

Sam mumbled an apology and then looked at his watch. “Where is that girl?”

“I vote we go ahead and eat,” Althea said.

“Five more minutes,” Harriet said, “and if she isn’t here…”

“So, Cliff,” Sam said, sitting back in his chair, “why don’t you explain to me exactly what a textile designer does.”

“Well, I’m a chemical engineer by training, Mr. Wyatt.”

“Oh, a chemical engineer,” Harriet repeated approvingly, raising her eyebrows.

“He went to MIT,” Althea added.

“I work in a lab to create new fibers. For different manufacturers.”

“He just created something for Ralph Lauren,” Althea said.

“Good for you,” Sam said, although it still sounded a little poofy to him. He turned at the sound of the tumblers in the front door.

“That will be Samantha,” Harriet said, jumping up and going to the foyer.

“Hooray, food,” Althea said, standing up.

“Oh, hi, Rosanne,” Sam heard Harriet say in the hall.

“Rosanne?” Sam said, glancing at Althea. “What’s Rosanne doing here?”

“I think Mom invited her to dinner.” Althea balanced her empty glass on the hors d’oeuvres tray and picked it up. “But she was going with Jason and Mrs. Goldblum over to the Stewarts’.” Cliff stood to pick up the other glasses and soiled cocktail napkins. “Rosanne was my babysitter way back when, Cliff, so be warned, if you don’t mind your p’s and q’s at the dinner table she might pinch you.”

Harriet reappeared in the living room and by her expression Sam knew something was wrong. “What’s wrong? Where’s Samantha?”

“She went to her room. She’s not feeling very well.” She turned to Cliff. “I hate to do this to you,” she began.

“But it would be better if I left. Of course, I understand.”

“Fix Cliff a plate to take with him,” Harriet said.

“No way, I’m taking him to Captain Cook’s,” Althea said. “After making him sit here half the night the least I can do is give him dinner.”

“No, Althea.” The tone of Harriet’s voice got everyone’s attention. She added, in a quieter voice, “I wish you would stay. I think your sister would want you here.”

A feeling of foreboding flooded through Sam and wordlessly he headed for Samantha’s bedroom.

“Sam, wait—”

Rosanne was standing next to three suitcases outside Samantha’s room.

“A lot of baggage for three days,” Sam observed.

“Mr. W,” Rosanne said, “we need to talk for a sec.”

Sam went to the door and found it locked. He knocked. “Samantha? This is your father. Open this door.”

“If I could just talk to you for one minute,” Rosanne pleaded.

“Oh, Rosanne!” Sam heard his daughter wail from behind the door. “What’s the use?” The handle turned and the door swung open.

“Samantha, what is it?” Sam asked, wincing as he looked at his daughter’s tearstained face. And then he looked down, between the parted sides of her coat. When he brought his eyes back up his daughter’s expression confirmed it. Samantha was pregnant.

7

Howard Stewart

HE KEPT PUTTING off telling Amanda about it and now he was running out of time. Christmas would just about finish him financially.

The deals he thought would set things right at the agency had never materialized. Instead, his number one associate announced she was moving to another agency and was taking two of Hillings & Stewart’s biggest writers with her. To be fair, Howard had assigned these two midlist authors (writers who sold consistently well but never quite seemed to make a bestseller list) to her because they were taking up so much of his time. The associate placed them at new publishing houses where first one and then the other popped onto the bestseller lists. Now the income from huge new contracts for these two writers was gone with his former associate.

And then there was the death of Gertrude Bristol, the international bestselling romance-suspense writer Howard had edited at Gardiner & Grayson who had become his founding client. Year in and year out for eight years Howard had received a Bristol novel to sell to publishers in twenty-one countries, to Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club, to audio publishers and to movie and TV producers.

Gertrude had been ninety-three when she died so it wasn’t as if her passing had come as a great shock, but what happened after did. It was not unusual for the longtime publisher of a bestselling writer to enlist a ghost writer to keep writing books under the name of the deceased writer. It was a marketing thing, where the author as a brand name promised to deliver a certain kind of book. Everyone fromV. C. Andrews to L. Ron Hubbard had been writing from the grave for years, and Gertrude Bristol was the kind of traditional “cozy” novelist who had written so many books for so many years that more than one excellent writer could emulate her style. Howard found the right writer, the publishing house was ecstatic and ready to go, and then—

The niece, Gertrude’s literary executor, said, “No.”

Of course, since the niece had inherited some twenty-six million dollars and the rights to forty-seven novels, what did she care about money? What was important to her, she wrote Howard, was that her dear aunt’s work remain her own.

Howard understood the niece’s sentiments but he also knew this decision put his agency in bad straits. His accountant had been warning him since he bought out the distinguished Hillings & Hillings Literary Agency to form Hillings & Stewart that Howard was operating on a very slim margin for error. Howard did not let the people go from Hillings & Hillings that the accountant advised him to; Howard had gone ahead with what was considered the Cadillac of health insurance plans; and Howard also instituted a retirement plan the accountant warned could come back to haunt him if any of his young employees ever got serious about saving. Yes, the accountant admitted, Howard could comfortably meet these obligations now. But what if something happened and costs went up and income came down? What then?

And then 9/11. Besides the psychological fallout from the tragedy, property taxes skyrocketed and so did the rents on midtown office buildings. Insurance premiums of all kinds went through the roof. And then there was the fact that it took months for the book publishing industry to return to any sense of normalcy. And God help any author whose book had been published in the interim. A techno-thriller about terrorists Howard represented had had a first printing of four hundred thousand copies coming out in November. Because of its subject matter the publisher delayed publication by ten months, at which time it sold barely thirty-five thousand copies.

Howard’s children had been badly frightened and so he had not even hesitated about buying the house in Woodbury. At the time he qualified for a good mortgage rate and he wanted his family safe. The house, in turn, started a slew of new expenses and it was not long before Howard was taking a lot more money out of the agency than the agency receipts could support.

By last year Howard knew he had to do something so he had put out a feeler with Henry Hillings about the possibility one of his grandchildren might be interested in learning the business. The old man instantly got fired up about the idea because he had one grandson, he said, “Who’s just the ticket,” and it was not long before a lawyer called Howard to express Henry’s interest in buying his grandson into the agency as a partner. A partial cash-flow solution seemed to be near. But when it came time to show the agency books, Howard put it off because the agency at that moment was out over two hundred thousand dollars on a credit line with a bank that was failing. That’s when he had hustled to get the Gertrude Bristol deal going and got shot down.

Subsequent meetings with his accountant did not go well. If Howard wanted the agency books to look good, he was told, he had to pay off the credit line, lay off at least three employees, sublet one of the offices and make his employees pay at least thirty percent of their health care premiums. Also, if he didn’t want trouble with the IRS, he needed an extra hundred thousand to set things right. His finances, the accountant told him, were now officially a secret disaster.

Howard took out a second mortgage on the Woodbury property (bringing up the percentage he owed to one hundred and twenty-five percent), paid the IRS, paid off the agency credit lines and balanced the books. The accountant only shook his head, saying it was no good to put personal property at risk when the agency had been incorporated expressly to shield his family. Why did Howard do it?

Howard did it because Howard couldn’t stand the idea that Henry Hillings would think he had sold his distinguished literary agency to a loser. In Howard’s eyes it was a far better thing to be in a temporary personal financial bind than for even a hint of tarnish to appear on the Hillings & Stewart name.

He had told Amanda none of this because this was the one area—money—he had sworn to her she would never have to worry about on his end. He had learned his lesson with his first wife; Howard would make his own money. Amanda owned the Riverside Drive apartment free and clear and she also had a generous trust fund, the revenue from which they could rely on. Amanda didn’t care how much money Howard made; she only cared that Howard did not drift into the financially carefree attitude he had developed in his first marriage. That was why he had been so excited about buying the Woodbury property. He was buying a beautiful home for his family; it was the money he had earned that would keep his family safe.

Amanda’s reaction to the house had been everything Howard had hoped for. Her jaw dropped in disbelief and then she had burst into tears, telling him she couldn’t believe it, how much he had achieved in such a short period of time, and how she and Emily and Teddy (for Grace had not yet even been imagined) were the luckiest people on the face of the earth.

“Howard,” his mother said.

Howard blinked and then looked across the living room. His mother was driving him crazy tonight, talking about what a wonderful husband and provider Howard’s father had been—even if he hadn’t gone to college like Howard and hadn’t had fancy friends. She was just declaring there was no shame in a man working with his hands when the phone rang.

“I’m proud of Dad, too, Mom,” Howard said, jumping up to answer the phone.

“I’m over here at Captain Cook’s if you still feel like having that beer,” the insurance salesman aspiring to be a novelist told Howard.

“I’m glad you called,” Howard said, trying to put on an act of grave concern for his mother’s benefit. This would be his only chance to get out of here for a while. “I got an e-mail this morning from Australia I’d like to discuss with you. So don’t move, I’ll be there shortly. I’m sorry, Mom,” Howard said, hanging up the phone, “but I’m afraid I have to go out.”

When Howard saw Celia behind the bar at Captain Cook’s he thought, How weird is that? Amanda had just asked him about Celia today and now here he was walking in like the regular he wasn’t.

“How are you?” Howard greeted the insurance salesman who was sitting at the bar, shaking his hand and giving him a pat on the shoulder.

“Nervous as hell,” the insurance salesman said, tossing back what smelled like whiskey.

Celia came over to their side of the bar. “He’s worried he’s going to have to sell insurance for the rest of his life,” she told Howard.

“Hi, Celia.”

“Hi.”

“And he’s scared you’re going to give up on him,” a strange woman with a lot of makeup said from the corner of the bar.

“He’s been hitting it pretty hard,” another customer explained.

“A Beck’s, please, Celia, thank you,” Howard said, sliding onto a stool. He looked at the writer. “I don’t know about your career in insurance, but I did get an offer from an Australian publisher for UK rights on your novel. It’s a modest offer, but you’ll be published in Australia, England, Ireland—”

The writer threw himself at Howard to hug him. The customers at this end of the bar cheered. Howard laughed, slapping the writer’s back, savoring the moment. This was the joy of his job. (Telling a writer that every publisher in America had rejected their manuscript was the worst.)

Celia placed a frosted mug and a bottle of Beck’s in front of Howard. “Nicely done.”

She was a pretty girl. It was funny, he didn’t remember her as such. While the writer grilled him for details, Howard watched Celia and began to realize why she might have given Amanda pause for thought. She was one of those seriously AWOL Fairfield County girls, a fascinating Waspy creature who could exude a kind of smoldering sexuality.Maybe it was the way her jeans fit her. She had a great ass.

When the writer left to use the bathroom Celia put a dish of pretzels down in front of Howard. “Thank God you had good news. He’s been depressed for as long as I’ve been serving him.”

Her eyes were nice.Very dark. Like her hair. “Which is how long?”

“Three years,” she said, leaving to get another patron a drink.

When she came back Howard told her, “There is a school of thought that says it’s good to keep writers depressed because then they stay home and write.”

She laughed. It made her much more attractive. She had a great smile.

“I hear you ran into my wife early this morning.”

Her eyebrows went up. “I did?”

“In the lobby. Around three this morning?”

Celia still looked uncertain and held up a finger, signaling that Howard was to hold that thought while she got another customer a drink.

Howard saw the writer standing just outside the bar area, holding a cell phone to one ear and covering his other with a hand. He guessed he was calling his wife with the good news.

“I got sort of hammered here after work last night,” Celia admitted on her return. “I think I remember seeing her. With the baby. Your wife has really beautiful hair, right?”

“Yes, she does.”

“And absolutely huge tits,” Celia added.

Howard did a double take.

Celia covered her mouth, aghast. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. My roommate and I watch this show on BBC America, What Not to Wear, and this lady Trinny’s always saying stuff like that so we’ve been saying it to each other. I didn’t mean to be rude—”

“Miss?” a customer called.

“I meant it as a compliment,” she said, moving away. “I mean, look.” She gestured to her own breasts and then made a gesture of futility.

No, there wasn’t much there, Howard had to agree. But Celia did have terrific legs and that great swing to her ass.

“My wife thinks I’m lying about the Australian publisher,” the writer announced upon his return. “She thinks I’m saying it so I can stay out and drink and not have to deal with her parents. The busboy says he knows you, by the way. That one, over there. Joey or something.”

Howard smiled. “Hey! Jason!”

The teenager untangled himself from a tray of dirty dishes and came over, smiling and wiping his hands on his apron before shaking Howard’s hand. “Hey, Mr. Stewart.”

“Long time no see,” Howard joked. Jason was a great kid, but really shy. Of course, with a mother like Rosanne, Howard imagined it would be hard to get a word in edgewise. “Was that turkey gross or what?”

“It wasn’t that bad,” the boy said nicely. “At least it didn’t have any buckshot in it this year.”

They laughed.

“My novel’s getting published,” the writer told Jason.

“Congratulations. Is Mr. Stewart your agent?”

“Best agent in the world,” the writer declared, but Jason’s eyes had moved to something behind them. Howard turned to see what he was looking at. Celia. Jason was looking at Celia. When Howard turned back around he could see a rash of scarlet spreading across Jason’s neck.

Jason had a crush on her.

“If you want, Jason,” he heard Celia say, “you can have a second break.”

Jason’s eyes lit up. “Yeah. Yeah! That’d be great,” he stammered.

“Then you better go and take it before she changes her mind,” Howard said.

“Yeah. I guess.” Jason stuck his hand out. “Thanks again for dinner, Mr. Stewart.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Congratulations again on your book,” Jason said politely as he backed away.

They turned back around on their stools to lean on the bar. “Seems like a good kid,” the writer said.

“He is. I think he’s going to do very well.” For some reason this reminded him of the financial mess he was in and it made him feel sick inside. “I think I need a real drink,” Howard announced. “What are you drinking?”

“Irish Mist.”

“Sounds good to me.” He looked around. “Where’s Celia?”

The bartender servicing the other end of the bar came down to Howard. “Can I get you fellas something?”

“Where’s Celia?”

“On break. What can I get you?”

Howard ordered two Irish Mists. The writer drank his pretty fast while Howard nursed his. Celia reappeared behind the bar about ten minutes later.

“You’re a little young for hot flashes,” the writer told her when Celia came over to see how they were doing. He had started slurring his words.

Celia blew the hair off her face. She did look hot. “Say that again?”

The writer repeated it.

“I think you’ve hit your limit,” Celia said, smoothly swiping his empty glass from the bar. “So what can I get you? On me. Water, soda or coffee?” She put a dish of pretzels in front of him.

“Fuck that, I wanna real drink,” he said, swatting the dish of pretzels off the bar. The pretzels went flying and the saucer clattered down on the floor behind the bar.

Celia looked at Howard. “Tell him I won’t hold it against him tomorrow.” And then she walked down to the other end of the bar.

“Fuck her,” the writer growled, trying to get off the bar stool. Howard held his arm to steady him and the writer threw his hand off.

“Okay, okay,” Howard said, backing off.

Without another word the writer staggered out of the bar.

“He left his coat,” the woman with lots of makeup on said.

Celia came to wipe down the bar again and Howard apologized. He thought it had been that last drink that had done it. Celia agreed that had she been out here she probably would not have poured him that last drink. She said the writer got a certain look when he was on the verge of a blackout. “The cold will wake him up, though,” she said with a smile. “How about a turkey sandwich? They’re really good.”

“Sounds good to me.” Howard switched back to beer and ate his sandwich. It was good. The football game on television got pretty good, too, and he stayed on, having another beer, doing his best to stay in the moment and not think about his problems.

At eleven Celia said she was going off her shift so Howard closed out his bill and asked if she wanted to share a cab home. She said she would prefer to walk. He said that sounded like a good idea.

It was freezing out but Celia seemed unaffected by it. She asked him a few questions about what a literary agent did, asked where he had gone to school (Duke) and who some of his writers were. (The only author of his she had heard of was Gertrude Bristol.) He asked her what kind of books she liked to read and she said Anthony Trollope.

“Which ones?”

She looked at him. “All of them. He makes me laugh and I like that time period. A lot of cool stuff was made back then. You know, books, paintings, furniture.”

“Good evening, Miss Cavanaugh, Mr. Stewart,” the night concierge of their building said. They said hello, and while Howard pressed the button for the elevator, Celia took her bandana off and shook out her hair. When they got in Howard pushed 11 and by the time Celia asked him to push 6 they were already past it.

“Sorry about that,” he said, starting to get that sinking feeling again. He dreaded the ride out to the airport with his mother and dreaded going out to Woodbury to hang out with his in-laws in a house that might well get repossessed if he didn’t think of something. He had to tell Amanda. And soon.

“It’s okay,” Celia said, leaning back against the wall and covering a yawn with her hand.

He sniffed the air, unable to identify the smell. “Is that your perfume?”

She laughed. “Perfume? It’s rose-scented Glade. We use it in the restaurant office.”

“Believe it or not,” he heard himself saying, “it almost smells good on you.”

A mysterious smile was playing on Celia’s mouth and Howard felt a small shot of fear. He was afraid he was about to try to kiss Celia. She turned her head slightly toward him, as if she were reading his mind.

The elevator eased to a stop and he just stood there, looking at her.

“Your floor,” Celia said, stepping forward to punch her floor into the directory as the doors opened.

Still, he stood there. They were only about ten inches apart. He knew she would let him kiss her. The doors started to close and Howard slammed them back, then took her in his arms to kiss her. When he tried to open her mouth the elevator doors tried to close again and knocked his mouth off hers. This time he let the doors close and Celia stepped back against the wall, putting her arms back to rest on the railing, as if to invite his eyes to run over her body while the elevator descended. He stepped forward to touch her but she twisted away. “I’m sorry, Howard, but I don’t do married men. I don’t think it’s right.”

It was as if she had slapped him across the face. At once he was ashamed and embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Celia, I’m sorry,” he said quietly, turning away from her. “I guess I shouldn’t have had that last drink, either.”

The elevator arrived at her floor and she stepped out. “Howard,” she said, waiting for him to look at her. “Forget about it. Because I already have.” And then the elevator doors closed. He slapped 11 and took off his glasses to rub his eyes. What the hell am I doing?

8

Cassy’s Monday Morning

“HOW GOOD OF you to telephone,” Mrs. Emma Goldblum said to Cassy.

“I would have called before, Emma, but I only just got back in town and received your message.” Cassy was speaking more or less in the direction of the speakerphone in her dressing room. She was slipping on a skirt, running late for the office. “How was your Thanksgiving?”

“It was very nice. We went to the Stewarts’, as you know. Amanda cooked a very nice dinner. Her parents were visiting. And Howard’s mother. Rosanne made a pumpkin pie and a mince pie. And you?”

Cassy had zipped up the skirt and was pulling down a pair of matching blue low heels from the organized shelves. “We had a full house.”

“Yes, I know, you’ll remember Henry brought over sweet William for me to see last week.”

“Did you say sweet, Emma?” Cassy said, searching through her vanity for earrings, necklace and a bracelet. She also hastily put on her wedding rings. “I love my grandson dearly, Emma, but please.” The sound of Mrs. Goldblum’s chuckle made Cassy smile as she scanned the upper rack for her new fitted blazer. Why she had waited so many years to get a personal shopper was beyond her. All she had to do was say, “I’d like a blazer that goes with this skirt,” and voilà, in a few days it appeared. (She knew why. Because they cost a fortune and she had not always had a fortune.)

“That is why animal crackers were invented, dear,” Mrs. Goldblum said. “It makes all children sweet for at least five minutes.”

Cassy laughed.

Scarf. She supposed she should wear a scarf. No, she hesitated, looking in the mirror, why start hiding her neck now with so many years to go? The sun did its work and that’s all there was to it.

Cassy put on a scarf.

The outfit looked good, she thought, turning to view it in the three mirrors. She had always liked her clothes to be as perfectly in place as possible. It had annoyed her no end when a therapist once said that it was common for children of alcoholics to grow up that way, obsessed with external order in an attempt to contain the emotional chaos they felt inside.

“I know how terribly busy you are, Cassy,”Emma Goldblum was saying, “but I’m calling to ask your help. Normally Sam Wyatt keeps an eye on my affairs but at present he is occupied with other matters so I am turning to you.”

This got her attention. Cassy picked up the phone. “What may I do?” She walked into the master bedroom to look out the largest window. It was cloudy outside, making the Hudson look gray. It was windy, too, creating white caps on the water. Directly below in Riverside Park the flag at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument was flailing wildly.

“I have some legal matters to attend to and I wondered if you would be so kind as to accompany me to my lawyer’s office. It is downtown. I know it’s a great deal to ask, but I need someone I can rely on and I prefer not to have Rosanne with me because I don’t want to upset her. And she will be, that’s just the way she is when it comes to—” she hesitated “—wills and such.”

Emma meant death. Cassy imagined it was hard enough for Emma to face her mortality without Rosanne looking on.

“Did you have a specific day and time in mind?”

“I waited until I had spoken to you before making an appointment.”

“I should be in town this week,” Cassy said, “but let me get my calendar in front of me at the office and then I’ll call you back. In, say, an hour?”

“I’m very grateful to you, dear.” Pause. “I fear time is slipping away.”

“Don’t I know it,” Cassy murmured. “Listen, Emma, is there something going on at the Wyatts’? You said ‘concerned with other matters’ in a rather ominous tone.”

“I’m afraid nothing that I am at liberty to discuss.”

After Cassy got off with Emma she went to the kitchen and flipped open the address book to check a number and make a call. “Good morning. Is Sam there, please? It’s Cassy Cochran calling.”

After a few moments Sam Wyatt came on the line. “Hey, girl.”

“Girl, I wish.” She laughed, looking at her watch. She was late.

Sam had been a good friend to her. Their relationship had been a baptism by fire in the final stages of her ex-husband’s drinking. Cassy didn’t know what would have happened had Sam not been there to help her through it. “I’m good, Sam, but I just got a call from Emma Goldblum. She asked me if I would take her to her lawyer’s office, which I said I would.”

“I would have taken her if she asked.”

“She seems to think you have a lot on your plate right now and the way she said it—well, it made me wonder if everything was okay.”

Silence.

“Sam?” She imagined he was reading something on his desk and was distracted.

“So Rosanne goes home and tells Emma,” Sam said, “and then Emma calls you—is that how this works? I admire her restraint, it’s been three whole days.”

Cassy hesitated. She’d known Sam for years and was well acquainted with the fact that he could be—well, scratchy on occasion. Irritable. She wasn’t offended particularly; that’s just the way he was when stressed out. “Sam, no one has told me anything. And if everything’s fine then that’s great, I’ll just hang up and get to the office.”

“Now there’s a plan,” he told her.

Well, that was an exercise in futility, Cassy thought, hanging up and going back to the bedroom to retrieve her bag. She was using up so much energy living two lives to begin with she didn’t need to nose into the affairs of her neighbors to expend any more.

“Mrs. Darenbrook?” she heard the housekeeper call.

“Good morning.”

“Ah, there you are,” the housekeeper said from the doorway. “You’re usually gone by now.”

Nothing like feeling unwelcome in your own home. Cassy knew the housekeeper was anxious for her to leave so she could turn all the TVs in the house on to begin her daily regime. Oh, for the days of Rosanne! When someone arrived who was interested in the house and the family in it!

Cassy’s plan to slip unobtrusively into the DBS News conference room had clearly failed; whatever discussion had been taking place stopped dead the moment she came through the door. She took the only seat left at the long conference table, which was at the other end from where their SeniorVice President and Executive Producer of DBS News, Will Rafferty, was presiding. She felt self-conscious with all of these eyes on her because they belonged to younger people, many of whom made their careers in front of the camera, which is to say they were trained to view their appearance critically and tended to do the same with everyone else.

Alexandra Waring was there, of course, the symbolic head of the news division and around whom it had largely been built. Alexandra recently celebrated her four-thousandth on-air hour for DBS News and, at forty-one, was, Cassy thought, even better looking than when they had launched the network. Maturity suited her. Alexandra had exquisite blue-gray eyes (which all five children of Congressman Waring, the longtime Kansas politician, had), high cheekbones, a full mouth and nearly black hair that had only recently begun to show an occasional gray hair. She also had a brilliant smile that was said to be able to generate ratings by itself.

Alexandra was fiercely bright and well-liked at the network, if not somewhat adored. She was demanding but fair and anyone who was trying their best usually found favor with her. A few people had come and gone very quickly at DBS News because it became quickly evident who fit in and who did not. If someone understood what Alexandra and Will were trying to do he or she would do fine; if he or she disagreed with their direction and had no constructive alternative to offer, he or she soon wanted out. (The chill factor could be unbearable.)

Many of their key players in the news group had been with DBS since the beginning, when there had only been DBS News America Tonight with Alexandra Waring, Monday through Friday, for one hour at nine.

Sitting next to Alexandra was half of the anchor team for DBS’s new 6:00–7:00 a.m. national news hour, Emmett Phelps. He was formerly a professor of law at USC and looked every inch the part, only younger. He was in his middle forties, had a nice head of hair, insisted on wearing horn-rimmed glasses and, regardless of the climate or season, a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows. Emmett was well-spoken and deliberate in his speech; he had the gift of being able to concisely summarize the complicated details of news stories that broadcast news could not stop to explain.

Across the table from Emmett was his more outgoing and outspoken coanchor, Sally Harrington, whose edge it was part of Emmett’s job to smooth while Sally’s was to make Emmett have one. She was almost thirty-five and possessed elocution no voice coach could ever teach. Sally was very pretty, with blue eyes and light brown hair streaked with blond. She had formerly served as a special producer for Alexandra, but also belonged to the Writers’ Guild because she could write almost as well as (some said better than) her boss, the latter of whom notoriously believed a newscast was only as good as the writing behind it.

The jury was still largely out on Sally and Emmett and DBS News America This Morning but the November sweeps had been promising. Their biggest hurdle was making viewers want to forego their local news to tune in to DBS before the Big Three network morning shows began at 7:00 a.m., which meant DBS Morning going great lengths to cut back and forth to their affiliates to update local weather and traffic. Sally and Emmett had very high TVQs (the TV quotient of that ineffable “something” that made television viewers want to watch them), and while their ratings were slightly higher than anticipated it was still anyone’s guess what would happen after the novelty of the news hour had worn off.

There were several other on-air talents and producers in this meeting. With the nightly news, the morning news, the half-hour daily newscast they produced for INS in the United Kingdom, the two magazine shows, the Internet newscast and the new podcast programming, the weekly meeting was an attempt to get the whole team on the same page of Alexandra and Will’s playbook.

Cassy smiled at the expectant faces around the table who were evidently waiting for her to say something. “Good morning. I apologize for being late.”

Instantly there were groans and people started throwing dollar bills down on the table, all except for Will Rafferty, who was picking out quarters from his change and shooting them down the table to Sally Harrington.

“You always win, Sally,” Emmett grumbled, thumbing through his wallet. He took out a dollar bill and dropped it in front of her. He looked at Cassy. “I bet that your first words would be ‘Sorry I’m late.’”

“You’ll never make it in curling,” Sally told Will, lunging to catch a rolling quarter.

Alexandra was making change for a five from the pile of singles. “I bet you’d say, ‘And what earthshaking events have I missed?’”

“I bet, ‘Hi, everybody,’” the meteorologist said, pushing a small pile of bills down from his end of the table. “I could have sworn that’s what you always say.”

The producer for the morning news leaned over the table to look down at Cassy. “I guess you’re really not a ‘Hey’ kind of person.”

“You thought Cassy would come in and say, ‘Hey’?” Will said incredulously.

“Better than what he thought,” the producer said, jerking his thumb in the direction of the twenty-two-year-old they’d hired straight out of Rochester Institute of Technology for the podcast. The producer laughed. “He said, ‘Yo.’”

“‘Yo?’” Will repeated. He frowned at the young man. “You thought the president of DBS Television would come in here and say, ‘Yo’? ” Everybody laughed.

The RIT rookie looked to Cassy. “Isn’t that what your generation used to say?”

“Thank you for the compliment,” Cassy said. “But I’m afraid my generation said, ‘Peace’—” she flashed the peace sign “‘ Love’ she made an L with her right hand “—and ‘Woodstock.’” She put two peace signs together to make a W.

“This goes straight into the Feed the Starving Interns Fund,” Sally announced, raking the pile of cash into her lap.

Sally was big on helping certain interns get by because she herself had once been a starving one. She shared something with Cassy on that score. Both of them had grown up, as Sally called it, “without money.” (Sally was always quick to explain that “without money” denoted someone in a temporary phase with prospects for the future, as opposed to someone stuck in a permanent economic status that made them “poor.”) Both Cassy and Sally had lost their fathers as children and both had put themselves through college. But where Cassy’s fears about her future had led her to the altar with Michael, Sally, as younger women seemed to do these days, simply flung herself into the universe and made ends meet until she could support herself as a journalist.

Cassy had come to admire Sally Harrington a great deal. But Sally also kept Cassy in a perpetual state of anxiety since the younger woman was forever careening from one crisis to the next. Sally was one of those people who was addicted to the adrenaline rush, who felt most alive when the air was fraught with risk and urgency. While it had made her a star at DBS News—enhancing her ability to jump right into the fast track of breaking news—the same trait had also very nearly killed her. (Her last escapade had necessitated significant plastic surgery.) Sitting behind the anchor desk, however, seemed to be somewhat calming her down. That and being engaged to Alexandra Waring’s older brother, a solid, reliable man who in nature was as different from Sally as earth is from wind.

The labyrinth of romance and nepotism in the Darenbrook media empire was vast and at times troubling. (She should talk!) Most dedicated people in mass communications tended to be workaholics and one of the challenges at Darenbrook Communications seemed to be how to prevent people from falling in love with one of the very few people they were regularly in contact with. Jackson’s father began the trend when he married his personal secretary (his fourth wife, Jackson’s mother) and she stayed on at the newspapers as an executive. Then Jack’s best friend, the financial brains behind the company, Langley Peterson, married Jack’s sister, Belinda. As the Darenbrook sons and daughters and nieces and nephews got older they needed careers (real or imagined) and they were placed throughout the corporation in the least damaging circumstances. Jack’s brother Beau, who ran the magazine division out of L.A., was gay, and had set up housekeeping with the publisher of their most successful magazine. Jackson hired Cassy to launch DBS and ended up marrying her. Will Rafferty, sitting at the end of the table, fell in love with Jessica Wright, the DBS talk show host, and they were married. And so, in a way, Cassy reconsidered, maybe Sally Harrington falling in love with Alexandra’s brother could scarcely be considered a conflict since David otherwise had nothing to do with Darenbrook Communications.

“Before I forget, Cassy,” Will said, “Jackson will definitely be at the American Trust Foundation dinner in January, right?”

The Foundation’s Awards dinner was a biannual event celebrating excellence in journalism. “He will be there,” she confirmed. “But he thinks only DBS News is getting an award.”

“What’s Mr. Darenbrook’s award for?” the young man from RIT asked.

“Lifetime achievement,” Will answered. “And it’s a surprise, so that information is not to leave this room.”

“I should hope everyone at this table will be attending the dinner,” Cassy said.

“Depends on how many tickets corporate picks up,” Alexandra said while writing something. “The suits don’t give us a whole lot of money for extracurricular activities.” She looked up. “As you should well know, Cassy. And I do like your suit, by the way.”

Everybody laughed.

“All right, guys, let’s get back on point here,” Will said, picking up his legal pad.

“Yo,” Cassy concurred, making them laugh again. She slipped on a pair of half glasses and scanned the agenda that had been passed to her. When she looked up she saw that Alexandra was watching her. The anchorwoman smiled and looked away.

As she listened to Will, Cassy sat back in her chair slightly to cross her legs. Then she leaned forward, picked up her pen and made a note in the margin of the agenda. And then, somewhat idly, she wondered if she had ever not been in love with Alexandra Waring.

DECEMBER

9

Celia Has a Gift

A FRIEND OF a friend of Rachel’s came to pick up their old refrigerator before the new one arrived. The guy was apparently some kind of fix-it whiz and he was somehow going to restore the Freon and put taps in the side to dispense beer and soda. Celia said if he could fix it why didn’t they just hire him to fix it while the refrigerator was still theirs instead of getting a new one. “Daddy’s getting it so don’t worry,” Rachel said. Celia was not worried in the least; she just hated what felt like arbitrarily replacing things for the sake of something new.

“Charlie,” the man said when he arrived, holding out his hand to politely shake hers.

He was huge, this Charlie, filling the doorway. Behind him stood an upright steel dolly with big straps. He was much older than Celia had expected for Rachel’s friend of a friend. He was like her dad’s age, neatly dressed in a sweater (that Celia could wear for a dress), jeans, work boots and big blue parka.

“I feel kinda guilty,” Charlie said later, sipping the cup of black coffee Celia made for him while looking in the back of the refrigerator. “I should just fix this for you.”

“Thanks for the thought,” Celia said, sitting at the breakfast bar, well wrapped in her terry-cloth robe, “but there’re always appliances mysteriously falling off the back of one of my roommate’s father’s trucks. This time it was a stainless steel refrigerator.” She was drinking coffee, as well. Nine-fifteen was early for her to be up; she didn’t get home from work until almost three this morning.

“She’ll never keep it looking clean,” Charlie commented, coming back around from behind the old refrigerator, “not without a full-time maid.”

“One of those hasn’t fallen off the back of the truck yet,” Celia told him.

Something on the counter caught Charlie’s eye. It was an old door knocker, covered in years of crud, that was waiting for Celia to clean up. She bought it off a janitor last week who had been cleaning out a basement. The knocker was the head of a horse, made of what Celia believed to be solid brass.

“I might be interested in making you an offer for that,” he said, moving closer.

“This?” Celia handed it to him. “Sorry, but I’m totally in love with it. Someday I’m going to buy a house with a front door that will do it justice. I think it’s solid brass. Maybe a hundred years old.”

“It is,” he confirmed, hefting it in his hand. He took reading glasses out of his pocket and slipped them on to examine it further. “But my guess is around 1880. Where’d you get it?”

“On One Hundred and First Street. Guy was cleaning out the basement of the building. Ten bucks.” Actually, she had paid the janitor ten bucks so that she could climb into the Dumpster to see what he was throwing out. Celia didn’t know why she felt compelled to do things like this, but she felt no shame about it; she had always been fascinated by junk piles, looking for something that spoke to her. To a certain degree her mother shared her interest, but would never dream of the lengths Celia had been known to go.

Charlie carefully placed the knocker back on the counter. “He gave you two, two hundred fifty bucks for ten dollars.”

“I guess it’s going to have to be a very expensive house, then.”

He looked at her. “You don’t seem surprised.”

“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging, “it’s never really been about money.”

“Spoken like a girl who grew up with a lot of it.”

She looked up at him. “I beg your pardon?” She knew she sounded like her mother when she got on her high horse, but she didn’t like the way he said it.

He held up his hand as a caution. “No offense. I just meant you obviously haven’t had to try to make a living selling antiques. If you did, well, then, the money would mean a lot.”

“I’m a bartender,” she told him.

He frowned slightly. “You seem kinda classy for a bartender.”

“I’m a classy bartender,” she said, sliding off the stool to get more coffee. She was starting to feel depressed. “I just like old things.”

“I work weekends at an auction house in the Bronx.” When she turned around, holding the coffeepot out to him, Charlie nodded and she poured. “Thanks. That’s why the money means something to me. I gotta kid trying to get through college. That’s what I use the money for.”

“Where is this auction house?”

He told her. It was way uptown, but it would have to be to make any money. “So if you ever want to sell anything like that, the knocker, I can move it for you. That’s the kind of thing people go nuts over.”

Celia, standing there, sipped her coffee and lofted an eyebrow. “Maybe I should show you something, then.” She led Charlie to the maid’s room which she and Rachel shared as a kind of studio space. Rachel used her side for art stuff. Celia gestured to the wall and bookshelves on her side. There were various small oil and watercolor paintings and prints, some hanging in old frames, others in new, some prints vaguely speckled while others were almost clean. (She’d zap them in the microwave to kill the mold spores and then, if it was in good enough shape, use an artist’s soft putty eraser on the spots. The paintings she left alone.)

Her best find in terms of a document had been rescued from a carton of ancient newspapers on the East Side that had been put out with the garbage. It was a single sheet, a 1787 playbill from the Drury Lane in London advertising Sarah Siddons and her brother, John Philip Kemble, starring in Macbeth. Celia had carefully matted it and used an old frame from another one of her finds, outfitted with new glass. She gave it to her mother, the intrepid theater goer, for her birthday last year and was amazed when her mother burst into tears, she was so moved. (Celia had been nervous her mother would think her cheap or something.)

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