“La Petite Nuit?” said KC. “Isn’t that the racy little lingerie shop around the corner?”
“I don’t know how any of you can even think about sex,” said Darwin. “I’m never going to go there again.”
“Another month or two, hon, and then it all comes back,” reassured Lucie. “But in the meantime, share some details. Because surely you didn’t bring a lingerie purchase into the Friday Night Knitting Club if you didn’t intend to be asked about it. Am I right?”
“Oh, you’re right,” seconded KC. “So who are you seeing?”
“Someone,” said Catherine, who couldn’t help but smile.
“Someone we know?” KC was persistent.
“Someone some of you know,” said Catherine. “But all of you have met him.”
“It’s James,” said KC, a note of triumph in her voice. “You and James are in love. Don’t ask me how I know. I’m perceptive about these things.”
“What?” Dakota turned to Catherine. “Is this true?”
“No way,” said Catherine.
“Okay, okay,” said KC, waving her hand as though to quiet down some nonexistent applause. “I’ll tell you how I know. I saw you guys eating dinner together last month and you looked so cute, sitting all crunched up together and totally ignoring your waitress.”
“What?” Dakota turned to Catherine. “Is that true?”
“Uh, yeah, but not like how she’s saying,” she said. “We’re just . . . friends.”
“Like you can be just friends with a man as good-looking as James Foster,” said Peri. “You know, I would like to find a guy. I’m almost thirty here and things are pretty dry. I’d like to find a black man, to be perfectly honest. But apparently all the good ones are chasing women like you.”
“You’re like twenty years younger than my dad,” said Dakota to Peri, “so that’s totally gross. And you’re one of my best friends, so that’s even worse, Catherine.”
“I didn’t do anything,” said Catherine, raising her voice. “I didn’t buy this sexy little number for James, that’s for sure, and James and I don’t owe any of you explanations for the fact that we sometimes eat a meal together. And by the way, if spying isn’t against the law, KC, then it should be.”
Lucie and Darwin were getting ready to referee when Anita returned to the shop, a bit out of breath from racing up the stairs. She was so excited to share her news that she didn’t notice the tension in the room.
“Okay, girls, it looks like it’s time to start the Friday Night Knitting Club: Italian edition!” She raised her hands in the air to quiet them, though no one else was speaking. “Dakota, your father has agreed you can go with Lucie, but he has some further details he’d like the three of you to work out. More on that later.”
Dakota began screaming and raced over to hug Anita.
“Gentle, dear, gentle,” said Anita. “I also want to tell all of you tonight that Marty and I are postponing our wedding planning while we take a trip this summer.”
“Is something wrong, Anita?” asked Peri, who was hard at work on knitting an intricate but tiny pocketbook to match Anita’s knitted wedding coat.
“No,” said Anita, hesitating. “Well, yes, in fact. But it’s nothing to do with Marty.”
She came over to the table and sat down. “I have a sister,” she began, “and I haven’t spoken to her in more years than many of you have been alive.”
“Where is she?” asked Dakota.
“I don’t know,” admitted Anita. “So we’ll be sailing to Europe shortly to try and find her.”
“How do you know she’s in Europe?” asked Dakota.
“I don’t,” admitted Anita. “But I have a hunch.”
“We’re all going on adventures,” said Dakota, looking away when she saw Peri’s face. “Sort of.”
“Well, Catherine, with the wedding planning on hold,” said Anita, “I think you can head off to that vineyard guilt-free now!”
“Oh, I don’t think I’m going anymore,” she said. “I was considering a trip down South.” She looked meaningfully at Anita but the older woman didn’t seem to pay attention, too busy catching her breath so she could keep talking.
“Peri, I promise to make sure you get a very solid two-week vacation in September, after the charity walk. Darwin, keep doing what you’re doing. And KC, I have a plan on how to stop smoking.”
She reached in for a piece of biscotti.
“I’m just so relieved and excited how everything is coming together,” said Anita. “It’s been a very stressful several weeks for me. And, Catherine, you’ll be pleased to know you can move back to the apartment until we sell. Nathan just called to let me know he’s going back to Atlanta. I’m so relieved: I had a long talk with him over lunch today and I guess I made real progress.” Anita beamed. “He’s going to try and work things out with his wife.”
intermediate
You’re getting better—smarter, quicker, faster—and yet you know just enough to realize how much you still have to learn. Now is when you are ready to take chances. To figure out just how far you want to go.
twenty
Not every mistake needs to be confessed. Nor every detail shared. That is the one thing she’d learned over her lifetime.
Catherine felt humiliated by Nathan even though their romance—if you could even call it that, she thought to herself—was known only to them. Rejection always hurts. There’d been a phone call that she let go to voice mail, and an e-mail she’d deleted. The details didn’t matter, did they, now that he’d decided? A conclusion was a conclusion. The end.
Besides, what could he tell her anyway that she didn’t already know? He had a family, she was a fling. And it stung.
“Water,” she told the flight attendant, who’d had to ask twice what she wanted to jolt Catherine out of her reverie. “Sparkling. With lime.”
What a relief it might be to tell Anita, or the members of the club, about yet another maybe-relationship dissolving just as she was pouring her heart into it. But how could she do that now? Sometimes the great relief of unburdening oneself only adds to someone else’s burden. What could she expect Anita to do? How uncomfortable it would be for all concerned. And there would be no point in choosing sides because the only side for Anita to choose was Nathan’s. As forgiving as Anita was, she might not be very understanding about Catherine sleeping with her married son, in what was once Anita’s very own bedroom, no less.
Imagine: If she and Nathan had worked, it would have been glorious. But revealing the failed romance would only result in potential embarrassment and shame for all concerned.
No, Catherine got herself into the mess, and she was a big enough girl to keep her mouth shut about it.
So there were no middle-of-the-night phone calls, no e-mails, no follow-up of any kind to disrupt what she assumed was Nathan’s happy reunion in Atlanta. When the laundry came back—she always sent it out on Mondays and Thursdays—-and she found a clean pair of his underwear tucked in with her things, she promptly took a pair of scissors and therapeutically cut them up before throwing them away. Then she did a thorough once-over of the apartment, tossing out anything he’d touched: a bar of soap, a barely used tube of toothpaste, the box of cookies he’d been eating. Catherine made sure there were no more traces of their week of playing house and then she arranged to have all her belongings sent up to the house in Cold Spring.
Being with Nathan had brought her years of living in Anita’s apartment to a close: she simply couldn’t see herself eating Cheerios and watching television on the same sofa where Nathan had made love to her the week before.
And yet it was lonely not to be able to talk about it: she felt positively bloated by swallowing the story.
Catherine twisted in her first-class seat and sighed, just as the flight attendant returned with her drink. “You’re not going to believe this one, guys,” she pretended to herself she might say to the club, “but I had a fling with Anita’s troublesome Nathan. The sex was a
wesome! Until he skedaddled back to the wife he said he was divorcing.” At least she thought that was what he said. Maybe he hadn’t been quite so explicit. But no! She would not give him an “out.” It made things too complicated, made her equally responsible. Instead, she tried to visualize everyone’s face if she revealed the four-night stand. Anita’s disappointment, Darwin’s judgment. What did these women know of temptation? Only KC, with her two divorces and her New Yorker’s seen-it-all-ness was not horrified in her vision.
She wasn’t entirely without boundaries: she hadn’t just jumped into bed with a married man. Well, she had. But not really. Nathan had said he’d already filed the papers. Or that he’d started papers. Which was it? There were lots of kisses and touching amid all the talking.
C’mon, Catherine, she thought to herself, you’re smarter than what happened here. A deal ain’t done until it’s done.
“I should know better,” she said now, watching the clouds out the window. “Right, James?” She reached over and patted his hand, a little bit forcefully, to get his attention.
“Hmm,” he murmured, a bewildered expression on his face as he looked up from his laptop. “I’m sorry, what were you saying, Catherine?”
“Just that Venice is going to be the perfect thing for me,” she said. “An antidote.” She took a gulp of sparkling water and nodded vigorously, waiting for him to ask the question. Ask what was wrong. Why so glum, chum?
It would be easy enough to tell James but somehow KC’s seeing them at the restaurant and telling everyone about it had punctured the safe bubble of secrecy that protected their friendship. She had almost told him days ago but felt a twinge of doubt: What if she told James about Nathan and he told Anita?
If he asked, she decided now, she would tell him. That would be okay. If not, she would suffer in silence.
“I needed to get out of the city . . .” she began, willing James to draw her out.
“Good,” said James pleasantly, and turned back to his work. He liked Catherine. He really did. But today he just didn’t have time to listen. There was a lot ahead of him: he was going to check on a potential new development in the watery city for a few days, and then go to Rome to spend the summer. Watching over Dakota.
The head of the company, Charles Vickerson, seemed pleased that James was taking such an interest in the European hotels, and even more delighted when James let him know he was going to have his daughter work one day a week for him. James Foster had worked his way up from being part of the architectural team on a Parisian hotel almost twenty years ago to being an integral part of the V hotel empire. And Vickerson was always on guard for companies out to poach his top execs; that James wanted to get his daughter involved in the company seemed a good sign to him.
“I wonder how Dakota is going to do on the plane tomorrow,” Catherine said now, trying to draw out James. “It’s her first trip without a parent.”
“She was quite thrilled about that, I assure you,” said James, glancing up from his computer only briefly. “She’d have gone to Scotland alone when she was younger, but I never wanted her to be by herself at Heathrow.”
Catherine’s trip, which she’d planned to call off when she thought she was going to live happily ever after with Nathan, was back on before anyone knew she’d considered not going. A trip would be just the thing to run away from yet another calamity in her love life, she believed.
Though touching base with Dakota to make arrangements had exhausted her.
“I plan to eat everything,” she told Catherine, and then spent ten minutes listing all the meals she hoped to consume, before moving on to all the sights she intended to see. “And I’m also going to ride a Vespa, at least once . . .”
I used to be like that, Catherine had thought, feeling used up when she realized it was twenty-five years since she was Dakota’s age. This is not how I meant my life to be, she told herself. Dakota’s nonstop enthusiasm was like pulling up the blinds while recovering from a hangover: her sunniness hurt. Everywhere.
As a ruse, Catherine declared she needed to find some good glass-work for The Phoenix and bowed out of the flight to Rome with Dakota and company, promising to catch up with them later. She rescheduled instead to Venice and made her departure coincide a few days earlier with James’s trip. Just because she couldn’t talk about how she was feeling didn’t mean she actually wanted to be left alone. Though James was hardly distracting company, his nose stuck in his work.
The details of Dakota’s summer adventure had been well negotiated with James by Anita, who had planned some serious travel of her own. Dakota would look after Ginger based on Lucie’s shooting schedule, but would work at least eight hours each week in her father’s office. Filing, researching, typing letters. She was to get no special treatment, James had announced, but he wanted her to learn more about working in a corporate environment. Get some exposure beyond the world of retail and of school. Plus, Lucie and Dakota and Ginger were to stay at the V, down the hall from James. So Dakota was almost on her own, but not really: on the nights when she wasn’t looking after Ginger, Dakota had to check in with her father by one a.m. Earlier, he told her, was also quite all right by him.
It wasn’t Dakota’s idea of a perfect summer, a five-year-old to look after and her father down the hall, but it was better than staying home and working in the shop. So what if she had to play administrative assistant for a few hours a week? She could handle it.
And as for Anita, she and Marty had booked passage on the Queen Mary 2, and Catherine had gone to the boat to see them off shortly before her flight. The two of them were going to head to the UK—they’d already hired a private investigator to meet them when they arrived—and then they were going to systematically glean any clues they could from the nearly forty postcards she’d been saving all these years. Catherine didn’t say she had that last postcard: she didn’t want to give Anita any reason to feel let down. She’d already let her down enough.
The travel, Catherine knew, was a huge effort for Anita. But her fear of flying meant ground and sea journeys were their only option.
“I’ve been a wimp,” she’d said to Catherine on the pier. “Reluctant to confront my fears and regrets with my sister. Now I have to sail across the world to find her.”
Catherine had nodded sympathetically.
“We used to have such fun—she was like my practice baby,” Anita told her. “I would take her out to the park and we’d eat ice cream cones. Give my mother a break, you know. Sarah was so much younger than I was.”
“How old would she be?”
“Sixty-three,” said Anita, before returning to her memories. “Sarah was an excellent knitter. I taught her myself. Bubbe taught me, and I showed her. She had perfect gauge. Spot on.”
“Better than you?” asked Catherine.
“Yes,” said Anita. “Though I’d never admit it. I think of her when I’m knitting up the the wedding coat, you know. Imagine if we could make it together. How fast it would go. How fun. We used to make sweaters together, each take a sleeve, she the front and I the back. Make them for our father for his birthday, that kind of thing.”
Catherine looked out to the Hudson as Anita went on, explaining how Nathan had adored his young aunt—his first and favorite babysitter—and how she spent most of her weekends playing with her young nephews.
“She helped me out just as I helped my mother with her,” said Anita. “And she was a laugher, always trying out jokes. In another generation, I think she would have been a comedian.”
“What did she do?” Catherine asked, but Anita’s face had darkened. She tried to press for details, to find out what had gone wrong, but Anita merely shook her head.
“I’m not ready,” she said. “I worry that by talking about her I’m just confirming that she’s already gone. Don’t let people slip through your fingers, Catherine. It can be easy to do and hard, so hard, to take back.”
As for the gang holding down the fort in the city, Catherine had popped b
y Walker and Daughter before she abandoned the San Remo to pick up a new summery felted tote bag from the Peri Pocketbook line. Her need to see everyone was powerful, almost as though she wanted to continually test her own resolve not to discuss Nathan.
“Seeing anyone these days, Peri?” she’d asked at the shop less than a day before her flight. Typically Catherine was a very organized flyer, but the situation had left her distracted.
“Ha!” said Peri. “I am the quintessential almost-thirty busy professional female in New York who is shocked and alarmed to discover she lacks a life partner.”
Or forty-something, thought Catherine.
“I thought KC had the perfect guy for you?”
“Oh, you know the type,” said Peri. “Spent all evening talking about himself.”
Nathan had seemed interesting when he told her about his life, growing up in New York, what Anita was like as a mother. Now Catherine wished he’d just kept his yap shut. She hated knowing him as well as she did. Or, at least, knowing his body as well as she did.
The phone rang, and it was Darwin, asking Peri to messenger over more yarn. Ever since Dakota had shown her how to make tiny socks, she’d become a woman obsessed, enchanted by the idea of Cady and Stanton’s little toes clad in Mommy-created footwear. Even when she knew she’d be better off taking a nap, she still tried to knit a few stitches before dozing off.
“So I’m going to focus this summer on giving private lessons to Darwin at her place,” said Peri. “When she doesn’t have Rosie in for a visit. As she said, the more mothers, the merrier.”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Catherine, trying very hard to act the role of the interested, engaged friend. But Catherine felt like the walking wounded, shell-shocked in a way she hadn’t been for a long time.
“I wouldn’t know, either,” said Peri. “Seeing as I just keep things rolling on here, and trying to get my bags in the hands of D-list celebrities. No trips to Italy for someone here.”
Peri had made it well known she wasn’t entirely keen on Dakota’s travel, but she’d backed down and accepted a summer replacement in the form of Dakota’s college pal Olivia. Unfortunately, Olivia was having difficulty ringing up the gorgeous cobalt blue laptop case Catherine was purchasing. She’d insisted on paying full price and not even using the Friday Night Knitting Club discount that Peri generously offered to her friends.