“Fine,” she concedes. “Go on.”
“It was September, almost five years ago. Tiger Woods was recovering from knee surgery. Justin Thomas won the BMW Championship, but then Rory McIlroy won the Tour Championship in Atlanta. The next month, the Nationals were going to beat the Astros in the World Series.”
“That’s a lot of sports context,” Nicola says. She squints into the middle distance and thinks back to almost five years ago. She was in law school. She knew Zachary, but they weren’t dating yet. If she was being honest she’d say she was trying to get his attention, because at the time she thought his opacity was mysterious and sexy.
Jack continues, “LookBook was a few years old then, gaining traction. David and Taylor were engaged. David was living with me in New York City, in an apartment owned but not occupied by my parents.”
“Sorry, I have to interrupt,” says Nicola. “Your parents just had an extra Manhattan apartment lying around?”
“Well, it wasn’tlying around.It was sitting. Sitting empty. Theybought it as an investment.” He smiles. “And they decided to invest in me.” He picks up her hand and traces the inside of her palm, delivering a wicked grin at the same time. “You’ll see, Nicky. I’m worth investing in.”
Flustered, she tries to keep them on track. “David and Taylor didn’t live together?” Taylor and David had met freshman year of college, and they’d been almost inseparable since.
“Not yet. They were renovating that brownstone in Back Bay to move into after the wedding. Taylor’s dad wanted her in the Boston office, but at that time she was still in New York. She was off and running with her career.”
“What about our David?”
Jack shakes his head regretfully. “Our David was at loose ends. His degree was in sociology, but, shocker, nobody was hiring sociologists with no experience.”
“Was anyone hiring sociologistswithexperience?” asks Nicola, and Jack hoots.
Even if they were, explains Jack, Taylor and David were soon moving to Boston, so what was the point of trying to get a job?
“What wasyourdegree in?” Nicola asks.
“Golf.”
“No, seriously.”
“I’m being completely serious.” Jack grins again, to show her that he really isn’t, but he doesn’t answer the question.
“My theory,” says Jack, maybe reading her mind, drawing out the wordtheorylike he’s getting paid for extra syllables, “is that everything I’m about to tell you has to do with race cars.”
Nicola does a spit take. “What?”
“You know about David’s race car thing,” Jack says. He looks at Nicola sideways, in a way that suggests he’s going to share a tremendous secret.
“Ofcourse,”says Nicola, pinched by the tiniest, most unobtrusiveirritation. “OfcourseI know about David’s race car thing.” They had talked about this at dinner, didn’t he remember? “I know David better than you do!”
Jack arches a single sexy eyebrow and says, “Do you?”
“Well, I used to know him better. I used to know him better than anyone did.” David was the brother Nicola never had, her teacher, protector, sometimes enabler. You don’t spend every holiday, a bunch of weekends, and most of the summer with someone without getting to know them as well as you know your own siblings. David taught her to drive, taught her to drink (not at the same time), taught her how to throw a football and catch a baseball and survive the scary Spanish teacher at the high school who refused to speak in English even to the beginner-level classes.
She slurps down the rest of her Mudslide and doesn’t object when Jack orders another round. “So you know about the state fair,” says Jack. He presses his elbow to hers, almost indecently.
Nicola reclaims her elbow and says, “Yes, Jack. I know about the fair.” In 2002, the day before school started, both families, hers and David’s, all eleven of them, took a family trip to the Minnesota State Fair. “I wasatthe fair. I was at the race when Gary St. Amant won the 300 after seventeen years of not winning.”
“Look who has the sports knowledge now,” says Jack, impressed.
“I have a lot of knowledge,” says Nicola, secretly proud of herself. “Want me to tell you about it?”
“Of course I do.”
“So we’re at the fair, trooping around, doing all the fair things. It started off as just this experience we were going to have as a family, watch a NASCAR race, you know, something different to do before we went off to get the fried dough—”
“But something changed in David when he watched that race,” says Jack, and now Nicola is impressed, because that’s exactly how she would have put it.
“Exactly. Something changed in David.”
