She laughed. It was actually tempting. Or it would be if he was here. And not her best friend’s fiancée’s best friend.
He laughed, too. Because of course he had been joking. “When are you going to your parents’ house? How do you get there? How is the fruitcake?”
“That’s a lot of questions. Let’s see.” She looked at her watch. “I’ll leave in about three hours. It’s not as long a journey as you might think. I take a bus to a station in Queens where I catch the Long Island Railroad, and my dad picks me up on the other end. And the fruitcake seems fine to me—I’ve been dousing it in extra booze—but my mom will be able to tell.”
“I have a feeling you might be able to fool her.”
“Your feeling is incorrect.”
“Truly. When she and I were speaking after the ballet, we were talking about how I don’t like Christmas. She wasn’t having it. She was listing all the things there are to love about Christmas, and one of them was fruitcake. I said, oh yes, I’d seen yours, that you’d been so hard at work on it for weeks.”
“You told my mother you’d seen my fruitcake?”
“What’s wrong with that? Is that an American idiom for something untoward?”
She laughed. “No. I’m just thinking about how my mom is going to get on my case about you knowing such intimate details about my life.”
“Intimate details about your fruitcake? Are you sure that isn’t American slang of some sort?”
She couldn’t help but laugh again. “You know what I mean. Vince left a year and a half ago, and she’s so angry at him. She wants me to move on. Well, she’d probably prefer if I actually got divorced first, but that’s taking long enough that I think she’s over it.”
“Why is that taking so long?”
“We’re fighting about Max.”
“Well, I have been called a homewrecker on more than one occasion.”
“Ha-ha. Technically, Max belongs to Vince. We decided to get a dog when we moved in together. I had to talk Vince into him. He wanted a more ‘masculine’ breed than a Yorkie. But ultimately Vince paid, and it’s his name on the adoption paperwork. In New York State, pets are treated like personal property in a divorce—they go to the spouse who ‘owns’ them. But I’m the one who did everything. Every walk, every stoop-and-scoop, every vet appointment. He’s my dog.”
“Let me guess. Vince suddenly wants him.”
“Yep. Never paid any attention to him, but whenever we were in with the mediator, he’d be all, ‘Oh how I miss him.’ We were actually supposed to have joint custody while we were in mediation—before Vince’s sabbatical started, back when he was still in town—but I refused to hand him over.”
“And Vince didn’t make an issue of that?”
“Oddly, no. I don’t think he actually cares about the dog. Well, I know he doesn’t. But it’s like Max was his wedge to hold up the divorce. And now we’re supposed to be continuing with mediation while he’s in Spain—we’re supposed to be doing it virtually. But he’s always missing the appointments or canceling them at the last minute. It doesn’t make any sense. He left me. Shouldn’t he want the divorce?”
“One would think. What must Oakland think?”
She smiled. “I feel bad for Berkeley. None of this is her fault.”
“Even if that’s the case, I commend you on taking such a charitable view.”
“Professors are not supposed to romance students. It’s a massive abuse of power.”
“I wondered about that.”
“There was a whole investigation. They both insist they didn’t get together until after she dropped out, which may even be true. She doesn’t come from money, and I gather she was having trouble financially. But even if they didn’t technically break any rules, it’s still gross. She’s a kid. Vince can be very compelling when he wants to, making you feel like you’re the center of his world. I should get the divorce done, for Berkeley’s sake, if not for Vince’s. If it was anything else—money, say—I would roll over.”
“Dani. You cannot give that man your dog.”
“Right?” His vehement agreement was gratifying, but she realized that here they were talking about her again. Max had a way of doing that. “What about you? Is lunch really that bad? What’s the problem? Too much family togetherness?”
“Christmas seems to put my parents, my father especially, into a mode where he’s taking stock. Of the family holdings, the state of the dukedom, the matrimonial future of his children. I never fare well in these accountings.”
“Because Marie jilted you? How old are you, anyway?”
“Yes, among other things. And I’m twenty-eight.”
“That’s too young to get married! Take it from an expert. From the ripe old age of thirty-two, I can say with authority that twenty-eight is not old.”
“It is when you’re in line to inherit a dukedom and everything you do is—”
“What?”
“Nothing. I should get back.”
“Tell me what you were going to say.” When he still didn’t speak, she added, “Come on. I’ve told you all the gory details of my humiliation at Vince’s hands.”
“I was going to say ‘wrong.’” His voice had gone quiet, shed of its usual bon vivant qualities. “When everything you do is wrong.”
Dani was glad, suddenly, that their texting had escalated to a phone call. While she considered what to say, she heard someone else through Max’s phone. “It’s Christmas Eve, darling.” It was a feminine voice, so it must have been his mother. The way she said darling was interesting. Somehow, she made it sound like the opposite of an endearment. “What can possibly be so important?”
“I’ll be right there, Mother.”
“Max, I—” Dani didn’t know what to say. When he’d talked about wanting to avoid his family, she’d classified that as the usual family junk. Or not even that. She’d thought of it as rich-person problems. “Have a negroni with lunch?” she finally finished weakly.
“I don’t drink around my family.”
“Oh, of course.” Why was she saying Of course? As if she knew anything about his family other than the handful of vague statements he’d made about them? She was starting to wonder if Max’s gentlemanly attentiveness wasn’t attentiveness per se so much as deflection.
“You weren’t humiliated at Vince’s hands, Dani.”
“What?”
“You said you’d been humiliated at Vince’s hands.”
Right. Case in point. She’d been trying to figure out the dynamic between him and his mother, and he was turning the conversation back to her.
“That is incorrect,” he went on. “He’s the one making a fool of himself.” He was still using the quiet, restrained voice from before. Together with the odd intimacy of the transatlantic phone call, it made what he was saying sound extra true, somehow. “And everyone knows it.”
She wondered if it was possible for both things about Max to be true: Could he be deflecting attention from himself and genuinely interested in her life? Regardless, she wasn’t sure how he could say that everyone knew. Max wasn’t part of her real life. He didn’t know the relevant “everyone.” But the quiet certainty with which he’d delivered his pronouncement was gratifying. So she just said, “Thanks.”