Rumaan Alam - Rich and Pretty

“I have some news, though,” Dan says.

“Oh?”

“I have to go to Minneapolis for the final phase of the test,” he says. “It won’t be until November, but Doctor Inglis had to drop out, and there’s no one else.”

“Well, if you have to go, you have to go.” She squeezes the half lemon into the palm of her hand, catching the seeds in the crevices between fingers, tossing the sticky pips in the general direction of the sink. Since Henry, Botswana has been forgotten. Even Minneapolis now sounds to her as far away as the moon. She dips her lemony hands into the spinach, tosses it, working her fingers over the oily leaves. She shakes them clean, washes them quickly, pauses, listening: Is that the baby? No, nothing.

“I’ll fly back, weekends, of course.”

“So much flying,” she says. “Back and forth. If you need to stay, you should. You should get some downtime. Find a nice hotel, order room service, the whole thing. You don’t want to spend every weekend at the airport.”

“We’ll see. November in Minneapolis.” Dan yawns. “I’m not exactly thrilled about it.”

Pecans. She remembers there are pecans. She breaks the seal on the airtight canister, snaps pecans in half and tosses them on top of the spinach. “What about Thanksgiving? Mom mentioned maybe doing it in the country this year.”

“In the country?”

“A new tradition,” she says. “Grandchild playing in the leaves while Huck bastes.”

“I’m all for new traditions,” he says. “Though I don’t know that he’ll be up for frolicking in the leaves this year. We’ll be lucky if he can hold his head up by then.”

Sarah loosens and then reties the sash around the robe. She doesn’t want to go into the bedroom, wake Henry, so she’ll dress later, or just slip into bed naked, the sheets cool against her skin, and she’ll pull Henry close to her when he cries; it’ll be easier for his little mouth to find her breast. She won’t even need to wake up. It’s weirdly second nature already, and she knows she’s lucky that it hasn’t been too hard, or too painful. She lifts the dish off the sandwich. It needs a good forty minutes to really compress, but never mind. There’s a traditional sandwich made this way, tuna, lots of olives, oil, and bread — something she had in France, once, as a child, on vacation with her parents. She’s forgotten it until now. You wrap the sandwich in plastic, compress it for hours, eat it at the seaside. She’ll do that, before the summer’s out — they can pack a picnic, drive to Long Island; Amina’s mother has a place in Quogue. Sarah puts the sandwiches on plates, divides the salad in half. Forks; no need for knives. She should have put capers in the chicken, but never mind. She carries the plates out of the kitchen and into the living room, places them on the coffee table, a twinge as she bends, still some soreness there, right at the hip.

“Dinner and a movie,” Dan says. He stands, picks up the glass, walks to the sofa. “Thanks, babe.”

She shrugs. “It’s nothing special.” Salt, pepper. She goes back to the kitchen for the saltbox, the pepper mill — a matching set, a wedding gift from Dan’s aunt and uncle. She brings these to the coffee table.

Dan’s switched on the television, volume turned low. “Stupid sitcom, reality show about cake, reality show about hairdressing, reality show about singing?”

“I think that’s dancing, actually, that one. I vote for cake.”

“Cake it is, then.” Dan flicks the volume up, just a bit, brings the sandwich to his mouth. “Delicious, babe. Thank you.”

She plucks one of the pecans off the salad. Are they a superfood? She can never remember what the superfoods are, or what they promise. Her hips do not want her to sit on the floor, as she normally would. She perches on the edge of the chair across from the sofa. It’s leather, midcentury, and she’s recently decided it’s not her taste. She should send it to the store, it’s the kind of thing that always finds a buyer quickly. She takes a bite of the sandwich. It would have been better with capers. Through the open bedroom door, she hears the snuffle, the tiny wail with which Henry announces he’s awake. He’ll be wet, and he’ll be hungry, too.

“Be right back,” she says.

Trucks — Sarah said he likes trucks.But a truck T-shirt? A book about trucks? A puzzle depicting trucks? A realistic, German-made plastic scale model of a truck, or a handcrafted hunk of wood that somehow communicates the essence of a truck? A little plastic package with five metal trucks inside or a set of pajamas emblazoned with trucks or a toothbrush that comes with truck toothpaste or a box of markers that’s shaped like a truck or a bouncy red rubber ball with a picture of a fire truck on it or a green plastic truck that’s meant to go in the sandbox or to the beach and comes with a little shovel and a tiny rake? Lauren doesn’t know what a five-year-old boy likes, or thinks about, or cares about. And she doesn’t know it for certain, but it’s reasonable to guess that this particular five-year-old boy has a fairly significant arsenal of toy trucks, truck books, truck clothes, truck ephemera, at home.

She settles on a truck made of wood, a jaunty green semi, pulling a simple wood car trailer, bearing four little wooden cars, but as this is fairly inexpensive, she also buys a pair of books, texts, taxonomies, really: photographs and jargon (what child needs to know about a goose-neck trailer truck?) but the girl at the bookstore swears they’re very popular. She wraps them in paper that’s bright blue with white polka dots, and taken in sum the three packages look alluring and bountiful, particularly when stuffed into a little paper bag, tied, for good measure, with a single, bobbing balloon. Henry will probably be diverted by the balloon and bag, mostly, in accordance with the law that deems the packaging more interesting than the contents.

The party is at their house. All that space — why wouldn’t it be? And that backyard, a simple rectangular lot, but excavated and carved and contoured and polished by the previous owners (landscape architects both). An arbor wrapped in vines bridges the kitchen and the yard. She’s sat there with Sarah and Dan, dinner, candlelit, a charmed summer evening, and looked down into the spill of all that yard, the stone terrace, planted with herbs, that runs the length of the garden, the single pine at the very back, making it possible to pretend their neighbor’s house doesn’t exist. She’s been there for dinner with Matt; she’s been there for dinner with Thom. Sarah liked Matt; Sarah did not like Thom. In the end, Lauren liked neither of them, and now they’re both mostly forgotten, footnotes, background in different, more important memories: dropping by with Christmas presents for Henry, bringing over a bagful of cookbooks for no particular reason, eating spatchcocked chicken Dan grilled under two aluminum foil-wrapped bricks, even the very first time she saw the house. Matt had driven her over. It was March, and the trees were naked, and the house was empty, so the windows were bare; thus, the rooms were drenched in pale light, and the place seemed holy, blessed, massive beyond reason. Matt, anyway, had been impressed.

The toy store is not far from their place, so she walks. It is sticky — New York in August, the air dense and swampy, what little breeze there is hot and ineffectual. The asphalt looks shiny, like it’s melting, and the garbage cans on the corners, overflowing with discarded Popsicle wrappers and other effluvia, smell terrible. The tote bag weighs heavily on her shoulder — she’s brought her most recent book, for Sarah, a monograph on creative spaces for children: playrooms with chalkboard walls, an old ballroom fitted out with a trampoline and basketball court, bunk beds carved to look like a pirate ship. Silly, but it had been fun to work on.