Rumaan Alam: Rich and Pretty

“You just missed them. Huck likes to make a big fuss about commuting out here from the city. They’re the same.”

“Of course they are,” Lauren says. “Tell them I said hi, though. I’ll send your mom my new book, when it’s out. She’ll get a kick out of it.”

“How’s your family?”

“The same,” Lauren says. “They’re fine. Ben and Alexis are having a baby.”

“Your parents must be psyched.” Sarah doesn’t say what she thinks, which is that Lauren must be relieved that her brother is taking the pressure off her. She’s never fully understood the complexities of Lauren’s relationship with her parents. She’s met them. She remembers them as perfectly pleasant. She can’t understand, but then, unhappy families, et cetera.

“Oh, they are,” Lauren says. “They’re planning a baby shower that’s only slightly less complicated than a royal wedding.” She takes another sip of the wine.

The door to the kitchen slides open, and Henry emerges from the house, face still flush with sleep, skin marked with lines from his bedding. His hair, thick, so like his father’s, stands on end. He frowns. “Mommy,” he says, his voice hoarse.

“Hi, baby,” she says. She opens her arms and Henry, aware that she can’t leap up to embrace him, wiggles over toward her. His body is hot, and soft. He smells wonderful. “How was your nap?”

“Good.” He yawns. An automatic response; good manners. “Mommy, can I swing?”

How she lives for it, this Mommy . Soon, too soon, it will be Mom, then, impatient, angry even. Mom! Doors slamming. Hard to imagine, though maybe it won’t be that way. She wasn’t that way, was she, as a teenager? Sarah can barely remember. It seems unimportant, now, what she was like; the only thing that matters, anymore, is what he will be like, him and his brother. The baby startles, kicks. She has a theory he does that at the sound of his big brother’s voice.

“It’s so hot,” she says. “We should get you a cup of water.” He looks up at her, his eyes dark, bottomless, under those eyelashes. He’s beautiful in the way she never has been. And it’s his birthday. Let him swing.

“Let’s swing,” she says. She heaves herself up, bracing palms against the iron table, a hand-me-down from Lulu, the one that sat poolside in Connecticut throughout her youth. She wonders if Lauren recognizes it. The table scrapes against the concrete. “Lauren, you coming?”

“Right behind you,” she says. She refills the glass, and they follow Henry, racing, awake now, down toward the swing set.

He leaps onto the seat, face pure joy. “Push me,” he says. “Push, push.”

And she does. The grass beneath her bare feet, swollen and fat, she pushes, back and forth, back and forth, stepping aside slightly, to keep the swing from banging into her belly. Henry laughs, such a sweet sound, and she keeps pushing, back and forth, up and down.

Thanks to Julie Barer and her colleagues at the Book Group, and to Megan Lynch and Kate Cassaday and their colleagues at Ecco and Harper Canada. Thanks to Dan Chaon, Alexander Chee, Mira Jacob, Edan Lepucki, and Emma Straub. Thank you to Vern Yip and Craig Koch, for their generous hospitality. Thank you to Dr. Bhoomi Brahmbhatt, for her expert insight. Thank you to Jennifer Romolini (for “groupthink”), Kristina Dechter (my first reader), Emily Hsieh (for the think tank), Samantha Turner (for the mascara), Lauren Whitehouse (for the ice), and Amanda Guttman and David Tamarkin (for everything else). Thank you to the weirdos on Twitter who kept me company while I worked.

I wrote this book mostly between the hours of 8:00 P.M. and 3:00 A.M.; this would have been unthinkable but for David Land, who shouldered the responsibilities (financial, parental, you name it) that I shirked for many months. All people should have a partner so generous; all children should have a parent so devoted. How I got so lucky, I will never know.

RUMAAN ALAM’Swriting has appeared in New York magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books , the Wall Street Journal , the Rumpus, Washington Square Review, The Gettysburg Review, American Short Fiction , and elsewhere. He studied at Oberlin College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

RUMAANALAM.COM

Twitter: @RUMAAN

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