CHAPTER SIX

SEAN HADN’T FULLY OPENED THE DOOR TO HIS APARTMENT WHEN his sister’s voice barreled down the hallway. “Where’ve you two been?” Nicole’s tone was always a little scary. At least he was used to it.

He gave Toby a pat on the back. “Homework. Go.” Toby trudged to his room.

Nicole’s pumps lay where she’d kicked them off. She was reclining on the couch reading The New York Law Journal.

“You, too,” he said to his sister. “Go, you’ll be late.” Thursdays were insane. As soon as he got Toby home from tutoring, Nicole went back to work and left Kat with them.

“I’m off tonight,” she said. “They had to wait until the last minute to tell me, those assholes.”

Over the years, Nicole’s thighs had thickened and gray strands had crowded out the brown in her short haircut. She’d always been a tomboy, and now, as an adult, she’d embraced a butch look that worked for her. Her official orientation was heterosexual, but non-sexual seemed more fitting.

“And my class is canceled next week,” he said. “Don’t forget.” The gig at the Art Students League paid him just enough to cover one-sixth of a shared painting studio downtown. Without Ellie around to stay with Toby, he hardly used it anymore. But he refused to give it up.

“Mommy!” Kat was sobbing as she ran out of Toby’s bedroom. Her bony little legs looked like they might crumple from the exertion. Kat embodied everything her mother lacked in girliness. She played with dolls, wore pink daily, and wanted to be a ballerina when she grew up. Nicole would shrug her shoulders. “She must get it from her father.”

Nicole got knocked up during a one-night stand around the same time Ellie got pregnant. He and Ellie used to call it the immaculate conception because neither of them could imagine Nicole having sex or anything approaching a relationship. She was far more comfortable in a prosecutorial role.

“Kiddo, what is it?” Nicole reached out and pulled in her daughter. “Calm down. What’s wrong?” Kat tried to catch her breath. Her face was a streaky mess. “He called me … he called me a COOL.”

“Well that doesn’t sound so bad.” Nicole smoothed back a strand of her hair.

“Not cool,” Kat said. “A COOL.”

Nicole and Sean eyed each other. What were they missing?

Toby skulked guiltily out of his room.

“Toby says a C-C-COOL,” Kat stuttered, “is a Constipated, Overweight, Out-of-style Loser.” She burst into tears.

He had to admit the insults had gotten more creative since he’d been in school. “Toby,” he said. “Over here. Now.”

Toby let out a defeated sigh. “What?”

Sean raised his eyebrows. No need for more.

“Sorry Kat,” Toby said. “You’re not a COOL.”

Kat’s lower lip was still trembling. “Really?”

“Yeah, you’re a JERK.”

“Mom!” Kat was ready to unleash another flood.

“Toby,” he now used the Ultra Serious Dad voice he reserved for serious infractions. “Go to your room.”

“No dad, a JERK is a good thing,” Toby said defensively. “It’s a Junior Educated Rich Kid. There’s also PERK, which is a Perfectly Educated Rich Kid. That’s what I am.”

Sean stared at his offspring, unable to control his jaw, which had gone slack. Forget the fact that Toby was not rich. If he was going to go around telling people outside of Bradley that he was rich and perfectly educated, well, he was going to get the crap kicked out of him. But this probably wasn’t the moment to get into that.

Nicole rocked Kat. Her glare screamed disapproval.

“Enough with the acronyms,” he said to Toby. “Apologize.”

“But …” Toby started. He looked at Sean, then at Nicole, and decided not to push it. “Sorry Kat,” he said. It was less than convincing. But it would have to do.

“And no more name calling,” he said. “Last warning.”

They dragged their feet down the hallway. Before they turned the corner into Toby’s room, Kat stuck out her tongue. “Told you you’d get in trouble,” she taunted. Toby just shook his head and rolled his eyes.

“Bradley kids—future leaders of the free world,” Nicole mumbled. “Nice.”

Obviously Bradley had its drawbacks. He’d never planned on sending his kid to private school. And Ellie—always up for rejecting her past—had been fine with the idea of public school. They were all set to do it. Somehow Ellie’s mother had convinced them to take a look.

“Bradley has changed,” Maureen had said. She was your classic volunteer lady—the thing Ellie was most afraid of turning into. “You’ll see. It’s very with it. They have minorities now—scholarship students from Queens and the Bronx.” To Maureen and Ellie’s father, Dick, the outer boroughs were exotic and volatile, much like third world countries. Sean couldn’t remember now why they’d agreed to take the tour.

“At Bradley we focus on the whole child,” Mimsy Roach had said with feeling as she guided prospective parents from the gymnasium to the black box theater. “Each child’s differences make her unique.” The use of her had thrown him, but he tried to stay with Mimsy’s spiel. “Different ethnicities, socio-economic backgrounds, learning styles, we welcome it all,” she went on. “That’s what makes this place stand out from all the other independent schools. We don’t only accept diversity. We crave it.”

Mimsy was a walking billboard for the place. With casual asides like, “There’s no challenge we don’t love,” and “our primary goal is to teach children to give back to the community,” everything that came out of her mouth was exactly what you wanted to hear. She let it slide toward the end of the tour that she’d graduated from Bradley and rushed back to work at the school after matriculating to Wellesley.

By the end of the tour, every parent was sold on the place. Suddenly, neither Sean nor Ellie could imagine sending Toby to a school that didn’t have a state-of-the-art computer room, cutting-edge science labs, a competition pool, and a professional art studio. Ignoring, for the moment, the joy they knew it would bring Maureen and Dick (who never tired of wearing his Bradley ‘53 varsity sweater), they found themselves being swept up in the excitement. They decided to go for it. When they got Toby’s acceptance letter, they jumped up and down and shrieked with joy. They couldn’t help feeling like they’d won the lottery.

“You’re spending tens of thousands of dollars,” Nicole said now, “or should I say tens of thousands of dollars are being spent—so Toby can learn to be a snob.”

“I could send him somewhere I could afford,” Sean said. “But you of all people know you get what you pay for.” This hit her where he knew it would hurt.

Nicole had decided to save on student loans by choosing an affordable law school. At eight thousand dollars a year, University of Buffalo seemed like the perfect choice. “Suckers,” she’d say, when her friends graduated from Yale and Harvard strapped with one hundred and fifty thousand dollars of debt.

When it came time to apply for jobs, it turned out that Nicole was, in fact, the sucker. The big New York law firms—and the six-figure salary she’d been counting on—dried up when they saw SUNY Buffalo on her resume. Maybe if she’d been on Law Review or at the top of her class or something it would have been different, but Nicole had had to work two jobs just to pay the discounted tuition plus room and board.

Her job as an Assistant District Attorney wasn’t bad, but the pay was. She lived on 155th Street and was barely getting by. Luckily, Kat had gotten into the G&T program at P.S. 163—New York–speak for “Gifted and Talented.” In theory, it was an “enriched” curriculum available free to any four-year-old who scored high enough on a standardized kindergarten exam, but it was still public school, which meant money was always tight. As a result, music and art—anything extra—flew out the window in lieu of things like lunch and toilet paper.

Sean was breaking his one rule with Nicole: do not under any circumstances get her started on school. Not only did she have a gigantic chip on her shoulder, but she was also an excellent litigator, not to mention she’d been trained to go for the jugular by the D.A., and by their parents before that.

“At least I’m not taking handouts from my in-laws,” she said.

“Nice,” he said. “What’s up with you tonight?”

“I’m on the rag.”

“Well back off. I’ve had a hard day.”

Nicole’s body language changed. “What happened?”

Sean shrugged away the question.

Nicole narrowed her eyes and lowered her voice. “Did you hear from Ellie again?”

“No.” He said it defensively.

Ellie had been sending postcards to Toby from all over the country as she got progressively farther away from home. The last one had come from Santa Fe. But she’d only bothered to call Sean three times since she’d been gone. Once to say she was okay—that she’d gone off the Prozac and was no longer staying up all night and dropping a thousand dollars a day (that he was still paying off) on Internet purchases. But she didn’t want to come home. Not yet. She told him not to worry. But not to call either. It was temporary, she said. “I’m not sure I want to leave you.” The statement had been as reassuring as a two by four to the solar plexus.

The second time she’d called she was crying hysterically and slurring her words. “I’m a bad mother,” she’d said.

“So come home,” he said and hung up. It seemed to have completely escaped her that she’d abandoned him, too. The third time had been the other night at the parent social.

The last miscarriage had pushed Ellie over the edge. He hadn’t been convinced another kid was even a good idea—the cost, for one thing—but when Ellie realized how hard it would be to get back into network television at an executive level, she decided to bag the job search and throw herself into another six years of the super-mom thing. It would be great for Toby to have a sibling, she’d argued, until he agreed. She waged a highly orchestrated attack involving ovulation kits, waiting thirty-six hours between “tries” as the doctor called what had become of their sex life, and elevating her legs in the air for twenty minutes afterwards. It took almost a year to get pregnant. Ellie was devastated when she lost the baby ten weeks in. It took another year to get pregnant again. When she had another miscarriage, she sunk even deeper. He’d tried to stop the “trying” then. But when he suggested that maybe a second child wasn’t in the cards, that they were good the way they were, Ellie became even more focused on success. “I’m not giving up,” she’d said, as if sheer will and hard work were going to make the difference. “We can do this.” The two other pregnancies ended almost before they started. She managed to take Toby to school in the mornings before crawling back into bed for the rest of the day. She stopped shaving her legs and shopping for groceries. He told her he loved her, that they didn’t need another baby. He kept telling her that their family was perfect the way it was. He cooked her dinner and combed her hair, but Ellie couldn’t shake it. She was depressed.

He took her to a shrink. The Prozac helped her get out of bed. Three months later, she left him.

“So if it’s not Ellie, what is it?” Nicole had tossed the Law Journal on the table and was gearing up to hound him. “Is it work? Wait, don’t tell me. You have to do a layout of Brad Pitt’s colonoscopy.”

“Funny.” Sean went into the kitchen and grabbed a couple of beers from the fridge.

“So it’s school. Let me guess …”

This was not a fun game. “Just drop it, okay?”

But Nicole didn’t drop things unless she wanted to. “Let’s see, they want Toby to start training now for the SATs.”

He handed her a beer.

“They’re worried because he’s not in AP physics yet and he’s falling behind the eleventh graders.”

“Okay. I get it.”

“He’s in too many after school activities.” She was on a roll now. “He’s not in enough after school activities.”

He took a drink, and tried to ignore her.

Nicole plowed ahead. “His advanced artwork is taking time from his advanced math so they’d like to give him extra help and maybe throw in some study drugs to get him up to speed.”

He stared at her, annoyed but slightly impressed. She took a sip of beer and raised her eyebrows as if to say, Am I close?