Louisa’s heart lifts, and hope unspools. “Are you done? Are you coming up? My mother will be so happy. She thinks we must be headed for divorce court, to be spending so much time apart.” Maybe they can knit together in person! Metaphorically, again. She edges past a family walking slowly on the rocks. Too many years of being a New Yorker have made a leisurely pace impossible for Louisa Fitzgerald McLean.
“Oh, no. It’s not that. I can’t come up. It’s not even July yet. We’ve got miles to go before we sleep, you know that.”
The wind makes pleats in the water, and gulls circle, screaming. “I know,” she says. “I know, I know.” She keeps walking, and she thinks of the young woman with the amazing eyebrows who works in the front office. An absurd envious part of her that she typically tries not to give voice to asks, “How’s Greta?”
“Greta? Fine, I guess. I don’t know. Why?”
“No reason. I was just wondering.” Steven clears his throat, and Louisa keeps walking, and the water is dazzling in the sunlight, and she wishes she’d worn a hat.
“The thing I’m wondering about—Louisa, there’s something that I need. I mean, there’s something that All Ears needs, to get us through the final stretch.”
“No,” says Louisa instantly. She’s positive she knows what Steven is asking. “You can’t have more time after August. You can’t! Youpromised,Steven. You promised. My book is due and my sabbatical is ending andyou promisedthat ten weeks would be it.”
Louisa is sure that Steven’s hand not holding the phone is lifted, palm out, in the universal sign fordon’t freak out.“It’s not more time, Louisa. I’m not going back on our agreement. It’s something else.” She waits. What could it be? “I’m not sure how to—well, I’ll just come right out and say it. It’s the money from the Emergency Fund. EF. One investor pulled out, last minute, and we need to fund the next few months to get us in the best possible position to be acquired.” Steven starts speaking more quickly, like one of them has a stopwatch on the conversation. “We need to pay salaries, and we’ve got three different shows in production—we have to finish those. There are travel expenses, to talk to potential buyers. It’s a lot, and without that investor we just don’t have the cash.”
Louisa takes a deep breath—she’s almost at the end of the breakwater now, at the lighthouse, and she can see Ships View acrossthe way. She imagines she even sees the green dot of the raft in the water, and her three children plus Hazel.
“The Emergency Fund! Steven. You may as well have said you wanted one of Abigail’s kidneys. The Emergency Fund isn’t for this kind of thing!” Long ago, newly married, struggling then (in truth, as life became more expensive, the children more plentiful, they struggled still, sometimes struggled more) they’d birthed the fund. Ten percent of each paycheck, always: in the fund. Significant cash gifts from Annie and Martin on the occasion of each of the children’s births: in the fund. A medium-size inheritance from Steven’s childless aunt, who had remembered all of the McLean brothers in her will: in the fund. They put the fund in the hands of Murph, Steven’s Boston College buddy, who, whatever his faults (and faults he had aplenty), was in fact a solid money manager. The Emergency Fund has grown under Murph, grown a lot in fact, to $150,000, and there it sits, inviolable, untouchable, a nest egg they never want to crack. “No,” she says.
“No?”
“We don’t touch the Emergency Fund. It’s foremergencies!Like, an unexpected medical situation. Or if we get sued. Or if one of the kids needs to go to rehab someday.”
“Louisa! Who’s going to need to go to rehab?”
“Hopefully nobody. My money would be on Claire, if I had to pick. But probably not. Anyway, we didn’t use the EF when we redid the floors, and that’s why it took so long to get to them. We’re still living with the appliances that came with the apartment, waiting until we save enough to replace them. That stupid fourth burner that you have to light with a candle lighter. I hate that burner, but we said we’d wait and save up. We didn’t use the money for camp. Our kids have never been to Disney World, which is practically a rite of passage for an American child, and now Matty’s too old for it.”
“He’s not too old for the scary rides.”
“Well. But he won’t like the scary rides. My point is, we held back on all these things because we said we wouldn’t touch the Emergency Fund. We said we’d let it keep growing. We never said we’d invest it in a start-up! Where we could lose it!”
Steven’s voice cracks. “It’s notastart-up. It’smystart-up. And we’re not going to lose it. I’m talking about moving it from one investment to another. It’s just to tide the company over, and I’ll put it right back as soon as we have another investor, or when we sell.”
It’s true that All Ears is making itself attractive to big media companies. But it’s also true that bad things happen all the time to start-ups with good intentions.
“But it’s in the stock market—we pay taxes if we take it out!”
He’s silent for a moment, and she watches the Vinalhaven ferry pass by. “We only pay taxes on the profit.”
“How much is that?”
“I don’t know. I’d have to ask Murph.”
Dazzling sun on the outside; incandescent rage on the inside. This feels like a betrayal, as certain as if Steven had put his hand to Greta’s breast, stroked her perfect eyebrow. First the time, and now the money. What next?
“No. Don’t ask Murph. It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to do it. I don’t agree. The emergency fund is for emergencies, and this doesn’t feel like an emergency.”
“It does to me.”
“Well, it doesn’t to me.” She softens her voice. “I mean, yes, I see that it is acompanyemergency. But it’s not afamilyemergency. And there have to be other places All Ears can go for the money, not to your own personal fund. Our own personal fund.” She pauses, then says, “I have to go. Pauline is making her lobster bisque, and I’m bringing home the lobster.”
“Fine,” he says. “Enjoy your lobster.” His voice is clipped.
“I will.” Hers too.
On the way back, she tries to find herself in the memory of the girl who danced to “Hips Don’t Lie”at the club in Boston, making, without knowing it, the first tentative movements toward tying her life to Steven’s. Marriage, children, the quotidian details that make up a life, an Emergency Fund built from scratch. And now this: a screaming gull, a husbandless summer, a blooming resentment, just when she was ready to start knitting. She and that Ph.D. student in the boot-cut jeans feel like two entirely different people, unrecognizable to one another.
When she gets home, Claire is lying on a beach towel in the side yard, fast asleep. Louisa fears she’s burning. She pokes Claire’s leg with her toe, and when Claire startles awake she helps her move to a shadier spot.
