There were only two days left until the party.
“Final countdown,” Annie chirped as she handed Lena the caftan she’d just tried on. The arms and shoulders had fit her perfectly, just like Lena had pictured when she had bought it.
“Not a surprise that it needs to be hemmed,” Annie said with a nervous giggle as Lena looped the thread onto her sewing machine. “Everything needs to be hemmed on me!”
She paced back and forth along the perimeter of Lena’s crafting room. Lena wanted to send her on a made-up errand, clear the room of her jittery energy.
“I’ll have Laurel try her dress on too when she gets home from Abe’s, where she is again,” Annie said.
Lena looked up. There had been a sharp note in Annie’s voice. “Is everything still okay?”
“Great.” Annie was still pacing. “She’s talking to us again. I don’t know why I feel so … bottled up this week. Do you think it’s the party?”
Lena pressed the sewing machine’s pedal. “Maybe.”
“Why are you so calm?”
“Hilde the party planner,” Lena said. “She’s a dynamo. You’ll see when you meet her.”
Lena remembered how she used to wake up with a jolt the morning of a party with a weird stage fright, task lists multiplying in her head.
You seem more plugged in, Melanie had said a few weeks ago. I think it’s because you’ve given yourself permission to live.
Melanie was almost right. Lena had given herself permission to forget.
All of these years, Lena had confused grief and guilt, but the grief was not Lena’s, it never had been, and the guilt was self-generated. It could be ditched by the side of the road, it turned out, to become smaller and smaller in the rearview, until it was practically indistinguishable from the rest of the landscape.
Annie had stopped her pacing to stand uncomfortably close to Lena’s shoulder. The way she peered at the hemming process made it impossible for Lena to concentrate.
Lena pointed to the stitch in the caftan. “I don’t think the thread matches.”
Annie sucked in her lips noisily. The smack reverberated in Lena’s ear. “Looks fine to me.”
“If you don’t mind,” Lena said, “could you grab some extra thread from the closet? Top of the stairs, third door on the right, middle shelf, in a wicker basket.”
Annie repeated the instructions, flashed a thumbs-up, left the room.
“Take your time,” Lena called after her. “Just grab all the pinks.”
Relieved, she returned to the hemming.
Upon closer examination, Lena saw the thread color was a little off. She leaned over the dress, carefully ripped out the stitches.
“I’m leaning toward going to that academic conference I told you about,” Jen said. “The one in June.”
She and Paul were in the car, driving home from an impromptu date night at a downtown sushi spot. Through the windshield, the moon was large and full, and the sky around it an electric blue.
“You should go,” Paul said.
Jen glanced over to the passenger seat. “I’d be away for five days.”
“So?”
“Is it that easy?”
“Sure.”
Jen did have a light optimistic feeling that it might be that easy, that the Paganos might be approaching something close to balance.
Since March—right around the time Abe had become friends with Laurel—there had been nary a square of toilet paper hung from a tree in all of Cottonwood Estates. Her worry that Abe was the vandal seemed a million years behind them, just like that horrible meeting at Foothills with Dutton.
In retrospect, she was almost grateful for it—and even for that uncomfortable call with Scofield—because they were now in a better place, with a small but legitimate circle of support.
Abe had two friends, if you counted Colin. He had Dr. Shapiro and Nan and the Kingdom School, which had its faults but was a good fit.
And Jen had the women of book club, not the Hitchcockian murder of crows she had imagined in darker moments, but more a circle of clucking mother hens.
As she turned into their driveway, Jen realized that the spot between her scapulae, usually rock-hard, was relaxed. Her entire body felt warm and content.
There were less complicated children out there, but there were also parents who might have handled it all better. In the name of protecting Abe, Jen had lost nuance, self-awareness, her career: everything that had made Jen Jen.
Almost everything. When Maxine Das had recalled Jen as the tigress from graduate school, Jen hadn’t initially recognized herself because all of that fire and drive wasn’t channeled toward the pursuit of tenure anymore.
It had all been repurposed, focused on Abe.
Jen had been stuck in tigress mode for years. But there were reinforcements now. Maybe the beast could finally loosen her hold.