Darley could tell it made Cord happy to see his wife and sister having fun together, and he invited Darley into their world of private jokes and goofy theories. They had a shared suspicion that the terrible butcher shop in the Hotel St. George was really a drug front and peppered Darley with evidence.
“They have like four cuts of meat and a bag of dried pasta. That literally cannot be their business model,” Cord said.
“And the guy who works there seems annoyed whenever you try to buy anything, like you’re messing up the stage,” agreed Sasha.
“You guys,” Darley interrupted, shaking her head. “This is New York City. Nobody needs a drug front. If you want drugs you just order them from the app on your phone.”
“Which app is that?” Cord teased.
“I mean, I don’t actually know!” Darley had to concede.
* * *
—
Sasha had never eaten Korean barbecue, so Darley decided they’d go to the new place that had opened in Gowanus—a sleek, wood-paneled restaurant nestled between a moving company and a mechanic—and served tiki bar cocktails and blood sausage. Malcolm was obsessed with their short ribs, and after six phone calls Darley managed to score a coveted Saturday night reservation for four. But it turned out that Cord had the Union Club cognac tasting that night. She called back, and after much begging and pleading got a reservation three weeks later, but then realized Malcolm had plans for his mother’s birthday. “It’s like they’re Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne,” Darley lamented to Sasha.
“Mom, they can’t be both.” Poppy rolled her eyes. They were sitting on the bench outside Joe Coffee waiting for their order.
“Right! Because they are secretly the same person! Like a superhero and his alter ego!”
“No, Mom, Clark Kent is Superman and Bruce Wayne is Batman. They’re two different characters.”
“Oh. Well, which one is Daddy?”
“Probably Bruce Wayne,” Poppy said thoughtfully. “And you’re Pennyworth.”
“Who’s Pennyworth? The cute girl reporter?”
“No, Pennyworth is his butler. He’s old,” Hatcher said.
“Oh, cool, cool.” Darley nodded and made a horrified face at Sasha over Hatcher’s head. “Because I’m old.”
Darley hadn’t realized how lonely she had been before. So many of her friends were stretched thin between their jobs and parenting, their weekends full of soccer and furtive emailing, never truly caught up on work. She had her brother and sister, she had her parents, she had Malcolm’s parents and Malcolm when he was home, but they all had client dinners and tennis matches, they all had Venetian-themed anniversary parties, golf outings, a zillion things to do that were more fun that watching the kids ride their bikes in circles for hours in Squibb Park. Of course, Sasha had more interesting things to do too. Sasha had work, and she had her art school friends, but she was just down the street, and rather than eat lunch alone at her desk staring into her computer, now she chose to swing by Darley’s with a salad on a random Wednesday afternoon.
On warm weekends Darley and Malcolm loaded the kids up in the Land Rover with Cord and Sasha crammed in the third row and drove out to the Spyglass house so that they could hit balls around the tennis court and grill hot dogs. They stayed up late drinking wine and playing cards after the kids went to bed. Chip and Tilda were usually there too, but always engaged with some dinner party or event at their country club, traipsing in close to midnight, tipsy and in high spirits, her mother making her father bring out the cognac so they could catch up and gossip. Somehow Tilda always had the best gossip after these parties—about minor New York celebrities, about board members at the various private schools, about which co-ops were gleefully refusing entry to the Hollywood actors and actresses who flocked to the leafy streets of Brooklyn Heights like parakeets, bright and noisy and utterly out of their element.
Now that Darley was on Team Sasha, she saw how awkward their family could be to an outsider, how tricky it might seem to make sense of their little clan. She knew about Sasha and Malcolm’s little inside joke, whispering “NMF” when they felt left out, but Darley realized she could just extend a hand to include Sasha, and she could have done it ages ago. She reminded Sasha to pack tennis whites for Spyglass. She passed her a coaster when she saw her about to put a tumbler on her mother’s coffee table. She made a frantic zipping motion by her mouth when Sasha mentioned a real estate reality show in front of her father.
They were eating family dinner at Cecconi’s in Dumbo one night when the vegetable soup arrived in a bread bowl. As Sasha ripped off a chunk of the bowl to eat, Darley saw her mother look at her, goggle-eyed.
“You aren’t going to eat the bowl, are you?” Tilda asked in surprise. To Darley’s knowledge her mother hadn’t eaten bread since the 1970s.
Sasha paused, the bread halfway to her mouth, dripping broth. “The soup soaked into it,” she faltered, and the table came to a terrible standstill.
Darley had ordered the soup as well and, full with the knowledge that only she could make this moment right, she ripped off a big piece of her own bowl. “Oh, but it’s kind of wonderful,” she insisted. Then, pivoting with the grace of a Lincoln Center ballerina, she asked, “Have any of you been to the new Italian restaurant on Henry Street? I heard the food is terrible, but the new James Bond is an investor.” Darley continued to enthusiastically dismantle her bread bowl as Tilda jumped at the bait, regaling them with the story of James Bond’s wife’s trouble with her brownstone renovation, and Cord gave his big sister a quick look, tweaking the corner of his lip in a private smile of thanks.
TEN
Sasha
When Sasha was ten she had such an intense crush on Harrison Ford that sometimes she would lie in bed and cry with deep sorrow that they would never be together. She knew it was weird. He was a grown man and a famous actor and she was a child with a dawning awareness that little hairs were growing up and down her legs, and it all compounded into a tragedy so devastating that she could barely stand to watch him in movies when anyone else was in the room. Her brothers obviously noticed her mooning after him and taunted her mercilessly. Later in life, when she saw in some celebrity magazine at the nail salon that Harrison got an earring, she felt embarrassed all over again that she had been obsessed with someone so old.
Sasha had been falling in love with Cord before he told her about his childhood crush, but the revelation was probably what sealed the deal. They were lying in bed one night, slightly drunk, and she told him about Harrison.
“Did you ever feel that way as a kid?” she asked. “So intense and confused?”
“Yeah, totally. I was in love with Little Debbie,” he confessed.
“Who’s that?” Sasha asked, running a finger along his bare chest. “A neighbor?”
“No, the little girl with a hat on the box of snack cakes.”
Sasha sat up. “You were in love with the girl on the box of Swiss Rolls? Those little chocolate things that taste like wax?”
“I just thought she looked so nice. She had this wavy brown hair and a friendly smile . . .”
“Do you think maybe you were just really hungry?”