Then her mind snagged on the last thing Mrs. Sanchez had said.Dying?
There was always something off about Jade, when people were nice to her. She had enough self-awareness to know this but not enough wherewithal to do anything about it.
She attached herself to people who showed her the smallest acts of kindness—Ms. Morin the guidance counselor, her roommate’s mother, and now a gentle old man. There were other people too. There was the lady in the registrar’s office at college, who had also come from Lawrence but who had married a man from Newton and had two kids at Newton North High School. There was her high school basketball coach, who, the one season she played (she hated it and was terrible, too small to score, too clumsy to bob and weave), waived the cost of the uniform and, Juliana knew, must have paid her team fees out of his own pocket.
There had been nothing reciprocal about these situations, nothing she could give back. These people had helped Jade out of a general bigheartedness or a well-developed charitable muscle or maybe something as basic as old-fashioned pity. All Jade could offer in return was her gratitude, and even that she had to be careful with. She was constantly calculating and recalculating the doses in which the gratitude should be meted out so she didn’t come off as too grateful, which in turn came off as needy. Not grateful enough, and she wouldn’t be eligible for anything more. It was a tightrope walk, and she was constantly teetering, worried about falling off. It wasexhausting.
But here was George, who actively sought her company! They had four lunches over four Wednesdays, from the beginning of July through the beginning of August, while Jade completed her internship. They always ate at the same restaurant, the Landmark Tavern on Eleventh Ave., which had been around for billions of years. It was dark wood and brick, with an old-fashioned cash register behind the bar and signs written in Gaelic. George always got the shepherd’s pie; Jade, the chicken Caesar salad. Neither of them saw anyone they knew there.
Each lunch George started out by asking how things were going at work and then by asking her more about LookBook. They talked about funding: “You’ve got to reach out to the VCs, Jade. This is the kind of thing they’d eat up.” And they talked about the development of the technology: “I know a guy who can find the right people to help you with that.” They talked about George’s children—“I know they mean well but they just get so busy”—and about his beloved wife, dead now ten years: “Absolute love of my life.”
After the fourth lunch, George asked, “Would you consider dining at my home? Monday? My housekeeper is away, and I suppose I get lonely.” Would she? Sure. What else was she doing on a Monday evening? “I’ll send my driver.”
“Oh, you don’t have to do that! I’ll take the subway.”
“He’ll be there at seven.”
When she arrived at George’s building, when she disembarked from the car, when she glided past the doorman and through the door, she imagined she was someone else entirely.
“Mr. Halsey is expecting me,” she said to the concierge, who had cornrows wound into a bun, a furrow between her brows.
“Let me call up,” she said. Her expression conveyed skepticism.
“He’s definitely expecting me,” Jade said.
They ate sushi, and they drank white wine. George wanted to look at her numbers, to help her figure out how much of an investment she’d need to get started. He scribbled some figures on a pad of paper with a fountain pen (a fountain pen!). Half a million dollars, he decided. With half a million, she could build out the website, nail the algorithm, hire two people, rent office space.
“Well, forget that,” she said. “I don’t have half a million dollars.”
“That’s what investors are there for, my dear. That’s what they do.”
“I don’t know how to find an investor. I’m not ready yet.”
He put his hand over hers, there at the table: hers palm up, his palm down. “It’s not as hard as it seems,” he said. “There are people all over this city with money to burn. You’re ready.”
Was she ready? She whispered, “Thank you.”
“It is I who should thank you, my dear,” he said. His voice caught. “I who should thank you.”
Jade looked at George; she looked into his watery brown eyes. She looked down and studied their hands together on the table, his spotted one over her open palm. George, who looked at her like she was an angel sent straight from heaven, just for him. Nobody had ever looked at Jade like that, not once, not ever. Everybody thought she needed to be saved, never that she could do the saving.
When the end came it came quickly, but the dying had happened more slowly, under the surface, the way much dying does. After the sushi night they resumed their weekly lunches, and Jade watched George carefully for signs that he wasn’t feeling well. What she observed was mostly subtle. Partway through the month George began to stand up more slowly from the table, gripping the edges of it. By the end of the month she noted a decrease in his appetite. His had never been enormous, especially not compared to hers (she had read somewhere that a person who grew up without enough food would forever approach each meal as though it were their last one on Earth), but the ratio of what he ate compared to what he left behind shifted in the wrong direction.
After their last meal together (she didn’t know it would be their last), he took her hand as they left the restaurant. She couldn’t tell if he meant anything by it, but she didn’t pull away. Who was she to school a dying man—a kind, courteous, sad, generous dyingman—in the rules of modern-day civility? Let him take her hand! She wrapped her fingers around his, held them tight.
A week after that, George failed to show up at the Landmark. She sat for twenty-two minutes at the table, not ordering, feeling a knot of dread develop. The knot grew larger and warmer in her gut until it took up so much space it was hard to breathe. She kept her eyes fixed on the entrance of the restaurant in the same way a dog tied to a lamppost outside a store into which his owner has disappeared might keep his gaze, unwavering, on the door.
When her phone buzzed she turned it over, hoping for it to be George with an apology, an excuse, a request to reschedule. His kids were in town! His driver was ill! And old Harvard friend had shown up out of the blue! But it was a number not associated with a contact.
THIS IS VALENTINA SANCHEZ.(Mrs. Sanchez had a first name?)PLEASE CALL ME AT THIS NUMBER.
Fingers trembling, Jade dialed. “I saw in his calendar that he had lunch with you. He asked that I see if you could come to him.”
“Is he... okay?”
“No.”
“No, like—how much not okay?”
