1-APR
The champagne bubbles had gone straight to Sloane’s head. She was considering asking Rosalita to arrange a playdate with her son—what was his name? Sal—Sal—Sal-something. Yes, she should do that. She put the glass to her lips again, one hand on her hip, thinking. But … would that be open-minded or condescending? Asking Rosalita’s son to play with Abigail, she meant.
And, actually, was wondering whether it was open-minded in itself evidence of a lack of open-mindedness? This was a conundrum. Sloane hated these ethical jigsaw puzzles. Wasn’t it enough that she liked everyone? She’d never met a person that she couldn’t talk to properly. But no, that was apparently naïve of her. Or, an uglier word she’d learned—privileged.
In Ardie’s backyard, the sun shined with just the right fervor. Branches swayed overhead and the shrieks of children knocking over cardboard buildings felt like a snapshot out of a Pottery Barn Kids catalogue. She would worry about the politics of a playdate later.
She really did enjoy the sensation of bubbles swimming up to her head.
For another moment, she stood atypically off to the side of the party, watching her daughter play superhero with Rosalita’s son. Two small children whose relative ages made them relatively important in this one particular context.
She’d deleted the text messages on Abigail’s phone. Poof! Gone! And now look! Her daughter was playing happily outside and Sloane had made that happen. Abigail’s meddling mother.
Maybe the emailed memorandum was a bit much in the light of day, but the school needed to be taught a lesson and who could blame her? She was a mother.
She smiled the easy smile of someone one-and-a-half drinks in, then returned to the patio, where Grace, Ardie, and Katherine stood around her husband.
“Are you swimming in estrogen yet?” She looped her arm through his elbow. His soft, worn-in polo brushed against her cheek. He was a dad who looked great in backyards. Tailor-made for tossing a football and carrying children on his shoulders. She was still debating whether to tell him about her missive to the school board. She was leaning toward no. It was, after all, a formal complaint to his employer, but that was precisely why she’d had to take matters so firmly into her own hands. It was better for him to be kept in the dark. Innocent. And anyway, a legal memorandum wasn’t his purview.
He bowed his head, his stubble catching her hair. “I remembered to hold my breath before I dove in.”
She grinned at the group. “Excellent, then what’d I miss?”
Grace held a bottle of champagne by the neck. She wore a chambray shirt tucked into an A-line floral skirt. Sloane had never looked that put-together after Abigail had been born. She’d lost the baby weight relatively quickly despite having gained a full forty-five pounds, but her shape was another story. It had been like her body had shifted half an inch to the left and didn’t settle back in until almost a year postpartum. “I was just topping off Katherine’s glass, here.” She gave a small curtsy. “It appears her roots are beginning to show.” Grace waggled her eyebrows mischievously.
Katherine took an aggressively long swig of champagne and Sloane squinted at her. She was too young to be showing gray.
“She was just complimenting me on my potty platta.” Ardie held up a fruit and cheese tray stabbed through with toothpicks.
Sloane hesitated and then her eyes widened, which was probably overdoing it, but she didn’t care. “Have you been hiding a Boston accent?”
The thought tickled her right along with the champagne bubbles. Perfectly proper Katherine Bell. Master enunciator. Sloane helped herself to one of the toothpicks with watermelon attached and popped it into her mouth. “I thought you were a boarding school girl or some such?” Sloane munched.
“Not exactly,” she said, taking another sip. “South Boston. Public school.”
“You’ve come a long way from home, Dorothy,” Grace said.
“Dah-thy,” Katherine quipped.
“Oh! Oh! Say something else!” Sloane clapped her hands. And she only rolled her eyes slightly when, after that, Derek whisked her glass away. Such a teacher. But she could always locate another.
Katherine held out her glass to Grace, who obliged with a soft, complicit laugh. “I guess I’m driving now.”
Katherine pointed a finger at Sloane. Her nails were childishly short. Chewed nearly to the quick. “Sloane Glovah, you ah wicked smaht.”
Maybe it was the lovely weather or the smell of fresh cut grass, but Sloane made an impulsive and irreversible decision to like Katherine. Katherine wasn’t an ingénue. She was a woman who’d fashioned herself out of scraps into a mosaic of a Harvard Law graduate and Big Law associate. She had gumption.
I want to be like you. The words that Katherine had said—maybe said—bubbled to the surface along with the bubbles. Or—wait—did she say, I want to be you? Did it matter? Sloane felt the slurpy, slushy feeling of guilt mucking about, weighing her down somewhere in her conscience. Goodness, she hoped she wouldn’t have a hangover.
“Okay,” Derek said, setting Sloane’s half-full glass on the outdoor dining table. “Better question: Who’s more of an A-hole, Jerry Jones or Bill Belichick?”
“Well, I know who’s more of a winner.” Katherine lifted one eyebrow.
“Ohhh, burn.” Derek shook his hand out, laughing. Though he really did love the Cowboys. Every year for his birthday, Sloane scored two of Truviv’s field-level seats. “So, what brought you here from Beantown?” he asked.
Sloane sighed and slyly retrieved her glass from the table. “Look at my husband trying to be cool,” she teased.
Katherine tipped her own glass back and drained it. “Oh, I was fired from my job.”
Grace wiped her mouth with a folded napkin.
Ardie’s forehead creased. “You were fired? From Frost Klein?”
“Yep.”
As Katherine’s boss, Sloane wasn’t sure she should be hearing this. But as an incorrigibly nosy person, she couldn’t resist.
“It was a nightmare, actually,” Katherine said, staring into the bottom of her glass. “What’s in these things?”
Ardie cocked her head. “Champagne,” she answered, slowly.
“That explains it.” Katherine nodded, solemnly.
“So, what happened?” Grace asked.
Sloane remembered vaguely where they were, which was a children’s birthday party, sometime just after noon. Derek excused himself to check on Abigail. The good parent, Sloane registered with mild annoyance. More with herself than him.
Ardie slipped her shoes off and stretched her feet on the patio tiles for a moment as she listened.
“The year before I was fired,” Katherine said, “the firm had done some statistical analysis for this public company on equal employment that made it look like the client was much better off than it was because the partner, who was the section head, by the way”—she moved the stem of her glass in a spiral—“had used the wrong statistics. The opinion letter with that analysis had been used, disclosed, and relied upon to complete a high-profile merger, which our firm helmed.”
Ardie covered her mouth with her hand and Grace smoothed her lips together.
Katherine looked down at her shoes, and then back up. Something unreadable played on her features. “I’d done work for the company in other capacities, but was brought on that year to help put together the new financials of the combined entity. I noticed a discrepancy in the statistical analysis and brought it to the partner’s attention.”
Sloane had lost her own shoes and she crossed her legs, bare toes bobbing from the leg on which her elbow dug a crater. “Sure, of course.”
She felt the vicarious sense of dread swelling under the narrative of a properly terrifying ghost story. At Jaxon Brockwell, a second-year associate had once left the word “not” out of a crucial sentence in a company’s retirement plan and the mistake had resulted in millions of dollars of additional payouts. Sloane had absolutely nothing to do with it and still hadn’t been able to sleep for weeks.
“He said to run the analysis this year on the right statistics,” Katherine continued. “No one would read them, and if they did, they’d tell them about the error at that point. I wasn’t comfortable with the arrangement.” She punctuated these words. “But it was the section head. At Frost Klein. And, the partner said that if the company asked, we’d disclose the mistake.” Katherine ran her hand through her hair. “But the surviving company with which the original one had merged did read the new report, they did notice the discrepancy, and they sued for fraud. I thought, fine, the partner is going to take responsibility. It made me sick, but the buck stopped with him.”
Grace’s expression had dropped. She lightly held her hands cupped over her ears. It was disaster porn, titillating and horrifying, for the attorney set.
“He had a meeting with the company, to which I wasn’t invited. I went to lunch. When I came back, the managing partner, the section head, and the head of HR were gathered in a conference room waiting for me. I was terminated immediately. The client had demanded the firm take action against me, though I’m sure the partner suggested it. I was confused.” She blinked now, reliving the moment. It made Sloane’s own stomach churn. “I was prepared to argue my case.” Her eyes stayed unfocused. “But the partner looked me straight in the eye and pushed documents across the table, documents they said they’d found in my office regarding the analysis from the year before, which I hadn’t even worked on, I swear. They were those statistics. The partner said I was the one responsible. He said he’d press criminal charges for my fraudulence on work for a public company under securities law. And the other attorneys there, I could tell that this was what they wanted. So I left. There was nothing I could do. They were threatening to disbar me.” Her voice became husky. “It was scary. I almost can’t believe I got out of there alive.”
“Christ,” Ardie said, finally setting down the party platter and dusting off her hands. “You could have made, what, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year if you’d stayed and made partner at Frost Klein.”
That was miles from what an attorney working in-house could typically make. Hundreds of thousands of miles, to be precise.
“Yep.” Katherine’s skin looked dewy, from sweat or alcohol or sun, Sloane wasn’t sure. But Katherine didn’t try to couch the issue by saying that it wasn’t about the money. (We had stopped buying the success-isn’t-synonymous-with-money line years ago when we realized how much less money we were making and, by extension, how much less success. We’d learned the hard way that money predicated success, not the other way around. Money was options. Money was the ability to take risks. To jump to the next level. Money can’t buy everything, we’d always been told. Money can’t buy time. To which we called B.S. We had the Care.com and Instacart accounts to prove it. Money was what we were after.)
Grace pulled her chin back in disgust. “Who was the partner?”
“Jonathan Fielding,” Katherine answered, without hesitation.
“Wow.” Sloane smacked her lips. “You must have wanted to kill him.”
“Sloane,” Ardie warned.
Katherine’s eyes, though, flashed in recognition. “If I’d had the chance, I think I would have.”
“Shoot.” Ardie looked out at the backyard, where the child half of the party was devolving into riot territory as little hands and feet pulled and stomped over the cardboard city. Scraps had begun to litter the fenced area. “I have to get the cake.”
“I’ll help!” Sloane raised her glass and followed Ardie into the kitchen. The screen door clanged shut behind them.
Ardie opened the refrigerator door and Sloane, who wasn’t actually particularly helpful at social gatherings, leaned her torso onto the kitchen island.
“Katherine seems a little unglued today, doesn’t she?” Sloane whispered, peering back over her shoulder through the window. “Do you think that’s really what happened?”
“Yes.” Ardie slid a red, white, and blue cake from the middle shelf. She cradled it in her arms, placing it down carefully beside where Sloane stood.
“She who is always so skeptical. That’s it?”
Ardie opened the drawer and began sinking candles through the icing around the cake’s perimeter. “That’s it.”
“What’s it called when men fail? Failing up?” Sloane eyed the frosting and debated a quick swipe of her finger through the blue swirls.
She struck a match on the side of the box. An orange flame jumped from its head. Sloane tipped it to meet the wicks and watched wax begin to drip onto the cake, until the flame burned just a second away from the tips of her fingers and she puffed it out. A breath of gray smoke curled and dissolved.
“I’ll say one thing,” Sloane said. “This is the booziest kid’s birthday I’ve ever attended. Well, except for Abigail’s first,” she mused.
She held the door for Ardie, who balanced the cake. The guests erupted into “Happy Birthday,” which Sloane sang with conviction. She noticed Rosalita missing from the ring of faces, but only in passing.
When the singing finished, slices of cake were cut and served. The sun had just begun to tip the day’s scales over into uncomfortably warm. Though that could have been due to the fact that she’d misplaced her champagne flute in the kitchen. The adults mingled, restless milling as everyone tried to extract themselves from the party in time to run errands, or get ready for a sitter that night, or to take naps.
It was with her mind on her own home and a pair of sweatpants that Sloane located Derek and then started guiding him toward Ardie to say their goodbyes. Grace was already collecting paper plates and shoving them into an open trash bag. And Sloane was considering how maybe it’d be easier if they all just chipped in for a cleaning service. Wouldn’t that be equally nice? If not nicer, she added.
Abigail came to show her a dandelion she’d found in the grass before she made a wish. And it was all such a blur that she hardly noticed who it was that had said to Ardie, “This was such a wonderful party. Thank you,” until Braylee and Tony appeared in front of them and Tony was saying to Derek, “There’s a scotch and chocolate tasting next month at our club, if you’re interested in making it a foursome. Braylee can get with Sloane for the details.”
And, well, Sloane had happened to be craving chocolate that very moment and so nodded enthusiastically and promised to speak soon.
When she turned it was to find Ardie’s face at point-blank range, the expression washed clean off it. “You’re going to get with Braylee for the details.” No question asked.
Sloane was about to press her hand to her forehead and decry the effects of too much bloody champagne. But she would have to do that at home with Derek. Because Ardie Valdez, she could see, wanted to hear none of it.
“It was just one or two times.” Or three or four, Sloane thought. Or five. “Derek ran into Tony at the grocery store one time.” She tried to imbue her tone with a sense of wonder, a what-are-the-odds type story. “And Tony asked him to play tennis at the club. Derek is always wanting to play tennis and you know I’m never letting him join a club.” Actually, there was a membership packet on the counter and Sloane had been very seriously considering it.
Ardie listened, passing out party favor bags without a word.
Sloane had begun to talk with her hands. “One thing led to another and—I’ve been meaning to mention it.”
Ardie’s mouth was a needle-sharp line. “But you ran out of time in the ten-odd hours that we work together, five days a week.”
Do you know what is worse than a text message? This. This is worse!
Sloane sighed, her posture wilting instantly. “Don’t be like that. I know you hate Tony.” Ardie glanced sharply at Sloane. “But Derek hardly has any guy friends. He works with a bunch of women. And he was a little bit thrilled to be invited, I think.” Derek stood at the fence gate, his hand resting on the back of Abigail’s neck. She swung a party favor bag at knee-level. Come on, he beckoned. “I was just trying to be—I don’t know—supportive.”
“Of whom?”
Sloane held up her finger to Derek. One second.
“Ardie, please don’t be mad.” Sloane had been under the impression that middle-aged people were no longer allowed to get mad at each other. So the slight chill in the air came as an unpleasant surprise.
“I’m not mad.”
“I didn’t intend for it to be some secret.” After that, Sloane wasn’t quite sure what else could be said. Because they were too old for petty grudges—weren’t they? And they’d been friends and colleagues for too long. And they were, most importantly, career women. They weren’t supposed to have time for drama.
“Sloane!” Derek barked.
“I have to go. We’ll talk about it on Monday. Or before Monday. Whenever you want.” Sloane followed Derek and Abigail out of the gate, assuring herself that the interaction had been nothing, that all was well, that Ardie didn’t blame her for what she’d done, but Sloane couldn’t swallow her own lie. Ardie was angry with her. She felt rotten, and in pretty shoes, no less. Her buzz flattened. She climbed into the seat of Derek’s SUV, the idea of a headache beginning to play in the center of her forehead. She stared out the window—the weather suddenly too hot, the birds too loud, the chugging sprinklers wasteful. She had other secrets. Lying dormant beneath the surface, safe from the ones she loved. She always believed that she kept them secret to avoid hurting anyone. But maybe, just maybe, that was another lie that would someday blow up in her face.