Neither spoke about the future of the store or where Casey might end up in the short run. She’d applied to only four schools: Columbia, Wharton, Harvard, and NYU. Her applications were decently prepared but not great. She wasn’t being modest. Most of her colleagues at Kearn Davis with MBAs minced no words telling her that her professional résumé was hardly a standout. Regardless, Sabine was delighted that Casey had applied at all. When a person followed her advice, she transformed into her full-blown Lady Bountiful persona.
When they were done with their sandwiches, Sabine tiptoed to her desk and opened a drawer. She took out a black leather box the size of a hamburger container, not wrapped in the store’s signature periwinkle blue paper but instead tied up grandly with a purple wire ribbon.
“For you,” Sabine said, her eyebrows raised, with an impossible-to-restrain smile. She loved to give presents.
“For me?” Casey replied. “You shouldn’t have.”
“Shall I take it back?”
“No. Of course not. Don’t you dare,” Casey said, following their script.
It was a stainless-steel Rolex watch with a sapphire metal face.
“Oh, my God.” Casey opened her mouth. “Oh, my God. Sabine! That’s crazy! Why?”
“Who needs a reason? Nice, huh?” Sabine was so thrilled, she could burst. That morning, she’d had the idea to get it for Casey in the event she sent in her applications. It was a kind of reward. Sabine adored giving unexpected treats. Her driver had raced her across town to Tourneau, because Sabine had a meeting at ten-thirty with a prickly distributor from Germany back at the store, but it had taken her only minutes to select the gift. The men’s stainless-steel bracelet with the small blue face had to be Casey’s watch. The Rolex was streamlined and tough and possessed tremendous style. It was a durable luxury good—that naturally tickled Sabine.
“Put it on, put it on!” Sabine shouted, so Casey did, unable to believe what she’d been given.
She walked around the table to get to where Sabine was seated. She opened her arms wide to embrace her. “This is—it’s incredible.”
“I know.” Sabine smiled. “It’s nice, huh?” Casey liked it. She could tell.
Casey hugged Sabine, and she hugged her back.
“Thank you. I don’t deserve it. I—I don’t know what to say.” Casey glanced at the cast-off Timex on the table. Her new watch rested perfectly on her left wrist next to her silver Wonder Woman cuff.
They stopped embracing to admire the watch.
“Do you have a headache?” Sabine asked.
“Pardon?”
Sabine draped her left forearm dramatically across her forehead. “Oh, dahling—I have a headache.”
“Oh. Oh. Yes. I have a headache.” Casey touched her forehead lightly with the inside of her forearm, flashing the new watch above her head.
She stopped this only to glance at her wrist again. “It goes with my cuffs. I love these—you know. Because you gave them to me.”
“Of course you do,” Sabine said, intentionally sounding haughty. Her tone of voice was ebullient, almost flirtatious. She lit up when she gave something away. To her, all her money made sense when it pleased the people she cared about, when she was able to support dreams. She loved this poor girl plucked out of Queens and wanted her to have everything she had herself. Sometimes abundance could repair a broken heart—Sabine believed that strongly. Even Casey’s ridiculous, flamboyant impulses—at times damaging to herself—made sense to Sabine, who despised emotional restraint. In the girl, Sabine spotted the wide flash of the creative, and she yearned to nurture that piece. A spectacular failure was better than safety. Sabine wanted individuals to honor their greatest ambitions. All superior things—all things worth knowing, possessing, creating, and admiring, she’d observed—had begun with vast, impractical wishes. She hated smallness of character. Sabine hated fear. If Casey was given a chance to know her own desires, she’d go further than she herself had. There was no proof for this, but Sabine had made every decision in her life based on hunches. And she was never wrong about people—the entirety of one’s personality was observable in the expression of the eyes. Her father, a successful fabric merchant, had taught her to look closely inside a face—that it was possible even to do this. You must spend a good length of time with an individual before you call him or her your friend, he’d instructed. To her father, a friend was the rare person—not everyone could be your friend. He scoffed at popular people: “A man the world loves cannot be a good lover.” Words never mattered, he said, seasons mattered. Notice how people behave when they’re desperate—that’s who they are, he warned. Sabine ached suddenly, missing him.