It was midafternoon when I arrived back in Manhattan. Five o’clock, cocktail hour, was still a couple of hours away, but it didn’t matter. I was rounding up. After the primal-scream field trip with my students, followed by the encounter with Mathias von Oehson that flipped everything about Carter’s apparent suicide upside down, it was definitely time for a drink.
Turns out, Tracy was well ahead of me.
His text was waiting on my cell when I parked my bike in the garage near our new apartment on 82nd off West End Avenue. He wanted me to meet him at Vincenzo’s a few blocks away, our favorite Italian restaurant in our new neighborhood.
“You’ll need to catch up,” Tracy added with a couple of martini emojis. He clearly wasn’t there to eat.
In fact, when I walked into Vincenzo’s the first thing I saw was another round being placed in front of him at the bar. Broken Shed vodka, two olives, and only a drop of vermouth. His usual. Although not usually in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon. Something was up, all right.
First things first, though. Where’s our daughter?
Tracy being Tracy, he answered the question even before I asked it. “Lucinda agreed to stay an extra couple of hours,” he said when he saw me approaching.
Lucinda’s our go-to babysitter. She emigrated from Portugal a decade ago. We didn’t hire her very often when we first adopted Annabelle because we couldn’t stand being away from our new baby girl. We still can’t stand it, but one of the things Tracy and I have learned about parenting skills is that they improve after having some alone time together as a couple.
Also, some alone time apart from each other as a couple. For me, that’s my teaching and…well, yeah, some of my “extracurriculars” over the past few years, such as chasing down a serial killer who used playing cards to announce his victims in advance and, more recently, helping to stop a major terrorist attack on Grand Central station. So much for my early retirement from the CIA.
For Tracy, he has his acting career and the amazing volunteer work he does with Harlem Legal House, putting his Yale law degree to use by helping those who aren’t able to afford a private attorney. Lately, though, there have been fewer auditions and more hours spent up in Harlem. He still loves acting, but the satisfaction he gets from making sure the justice system works for everyone, and not just the wealthy, is greater than—and I quote—anything he’s ever felt onstage or in front of a camera. That makes me love and respect Tracy even more.
So if that means having Lucinda watch Annabelle three afternoons a week instead of two so Tracy can volunteer more and I can still prepare for my lectures, so be it. We adore Lucinda. Annabelle adores Lucinda. Plus, how many American two-and-a-half-year-olds can already say please and thank you in Portuguese?
“Okay, then,” I said, pivoting from our daughter back to Tracy. “What’s wrong?”