They followed Sasha out of the playground and up Willow Street to Pineapple. They parked their scooters in the foyer, shucked their muddy sneakers, and carefully laid down their gooey sticks, while Darley hung their swim bag on a hook before entering the apartment.
“Guys, I have a bunch of art stuff out in my room if you want to draw.” Sasha ushered the kids up the stairs. “Is that okay with you? If they go?”
“Sure.” Darley smiled. She was not going to object to her kids playing independently. Sasha tipped her chin to the kitchen and Darley followed. She pulled out a bottle of white from the fridge and poured some for each of them. The rain slapped the glass doors to the yard.
“I should text Malcolm.” Darley pulled out her phone. “Let’s see, his golf game should be over by now.” Darley dashed off a quick note letting him know the kids got kicked out of the pool and they were at the Pineapple Street house. She then put her phone facedown on the table and apologized. “Sorry about that.”
“Malcolm’s playing golf?”
“Yeah, with some business school friends in Texas.”
“Do you guys talk a lot while he travels?”
“Like four hundred times a day,” Darley laughed. “Do you and Cord talk all day?”
“No, I think Cord goes into beast mode when he’s at the office and basically forgets he is a human. He comes back all starving from skipping lunch and then eats a whole bag of chips before dinner.”
“Does he actually like working with Dad?”
“He loves it. He and your dad are two peas in a pod.” Sasha smiled. “Is it hard having Malcolm travel so much for work? Do you miss him?”
Darley paused. Even though Malcolm had been let go from Deutsche Bank weeks and weeks ago, nobody in the family knew. Darley had decided it was best this way. But the weekend had been so long, so lonely, and keeping the secret had started to weigh on her. “Don’t tell Cord, but Malcolm was fired. He’s interviewing for a new job.”
“He was fired?” Sasha asked, putting her wineglass down on the counter with a clink.
“It wasn’t his fault—an analyst killed a deal and Malcolm took the fall.”
“Shit. He must be heartbroken. I know how much he loves his job.”
Darley was surprised to feel tears spring to her eyes. It was like Sasha actually understood why it scared her so much. “He is heartbroken. And banking is brutal. You make one misstep and you’re persona non grata.”
“Is he interviewing with another bank?”
“No, he’s looking at private equity. But he just doesn’t have connections there.” Darley took a deep drink of wine.
“Don’t your parents know people who could help?”
“We’re not telling them,” Darley said firmly.
“Why not?”
“It’s complicated.” Darley didn’t want to talk about her parents, how she was afraid that on some secret level, a level they could never even acknowledge to themselves, they might have welcomed Malcolm more readily to their family because he was financially secure. Once his money was gone, once the shine of success had tarnished, would they feel quite the same way? “Promise me you won’t mention it to Cord. I’ll tell him all about it once Malcolm has a new job. I just don’t want to put that pressure on Malcolm right now.”
“Of course.” Sasha nodded. “No problem. And he’ll be hired in no time. He’s a genius.” Her phone dinged and she looked down. “Christ on a cracker.” She showed Darley the screen, her father and brother holding the small brown bat in a net, victorious.
“Unreal,” Darley murmured, trying to picture Chip doing anything with a net other than skimming bugs off the swimming pool at Spyglass.
“Maybe Malcolm won’t have to travel so much with his next job,” Sasha mused.
“Do you know my friend Priya Singh? Both she and her husband work at Goldman, and I literally have no idea how they even got pregnant with their second. I don’t think they ever see each other.”
“That sounds so lonely.”
“There’s that mom at the Henry Street School who married the NBA star who got traded to Los Angeles. Those kids only see their dad on TV.”
“I mean, that’s still pretty cool, though,” Sasha said. “I would not be sad to be married to a basketball star.”
“True. They make a ton of money, then they retire in their thirties and you can just stop working and hang out together.”
“I don’t think Cord will ever retire. He loves his work.”
“I feel like there are all these guys who go into finance, and they have grand plans to make it big and then retire at thirty, but then no matter how much money they make they see that if they keep going, they could just make more. Like, there’s never a moment when they think, Oh, I have ten million dollars and that’s enough.”
“No, because everyone they know is also making that kind of money and spending that kind of money, and even when they have more than they could realistically need in a lifetime, it doesn’t feel like they have enough.”
“Totally,” Darley agreed, finishing her wine.
Sasha reached over and poured her more. She turned on the oven and pulled two pizzas out of the freezer. “Should I make pizza and salad?”
“That’s all the kids eat.”
When the pizza was done, she called the kids down and they sat at the granite island and devoured slice after slice while arguing animatedly about invisibility cloaks. Hatcher thought they were real, but Poppy was unsure. After dinner they moved to the sofas in the parlor and Sasha put on music. The kids shimmied around and piled cushions on the floor and played hot lava, while Darley and Sasha laughed and drank and occasionally tossed a rogue pillow at an exuberant child. Her mother would kill them if she saw what they were doing with the governor’s furniture.
Somehow, it was suddenly eight thirty and Darley realized they had missed bath time and overshot bedtime, and the dreaded Sunday afternoon had passed in a happy blur. She snapped helmets on the kids and gathered their sticks, and as they set off into the warm evening she gripped Sasha’s arm seriously. “This was the most fun.”
“I’m so glad you all got kicked out of the pool so we could do this.” Sasha grinned.
As they swept down the damp sidewalks back to their apartment, Darley pulled out her phone. She had a missed FaceTime from Malcolm and a text.
Hope you’re surviving the Sunday scaries . . .
Darley was a little drunk and the letters swam, so she closed one eye and texted back.
So fun. Had wine. Baby carrots and regret tomrw.
* * *
There were things you could do with family that you just couldn’t do with friends: You could let them see you wearing the same outfit three days in a row. You could invite them over for lunch and then mostly ignore them as you finally got off hold with the internet provider. You could have an entire conversation while wearing Crest Whitestrips. Suddenly, with her new friendship with Sasha, Darley felt her guard drop. Sasha was funny and easygoing and genuinely enjoyed spending time with Poppy and Hatcher. She worked freelancer hours and was often free to meet Darley in the park midday, joining her and the kids for bagels at second breakfast, rides on the carousel, ice cream from the truck. She was silly with the kids in the same way Cord was, pretending her sunglasses gave her X-ray vision, insisting she understood what the barking dogs were saying when they ran past, engaging in long and serious discussions about the relative merits of a pet Pegasus or unicorn.