That was when I remembered that tomorrow was Saturday, and on Saturday I had agreed to go to brunch at the Hotallings’.
“Who are the Hotallings?” Jonathan asked.
We were comfortable in bed, and so I explained who the Hotallings were as well. Skip and Polly were easier to unpack than one might imagine.
“And there’s a brunch in Darien?”
“At their house.”
“Are you picking Eddie up?”
I shook my head. I would drive and he would take the train. He would get there before me. We had worked it all out. Jonathan told me he was going to come. “Call Eddie and tell him to call the Hotallings. They’ll understand. The husband just got back from a lengthy trip. He refuses to be separated from you.”
“You don’t want to come to the Hotallings’ for brunch,” Isaid. “Trust me on this.”
“I want to be with you,” he said. “I came back from Wisconsin to be with you.”
Like all long-married couples, Jonathan and I were capable of sitting across from one another at the breakfast table without a single sentence to exchange, which made this closeness a luxury—bed, horse, brunch. That he offered to go with me to Connecticut was an act of generosity I could hardly fathom.
I lived in a school full of girls, most of them smart from wealthy families, a few of them very smart from working-class families or occasionally poor families. Girls who loved literature above all else—ask me any question about these girls, and I would be able to answer. I imagined Eddie’s life to be limited in similar ways, buffeted as he was by readers on every side. We were especially qualified to talk to people coming out of libraries, bookstores, or certain classrooms. The rest of humanity? Less so.
But Jonathan could talk to anyone, illness and death being the guaranteed common denominator. He wasn’t worried about the Hotallings at all. I texted Eddie to tell him Jonathan was coming, and Eddie promised to pass the happy news along to our hosts.
The next day we took the Hutch north, past the exits for Rye and Port Chester and Scarsdale, the parkway living up to its name as a park to be driven through, the trees that lined either side of the road a rich and heavy green. Jonathan seemed to be nothing but happy driving to Connecticut on his first full day at home, giving my knee an occasional affectionate pat. Moreover, there was nothing in the story of Eddie Triplett and Skip and Polly Hotalling that surprised him. “Everyone goes their own way,” he said when I laid it all out.
“I once fired a doctor who lived in Darien,” he said as wepassed the state line into Connecticut and the beautiful Hutch became the much more beautiful Merritt and the tax rates lowered considerably. “It must have been my first month or two on the job. I know it was before you got here. The guy who had the job before me left the mess behind. Didn’t want to deal with it. Not that I could blame him. I didn’t want to deal with it either.”
“What was he doing?” I asked, grateful not to be driving. Grateful for pretty much everything.
“Back surgery. There is a fortune to be made in back surgery.”
“He was doing back surgery on people who didn’t need back surgery?”
“He was doing back surgery on people who should have had their tonsils out. Anyway, the guy was impossible to pin down. He was always busy doing back surgery. For whatever reason, I ended up going out to his house to talk to him. I’d never been to Darien before. Maybe that was why he wanted to get me out there, so he could show me what his overhead looked like.”
“So what happened?”
“I fired him,” Jonathan said. “Then I dealt with the lawsuits. He sued the hospital, the patients sued the hospital. He tried to sue me personally. As we say in the business, it was a dumpster fire. That’s what I think of whenever I think of Darien.”
“What was his house like?”
Jonathan thought for a minute. “Like stacks of money shaped into a building.”
I laughed, and when, fifteen minutes later, we arrived at the Hotallings’ address on Pear Tree Point Road, I asked him if the surgeon’s house had been anything like this. Jonathan shook his head. “Oh, no. This is tasteful,” he said. “This is modest.”
We continued to sit in the car, contemplating. “I guess if alltheir children came home at the same time and brought all their children and no one was willing to double up in a room—”
Then the heavy wooden door of a type most often found on cathedrals swung open and Eddie came out. “Fullers!” he shouted.
It was the second time they had met, but there went Jonathan, arms open, as I was getting out of the car.
“Am I ruining your entire weekend?” Eddie asked.
“Brunch in Connecticut?” Jonathan said. “Are you crazy?”
“Polly wants very much to make a good impression,” Eddie said to me. “If I had wanted to make a good impression, I would have let you stay home.” In another minute she was there behind him, standing in the open door.
“Come in, come in,” she said with radiant good cheer. “You’re so nice to drive out here on a Saturday.”
