It was a relief to finally see a friendly face. On the quiet twilight walk over, Amanda had gotten two calls to her cell from an unknown number. The sudden shrill sound had made her heart take flight, even though the phone had rung only once each time, not even long enough for Amanda to decide whether to answer. The calls could have been unrelated to the many that had come before—only a few weeks earlier Amanda had fully believed that was a possibility. But once the breathing started, there was no pretending anymore. Somehow, he’d found her. And whatever he wanted, it wasn’t something good.
It was hard not to envy all those parents squeezed into Sarah’s brownstone for the PTA meeting with their “cybersecurity” problems. Amanda had real security problems, and it was way more terrifying.
At least there in Sarah’s brownstone, Amanda felt safe. Sarah’s husband Kerry was a huge guy—over six feet, and with the girth of the defensive linebacker he’d once been. Amanda always had such a hard time imagining Kerry, with his soft, saggy brown eyes and quick grin, intentionally knocking anyone over, even on a football field. She could much more easily picture him as Prom King. Though his face was quite a bit rounder than it had once been. Amanda had noticed from some of the older photographs displayed throughout the house.
Sarah hadn’t married Kerry for his looks anyway. Kerry had swooped in with his button fortune and his varsity jacket and swept Sarah right off her feet, made her feel safe and taken care of. Of course, in the end, she and Kerry had ended up not nearly as wealthy as Sarah had anticipated—she was quick to point out—but it wasn’t like they were suffering. Kerry was a very successful lawyer.
As far as Amanda was concerned, Kerry’s attentiveness was far more valuable than money anyway. Zach had always been more than happy for Amanda to fill the gaps left by his demanding career by hiring people—plumbers, carpenters, nannies, tutors, gardeners, painters. But she couldn’t very well hire someone to do something like reach Case’s baseball card collection on his highest closet shelf. Mentioning it to Sarah last weekend was embarrassing, but within the hour there was Kerry, standing on Amanda’s front stoop.
“I was instructed to come, madam,” he’d joked. “Something about baseball cards?”
“I’m sorry,” Amanda had said. “It’s so late on a Sunday night. I swear I didn’t ask her to make you come.”
And Amanda hadn’t, but she was glad Sarah had sent him. Case wanted his cards at camp, and Amanda wanted to get them shipped first thing in the morning. She’d tried using the extra tall stepladder, but the box remained hopelessly out of reach.
“Oh, don’t worry. I know my wife,” Kerry had said, glancing around the dark house. “Zach’s at work at eight thirty on a Sunday? That’s hardcore.”
“He has a funding meeting in the morning,” Amanda had said, which was often the case, though she hadn’t known it to be specifically true on that day.
Kerry had retrieved the box from the shelf without even having to go all the way to the top of the stepladder.
“Be sure to tell Case he’s a lucky kid,” he’d said as he handed it down to Amanda. “If one of our boys ever wrote from camp askingfor something like that, Sarah would pretend the letter got lost in the mail. You want me to take a look at that closet door while I’m here? It’s probably just the hinge making it stick.”
“No, no,” Amanda had said, feeling mortified that Kerry had a mental list of all her undone chores. Did she mention them that often? “I’ve already called someone.”
It was no surprise then, that Kerry was there at Sarah’s PTA meeting, even though he’d probably had to leave work early. He was always wherever his wife needed him to be.
Kerry finally noticed Amanda hovering near the door and waved her over. “Can you help?” he whispered through clenched teeth once Amanda had made her way through the crowd. He rubbed a hand over his shaggy brown hair. “Why are all these people in my house?”
“Because your wife is the PTA president?” Amanda replied.
“But it’ssummer,” Kerry whined. “There should be a summer reprieve.”
“Don’t look at me. She made me come, too.”
“On my signal,” he said. “Let’s run for the door.”
Amanda appreciated the way Kerry joked with her, like she was just another person, and not even an especially attractive one.
“No way. I’m too scared of your wife,” Amanda said with a grin—a real one—as she slid past Kerry toward the living room. “You should be, too.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” he said with an exaggerated sigh. “I am appropriately terrified.”
As much as she would have preferred to stay with Kerry near the back of the room, Amanda needed to get where Sarah would see her, so that her presence would be counted. Then maybe she wouldn’t need to stay as long. Amanda was feeling rattled from all the calls—more today than yesterday—and being alone in a large group of Brooklyn Country Day parents was stressful in and of itself. Amanda looked around for Maude, but didn’t see her. Her gallery was often open late on weeknights. She was probably at work.
Sarah’s living room was warm and tasteful. Well lived-in and loved, Amanda always thought, the walls crowded with candid family photos through the years—red-faced crying babies, first meals, awkward Halloweens, and finally sullen teenagers. It was so different from the pristine surfaces of Amanda’s gut-renovated brownstone. Her own home was beautiful, of course, but she longed for floors like Sarah’s that creaked in some spots and bowed in others. Not that noisy floors in and of themselves were a good thing. The floors of the trailer Amanda grew up in had made plenty of noise, each heavy, drunken footstep on the yellowed linoleum like the squeak of a mouse stuck on a glue trap. Anyway, the point was, the noises of Sarah and Kerry’s house were nothing like that. They were the sounds of a well-loved family in the brownstone’s bones.
Amanda looked around the room at the usual eclectic mix of Park Slope parents—women in suits next to men in graphic T-shirts; parents who looked old enough to be grandparents next to parents who looked like they could be students themselves; parents of different races and cultures; single parents and same-sex couples. It was a diverse group in many respects, though they were almost all very wealthy and, to Amanda, universally intimidating.
In their corner of Palo Alto, the PTA meetings had mostly been attended by stay-at-home moms, but in Park Slope men and women seemed to share more equally in parenting, and almost everyone had not only a job but acareer. People were intelligent and accomplished in Palo Alto, too, but in Park Slope everyone wasintellectual. The neighborhood was filled with journalists and professors and artists. People who wanted you to besaying somethingwhen you spoke. Politics, art, books, travel—you were expected to have opinions that were informed. As well read as Amanda was, none of her knowledge ran all that deep, and in Park Slope they picked the bone of each matter clean, held it up to the light, and inspected the marrow for consistency. This was true of people, too. If they ever looked inside Amanda they would find nothing.
“Hi everyone,” Sarah began once people had finally settled down. She winked in Amanda’s direction and then looked around the room, allowing the tension to mount. Sarah had a knack for knowing exactly how to keep a handle on the Brooklyn Country Day parents. “So the dreaded contact list,” Sarah finally went on. “First of all: Don’t panic. We are all going to be okay. I promise.” There was an edge to her voice that she wasn’t bothering to disguise. “The PTA is working closely with Country Day to resolve the issue.”
Hands shot up. “Working to resolve it how?” asked a tall man with dark brown skin and a perfectly tailored herringbone suit that Amanda was pretty sure she’d seen on the extra-expensive floor at Barney’s. AWall Street Journalwas folded crisply in his hand. “They aren’t telling us anything.”
“Country Day has hired a firm that specializes in cybersecurity,” Sarah explained. “All they do is figure out what happened in these exact kinds of situations and help come up with solutions. But that can take time.”
“Time, my ass,” a woman next to Amanda muttered angrily. She was frumpy and unkempt, her white skin pasty and veined. Amanda wondered when she’d last brushed her stringy blond hair.
