The cat—fuck my life—obliged. I opened the next one, then folded it right back up. Sweat suddenly lined my forehead, and my skin had grown prickly.
“Can he pick again?” I said as the heat spread to my hands and cheeks. “Is that allowed? He’s a he, right? Sorry, I didn’t mean to gender your cat.”
Meredith laughed. “He’s a boy, yes. And, unfortunately, no. Once Pinot has selected, we cannot change course. It creates dishonesty in the narrative, and you’ll feel it. And then, of course, the reader will feel it too.”
I nodded. That was an insane thing to say, given the cat, but otherwise, I did understand. She was right: good writers told the truth, always. Eventually, at least.
“Just read it,” Katie said.
I handed it to her. She gulped.
“Girl next door.”
Meredith nodded, then shook the bowl once. Pinot, this time, jumped inside, pushed a few balls around, and made his selection. He delivered this one directly to Meredith, almost as if he didn’t trust us.
Meredith’s face remained neutral as her eyes passed over the scrap, but I swore, somewhere in there, beneath the filler and the facelifts and whatever else she’d surely done to herself, I saw it: a sliver of a smirk.
“What does it say?” Katie asked. For what it was worth, she’d stopped taking notes, and her cheeks were completely red. I stared into what was left of my cake slice and braced for it. We all knew what was coming.
“Brother’s best friend,” Meredith said. “A classic, don’t you think?”
We were mostly quiet in the back of the car. After brunch, Meredith had told us she’d send for us again two weeks from tomorrow and to put together an outline and our first fifty pages for her to review. We also left with a stack of books, all set in the Hamptons:A Widow for One Year, Amagansett, Philistines at the Hedgerow. Neither of us bothered to mention we’d grown up an hour west of here: same county, same ocean, different world.
“Hey,” I said as the skyline encroached, thick stacks of gray and gold. It was late afternoon now, the sun low but relentless. “Why did Meredith stop writing?”
“I don’t know, honestly. From what I’ve heard, she just loved it too much.”
I nodded, then pressed my nose against the window. Neither of us said another word for the rest of the ride home.
9
Katie
I called my mother around eight that evening, the buzz of my strange day at Meredith’s having evaporated, the cucumber sheet mask on my face soft and cool, the fact that I didn’t completely hate Tyler McNally’s guts floating somewhere between my throat and my malfunctioning prefrontal cortex. Lola was on a first date, and every article of clothing, tube of lip gloss, and bottle of nail polish we owned was splayed out on our beds as a result, so I’d set up my work on our coffee table instead. Four hundred names, each written on a tiny sticky note, then arranged around twenty-five invisible circles.
When my brother died, my mother started a foundation for other athletes, from middle schoolers to NFL players, who’d gone down the same path as Mikey. My mom had a background in people—real estate; nothing fancy, just unremarkable houses on the south shore in Suffolk County. But she knew how to socialize, how to make a deal, and the foundation grew and grew. It raised tens of millions of dollars a year, and its biggest event, a black-tie gala held the final weekend in August, marked my brother’s passing every summer.
“I was thinking,” she said, “what if we moved the Cohens to the state senator’s table? Amelia played basketball at Michigan State, and I think her father could really make an impression, especially with the social media bill we’ve been working on. But then, if we move them, we’d have to move the de la Costas too.”
I pushed a few names around. “But I think Mindy and Ernestowould be fine without the Cohens,” I said. “They could sit with the Dahls, right? Plus, they know the Koitas from the CNN Town Hall thing last year, so it works out perfectly.”
My mother sighed. I could picture her so clearly, tucked away in the extra bedroom of a house that had never felt like home. Her head, surely, pressed against that cluttered desk in a shrine to the man my brother never became. The Westchester County moon, beaming through the windowpane, but all wrong. All cold and lonely, even now, as the crickets chirped and the bluegrass swayed and eight years had whirled on by and the rest of the world had returned to order.
“You all right?” I said.
A muffled sob but no answer.
“Mom? Mommy?”
“No,” she said, eventually. I could hear it in her voice: her eyes were glass, and her shattered heart was too. She was stuck, folded into that chair again. A room full of T-shirts and buttons and pamphlets and bumper stickers, but no light, and no son. “I...”
I bit down on my tongue and closed my eyes. “Mom, listen. If it’s too much, I could come up for a weekend soon. I could take on more of the planning, I don’t mind. I know how stressed you are. I have to be here for work during the week, but I could take the train up first thing pretty much any Saturday. Maybe we could get lunch, or go to the mall, or—”
“My Michael,” she said. “My baby. My baby. My baby.”
The next morning, I arrived at the café in the perkiest, most summery outfit I could put together given the state of my still-trashedapartment: a romper with daisies on it, plus five-inch espadrilles and my second favorite watermelon-red lipstick. I’d spent an hour on my hair.
Tyler looked up from his book—Hook, Line, and Sinkerby Tessa Bailey; I would not forget this moment for as long as I lived—and inched out of his chair.
