“I’ll check in on you when I get back.”
“You can’t—”
“Quarantine,” she says. “I know. I meant I’ll call or something.”
“Oh,” he says. “Okay.”
In the deep, deep dark, she finds herself nodding. “Okay.”
And then he hangs up.
She falls asleep again immediately, into the kind of hard, dreamless sleep that usually follows a show. When she wakes, she fumbles around for her phone on the table, and sees that it’s almost nine.
The buffet is on the lido deck, and it’s crowded this morning. A couple of kids run past wearing powdery doughnuts like rings on their fingers, and an attendant pushing an elderly man in a wheelchair tries to fight his way past the line for coffee. The tables are arranged along the perimeter of the ship, pressed up against the windows, and Greta spots Mary and Eleanor sitting at one of them, their heads bent over a phone.
For a second, she pauses, struck by the sight of them together like that, thinking about how her mom should be there too. These women had been as much Helen’s family as Greta and Asher and Conrad, the three of them trading gardening secrets and tips on asking for a raise, organizing meals when one of them was sick, and throwing parties for every occasion. They spent summers in each other’s backyards and winters at each other’s kitchen tables. They were friends—best friends—but they were also family.
And now there are only two of them.
When Greta walks up to the table, Eleanor beams at her. “Mary was showing me some pictures of the proposal,” she says, turning the phone around. Greta doesn’t have time to prepare herself; just like that, she’s looking at a picture of Jason, down on one knee, grinning up at a beautiful Asian woman who looks like she’s straight out of a J.Crew catalog.
“He did it in Central Park,” Mary says proudly. “She was shocked.”
Who isn’t? Greta wants to say, but she doesn’t.
Years ago, she and Jason were at a bar in the East Village when a guy—through sleight of hand or maybe something more technical—made a ring appear in the token slot of a Skee-Ball machine. Right there on the beer-soaked floor, he dropped to one knee and the girl burst into tears. Jason had turned to Greta and rolled his eyes.
“What?” she asked. “What would you do?”
“I wouldn’t,” he said simply.
It was one of the things they had in common, this aversion to commitment, to knitting your life to someone else’s. When she used to stay over at his place, he would pointedly move the toothpaste back where it belonged after she used it. When they woke up in the morning, he would go about his routine as if she weren’t there. And that was fine with Greta, who did the same on the rare occasions when he slept at her place. They were two independent people who wanted it all: someone in their bed at night and also out of it first thing in the morning.
Until now, apparently.
“Wow,” Greta says, peering closer at the picture, searching for signs of Jason’s unhappiness like an FBI agent examining a hostage video. But there’s nothing. He looks overjoyed to be perched on a rock in Central Park, proposing to a woman he allegedly loves.
“What does she do?” she finds herself asking.
“She’s a vet,” Mary says, still smiling at the photo.
“Oh,” Greta says, surprised. “That’s amazing. Where did she serve?”
Both women laugh. “No, no,” Mary says. “A veterinarian. She treated his puppy, which is how they met.”
“He has a puppy?” Greta says, picturing the white carpets in his sleek high-rise apartment. “Since when?”
Mary frowns. “Maybe a year or so?”
“Don’t you two ever see each other?” Eleanor asks. “The Big Apple can’t be that big.”
“Bigger than you think,” Greta says morosely.
Davis and Todd return then, plates heaped with pancakes. They make an odd pair: Todd, skinny and pale and so like a stereotype of an insurance adjuster that it’s almost weird that he is one, and Davis, broad-shouldered and athletic, with a personality even bigger than his stature.
“Hey, kid,” Davis says as he slides awkwardly into a too-small chair. “Heard your dad spent the night getting acquainted with the bathroom floor.”
“You talked to him?”
He nods as he pours syrup over his pancakes. “He’s in rough shape.”
“He didn’t sound that bad last night. Just annoyed.”