“Piper,” began Margot, “this is a bit awkward, but it really has to be said.”
Piper raised her eyebrows, waiting.
“I mean, I wouldn’t normally say anything, but when my child gets involved, well”—she gave a faux-flustered pause—“it’s just gone too far.”
A warning went off in Piper’s head, but she said calmly, “Margot, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t you?” asked Erin. Her voice was as thin and dry as her hair.
Margot cleared her throat. “Tansy came home yesterday with quite a story. Apparently, Carter announced that since Kyle left you, you’ve been sleeping at Tom Donahue’s. Apparently, it’s a regular thing.”
As if in slow motion, Margot’s words slammed into Piper, one by one. Oh, God. Oh, God, it was over. Everyone would know. Everyone will know, everyone will know, the phrase spiraled crazily through her head.
“If you want to expose your own children to your disgusting behavior, that’s your choice, but what about mine? How do you think that sounded to Tansy: Carter’s mommy playing sleepover with Emma’s daddy?”
“Fun?” Cornelia’s voice was as clear as a chime. All three women stared at her.
The expression on Cornelia’s face was pleasantly inquisitive, but her body in her black bike shorts and tank top was arrow straight and taut with contained energy. Despite the fact that she was both child sized and sporting a glued-on soccer ball of a pregnant belly, Cornelia looked positively scary.
“Your daughter’s in Carter’s class, so she must be, what? Four? Five?”
“Five and three quarters.” Margot’s face turned red. “She has a late birthday, so we held her back last year.”
Cornelia merely looked at Margot.
“Voluntarily,” added Margot.
Cornelia waited a few more seconds before continuing. “As I was saying, I can’t imagine that a five-year-old, even one almost six, unless she’d been exposed to some pretty adult ideas, ideas completely inappropriate for a child her age, would find the notion of a two-family sleepover anything but fun.”
Through the haze of her own panic, Piper could see Margot piecing together what Cornelia meant. Finally, Margot burst out with, “Tansy is as pure as the driven snow! She doesn’t even see commercials. PBS Kids only!”
“Then I’m not sure I see the problem,” said Cornelia with sweet bemusement.
“The problem,” Margot said, gathering self-righteous steam, “the problem is that Elizabeth Donahue’s body is hardly cold yet, and her so-called best friend is fooling around with her husband!”
Piper just stood there, blood pounding in her ears, wishing Margot Cleary would disappear, burst into flames. But even that wouldn’t help. Piper knew with doomed certainty that seconds after Tansy had told her story, Margot had flipped open her cell phone to call everyone they knew.
“And,” inserted Erin, nastily, “it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out that it probably started before Elizabeth was even dead.”
“‘Not much, perhaps, but just of a certain kind,’” said Cornelia.
“What?” spat Margot.
“Nothing,” said Cornelia. “I’m wondering, though, if you might be interested in Tom yourself?”
Margot went from red to pale, except for her mouth, which remained a moist scarlet. Lip gloss at aerobics, thought Piper fleetingly, how pathetic is that? “You’re insane,” gasped Margot.
“Well, if you’re not interested in Tom yourself, then how is the nature of his relationship with Piper any of your business? Why in the world would you care, much less get so excessively angry?”
Margot looked like she might burst at the seams. Her lips began to twitch, thickly, but no sound came out. Two red slugs, thought Piper, red slugs mating. Somehow the sight of them steadied Piper.
“Go home, Margot,” said Piper, in a tired voice, “it’s time to go.”
Margot glared at Piper with vicious little badger eyes, growled, “You make me sick,” and left.
Erin stood there, her scarecrow body panting. Piper gave her a brief sideways glance.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Erin. Go. You look like you’re about to cough up a fucking hair ball.”
Inside her car, in the parking lot of the gym, Piper lost it. She dropped her head onto the steering wheel and sobbed.
After a few minutes, Cornelia didn’t touch her, but said, compassionately, “Piper.”
“I’m sorry,” said Piper, sobbing, not looking up, “you just have no idea what a disaster this is for me. They will tell everyone I know. Everyone. I’m ruined.”
“You’re not ruined,” said Cornelia.
Piper turned to Cornelia. “I didn’t sleep with him. I mean, we sleep there sometimes because I hate my goddamn, fucking house and the kids want to be together, but I don’t sleep with Tom.”
“You don’t have to explain. It doesn’t matter,” said Cornelia, in a manner that made Piper believe she really meant it.
“You’re right.” Piper ripped off her headband and shook out her hair. “It doesn’t matter because the truth doesn’t matter. Effectively, I’m sleeping with him. Period. Oh, Cornelia, you don’t know what these people are like.”
“Maybe you don’t,” ventured Cornelia. “Maybe they aren’t as bad as you think.”
Piper gave a bitter, barking laugh. “Of course I know what they’re like. I trained them! Megan, Liddy, Allie, Parvee, Kate, all the rest.” She paused. “Well, maybe not Kate. But everyone else.”
“But, Piper, who cares? If they’re anything like those two women back there, who cares what they think?”
Piper turned on Cornelia, screeching, “That’s easy for you to say. When you’re nobody, it’s easy not to care what people think.”
Silence.
“Cornelia,” Piper began, “I didn’t mean that. I—”
Cornelia cut her off by snapping, “Hey, Piper, here’s a radical idea: be true to yourself.”
Piper stared at Cornelia, flabbergasted. Then she sat back in her seat with the blue sky and the cars and the green verge of grass outside the car windows, considering what Cornelia had said.
The truly strange thing was that it was a radical idea: be true to yourself. Piper had heard those words a hundred times without ever knowing what they meant, and now they seemed to be layered with meaning and speaking directly to Piper. She took the words apart, put them back together, unpacked them like a box. Be true to yourself. If she didn’t do it, who would? Not Kyle. Not even Elizabeth, who had left her. Be true. How had she gotten the idea that she wasn’t allowed?
Then she looked at Cornelia and said, “You and your New Age mumbo jumbo.”
A smile made its radiant way across Cornelia’s face, a certain kind of smile that Piper recognized, although she hadn’t seen it in a long time. “Thatta girl!” said the smile. Cornelia put out a hand and moved a piece of Piper’s hair back into place.
“Everything still sucks,” grumbled Piper. “Royally.”
“I know,” said Cornelia, still smiling.
Piper slid her headband back in place, started her car, and drove them home.
FIFTEEN
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
—CARL SAGAN
It hadn’t been easy, separating the “Rafferty” from the “Pleat.” It hadn’t required mental nuclear fission, maybe, but it had not been easy and it hadn’t happened overnight either because for a long time, in Dev’s mind, those two names (and their pseudonymous effect) had been a single entity, a two-word, nominal joke. Setup: Rafferty. Punch line: Pleat.
Even after Dev had begun to like Rafferty, after the two names were no longer glued together with a sneer and after Rafferty had asked Dev to call him Rafferty instead of Mr. Pleat, the names stayed inseparable. Calling Rafferty by both names, if only inside his own head (he tried to avoid calling him anything at all aloud), kept a small, necessary space between Dev and the man who was so obviously, so blatantly
in love with Dev’s mom.
Not that Rafferty went the moony, Hallmark cards, gooey compliments route, which would have most assuredly earned him Lake’s everlasting contempt. In fact, while his name might sound exceptionally fake, the man himself turned out to be exceptionally genuine, sincere, but in a good way, a way that put him several cuts above corniness. Dev had never even seen Rafferty and his mom kiss, although he was sure they had. But there was something about Rafferty’s face whenever he looked at Lake, something about the way he’d pick her hand up off a tabletop and hold it between the two of his that made Dev look away fast but also made him positive that, while Rafferty might not stand outside serenading her the way one old boyfriend had, he would, without question or hesitation, throw himself in front of a bullet train to save her life.
Dev wasn’t uncomfortable in some lame, babyish, nauseatingly creepy Oedipus Rex way with a man being in love with his mom. But Dev knew Lake, and he was also beginning to know about being in love, and he understood that, despite the fairly substantial handful of boyfriends she’d had over the years, Dev had never, ever, not once, not even for five minutes seen Lake in love. In a state of grudging, ironic, distracted semiaffection, yes. But not in love. Consequently, for months, Dev took care to keep Rafferty at a safe, double-named distance so that when the guy got his heart smashed, Dev wouldn’t get hit by the flying debris.
But then Lake changed. One Saturday in April, Dev and Rafferty were playing chess outside, each sitting on his respective deck with the chessboard balanced on the flat rail between them, when Dev glanced up to find Lake, who had come home between shifts without their knowing it, watching them through the sliding glass door. Dev smiled at her, but she didn’t see him because her eyes were on Rafferty. It was Rafferty’s move, and he was doing the remarkable, only occasionally annoying thing he always did when he played chess, which was to talk. His eyes were scanning the board, and Dev could practically see his brain clicking away, considering and discarding move after move, while in one, long, continuous stream of words, he told Dev the not uninteresting story of the summer when he was seventeen and built a racing bike from scratch.
Dev sat watching his mother watch Rafferty, thinking she was probably doing the same thing he was doing, marveling at the guy’s wacky multitasking abilities (he was a decent chess player, too), when he noticed with alarm that, even though her mouth was smiling, his mother’s eyes were filling with tears. As he watched, her face changed and changed again, softened and shifted, and she was suddenly giving Rafferty what Dev could only describe as the fullest look he’d ever seen on anybody’s face, a look that included sadness, hope, and—there was no getting around it, even though Dev tried—desire, all of it adding up, unmistakably, to love.
Dev turned back to the chessboard, his embarrassment turning first to relief and then to bona fide happiness. Lake loved Rafferty. Somehow, it felt like a victory for all of them.
So by the time Rafferty took Dev to see the house he was renovating, Rafferty had been Rafferty, both out loud and inside Dev’s head, for over a month.
The house sat on the frayed, green edge where the suburbs began to diffuse and give way to countryside. A white clapboard house with a front porch and big trees in the right-side yard, the original farmhouse of a cornfield-turned-subdivision, the glassy new homes (“The guys who sell them always call them ‘homes,’” Rafferty had told Dev. “Subliminal advertising at its least subliminal”) glinting just beyond the back fence.
“Generally, when I renovate a house,” Rafferty explained as he opened the front door, “I have to juggle three things: what the clients want, what the clients think they’re supposed to want, and what the house wants.”
“What do you mean, what the house wants?” Sometimes, pretty often even, Rafferty said intriguing things.
“Like this room,” began Rafferty, walking through what Dev supposed was the living room, to one so tiny and dim that it was more an alcove than a room and was lined from floor to ceiling with new, built-in shelves. “People think they need light, light, light. A lot of folks would want to cut in a bigger window, add a French door, maybe get rid of one or two of those big trees outside. Some people would even knock out this wall and incorporate the room into the larger living space. And, yeah, light’s important, but it isn’t everything. This is a house that wants to hang on to its small, quiet pockets. It respects a person’s privacy.”
Dev looked around, smelling the clean, sawdusty, fresh-paint smell of the place. “I like this room,” he said finally. “The sun coming through the green leaves makes you sort of feel like you’re underwater.” His imagination sketched in a deep chair and a brass floor lamp curling over it. “It’d make a great place to read, I think.”
“Me, too,” said Rafferty. He smiled at Dev.
“So this house is for you, right?”
They walked to the kitchen in the back of the house, a square, unexpectedly modern room, with silvery appliances and an island with its own sink. Dev slid his hand across a countertop of weathered-looking, sand-colored stone.
“Jerusalem stone,” said Rafferty. “Needs more upkeep than some people want, but I like it.” He smiled a wistful smile, not at Dev, but at the room, the cabinets and stone floor and the place where a table would stand one day. “Yeah, this one’s for me. I started on it a while ago.”
His voice had an ache in it, so Dev said, tentatively, “For your wife, I guess. And Molly.”
“Molly, yeah,” said Rafferty. “But when I bought it, I already knew Gretchen would leave. She hadn’t said so, but I could tell.”
He sounded so sure. Dev wondered how you could be sure of something like that, and also how you could watch TV or run errands or eat dinner—do anything ordinary—with a person, knowing that they wouldn’t be around for long, that your life without them was lurking around the next corner. Wasn’t at least the possibility of forever the whole point of everything?
“Well, it’ll still be Molly’s house, right?”
“Sure. Summers,” said Rafferty, “holidays. Occasional long weekends, maybe. Buddy’s transfer to Florida is supposed to last three years, then, supposedly, they’ll be back in the area. We’ll see.”
“Buddy?” Gretchen’s soon-to-be second husband. “Sounds like a dog in a kids’ book. A basset hound, maybe.”
Rafferty laughed. “Well, he sure didn’t turn out to be my buddy, did he?” Rafferty stopped laughing. “But maybe things happen for the best. Not Molly moving a thousand miles away, which stinks no matter how you look at it. But, you know, I met your mom.” Dev knew Lake made Rafferty happy, but his voice didn’t sound happy as he said this. It sounded fogged over with loneliness.
“Were you, like, thinking my mom and I would move in here?” Even though he knew he probably should feel nervous about asking this question, Dev didn’t. Something about Rafferty made it easy to talk without weighing what you wanted to say beforehand. Rafferty hesitated, but he didn’t act startled or as if Dev had overstepped.
“I would really like for that to happen,” Rafferty said, finally, “but I don’t think it will.”
“Did you ask her?”
“No. I mean, I plan to, someday soon. I’ll just put it out there. But every time we start moving in the direction of that question, she starts talking about how she doesn’t know how long you two will be sticking around.”
Dev’s stomach dropped a couple of inches. Ever since the trip to Philadelphia when he’d sworn off looking for his father, he’d almost forgotten his theory, that it included squeezing money out of his dad and taking off for one of those rich, seedy, sunbaked towns so he could learn how to maximize his potential and take over the world. He hadn’t really forgotten. The idea stewed on some obscure back burner in his brain, and now and then he caught a whiff of it, but he’d gotten good at ignoring it, at pretending that all the things about his life that he liked—Aidan, Cornelia, Teo, Clare (who would arrive before long to spend a spectacularly huge chunk of the summer w
ith Teo and Cornelia), his school, their house—were permanent fixtures, solid. Rafferty, too.
Even Lake behaved as though they were staying, planting dahlia and calla lily bulbs with Rafferty, flowers that wouldn’t bloom for months, granting permission for Dev to try out for basketball in the fall, once he had a year of high school under his belt. He’d even checked the mail one day and found a packet of information from the University of Pennsylvania’s College of General Studies. Maybe Lake had shelved her plan to leave and had just been putting Rafferty off, nervous about committing herself and Dev to something as big as moving in. Or maybe she still planned to grab the money and run, but was doing some pretending of her own.
Dev didn’t know if Lake had found Teddy Tremain yet, but he suspected that she hadn’t because even though she’d never said anything much worse about him than that he was an overgrown baby, it had always been completely clear to Dev that she did not want the man in their lives, especially in Dev’s life. If she had found him and asked him for the money, whether he had said yes or no, Dev was certain she would have packed up and yanked Dev out of this town just as abruptly as she’d yanked him (however willingly he’d gone) out of California.
“Well, if anyone needs a house that respects privacy, it’s Lake.” Dev told Rafferty this in a dry voice and with a sly look, and Rafferty laughed, but Dev hoped he understood what Dev was trying to say. Something like “If Lake ever does decide to move us in here, it’s okay with me.”
Rafferty walked Dev through the rest of the house, pointing out the original glass doorknobs and the original old-fashioned keyholes, the kind people looked through in movies; something called tongue-and-groove boards in the floor; a ball-foot tub big enough for a lounging hippopotamus, but Dev was only halfway listening. What Rafferty had said about Lake had tugged something into the light, a fantasy Dev had caught himself unreeling just once, before shoving it into an obscure corner of his imagination where it had lain inert for months.