William and Catherine freeze, and then cant their heads up toward Peter. He holds a pair of blue jeans and a red sweatshirt.
“I like those,” says William.
Peter hands the clothes to Catherine.
“Let’s try them on,” she says, taking William by the wrist and guiding him out from beneath the rack of sweatshirts and toward the changing rooms.
“I want some privacy,” he announces, tugging free from his mother’s grip.
“Then go by yourself,” she says.
He turns toward the back of the store but doesn’t move.
Catherine glances over at Peter, who then leads William by the hand to the changing rooms, where they step into a stall and he pulls the curtain shut behind them. William strips off his pajama shirt and takes high-kneed marching steps out of the cuffs of his pajama pants while he asks, “How long are we going to stay with you?”
Peter tugs William’s large feet through the jeans, while the boy leans on his shoulder to keep balance. “You should ask your mother,” answers Peter.
“I don’t think she knows.”
“Well, I don’t know either.”
“We’re not going home,” says William.
Peter stops his work and straightens himself so that he looks directly at the boy. “What makes you say that?” Peter wonders about the night before, about Catherine’s plans, and what has led William to conclude that returning home is no longer an option. William doesn’t answer Peter’s question. Instead he pulls away and finishes dressing on his own.
The two of them leave the changing rooms and find Catherine by the cash register. She jerks the plastic tags off the back of William’s shirt and pants, handing them to the checkout girl. But when Catherine goes to pay, her card doesn’t work. “Funny,” she mutters, “try this one.” It doesn’t work either. The two other cards she presents are also declined. Peter offers to pay, but she refuses and then digs through her wallet and change purse. Her hand trembles slightly as she spreads the bills and coins across the counter until at last she realizes she doesn’t have quite enough.
Peter passes the girl at the register his debit card.
“I’ll find a cash machine and pay you back,” Catherine insists.
Peter signs the receipt and hands Catherine the bag with the pajamas. William wears his new clothes out of the store. The three of them walk through the mall’s gleaming corridors. William keeps a few paces ahead of Catherine and Peter. He makes a close inspection of each of the shop windows, pressing his nose right up to the glass. The jeans and sweatshirt had cost around ninety lira, or thirty dollars as Peter did the conversion. And it seems like such a bargain—not the jeans and sweatshirt—but rather the idea of it, the satisfaction it gave him. He had, after all, put clothes on this little boy’s back.
When they pass a bank of cash machines, Catherine insists on stopping.
“Please, don’t worry about the clothes,” says Peter.
She ignores him, punching her PIN into the keypad. A minute passes, no cash. She tries again. Nothing. She won’t say it, so Peter does: “He’s frozen your accounts.”
With the heel of her palm, she strikes the cash machine’s keypad.
Peter grabs her by both shoulders. “Catherine.”
She takes a breath and stands up straight. “I’m sorry,” she says. Then she takes another breath and wipes her eyes once quickly with the back of her hand. “What now?”
Peter glances down at his watch. It is well past noon. The food court isn’t far off. They continue their walk through the mall. The sun pours its light through the glass vestibule. Ahead of them, Peter sees the little girl from before, the one from the elevator. She rides her scooter through the mall, trailing after her parents, who have ducked into a restaurant. “Let’s get a bite in there,” suggests Peter.
“I don’t want you to pay for anything else,” says Catherine.
“Buy me lunch with what you’ve got left and we’ll call it even.”
She counts out a crumpled handful of bills. “Fifty lira,” she says.
“I don’t know if that’ll be quite enough.”
They walk a bit further. Then they come to the restaurant’s front, where a menu is perched on a chalkboard easel. Fifty lira would be enough. They were offering a family special.
March 7, 2012
They had intended to meet for lunch. Lunch was casual. Yet Peter and Catherine wound up having dinner instead.
It was Kristin who had arranged everything. As soon as Peter had signed for the grant money and left her office at the consulate, she had followed up her email to Catherine with a phone call explaining that she had spoken with “a fantastic American photographer,” and that she thought the two of them should meet. Catherine wasn’t antisocial, but when it came to new acquaintances she had always been discerning. Her friendships were few and deep. Not long after Catherine adopted William, Kristin had come into her life. At first the relationship was professional, Kristin’s duties in cultural affairs intersecting with Catherine’s philanthropic interests. But their relationship soon migrated to the personal. The two women, both young mothers in a new and unfamiliar city, struggled with the role and this struggle became the basis of a friendship. Neither would call what they were experiencing depression—and never did to the other—but they could feel how through twice weekly lunches, or an afternoon coffee, or in certain instances a spontaneous phone call, the one was lifting the other out of the pit into which they had both fallen. In short, Catherine trusted Kristin, and if Kristin thought she should meet this other American, then she should.
The initial plan was for her and Peter to have lunch at the terrace restaurant at the Istanbul Modern. However, that changed when William stayed home from kindergarten with the flu. Before Catherine could cancel the engagement, Murat volunteered to finish work early and care for William, so Catherine shifted her plan with Peter to that evening. Murat had, in recent months, closed on a number of highly profitable real estate deals in partnership with the government and, with the earnings from those deals secure in his account, he was, from time to time, curtailing his hours at the office. He had begun taking William to school once a week and, on Catherine’s behalf, he had even made a sizable donation to the Istanbul Modern, financing both the planned construction of a new wing and exhibitions by well-known and lesser-known contemporary artists—a subject that may have once interested him, but no longer did. Most essentially, though, his donation had assured his wife a role at the museum. She had sporadically volunteered there for the last few years, but now became a trustee. Although Catherine had emerged from her depression, she knew how Murat worried about a relapse if she were not sufficiently occupied.