“Well, any mom who misses the chance to dress her kid up like a hot dog sounds like a psychopath to me.”
“Exactly. Thank you. And now”—Emira took her voice down—“I’m at Shaunie’s and she just got this huge promotion. So now she’s all hyped and I know I should be happy for her . . . but I just wanna punch her in the face and go to bed.”
“Easy, killer,” he said. “Just buy her a drink.”
Emira held on to the railing. “Now you tell me yours.”
That day, Kelley introduced himself to who he thought was a tech lead named Jesse. The real Jessie was a woman, but Kelley had introduced himself to her male assistant, in front of her and her team. He’d also gotten salad dressing in his eye and thought he was blind for approximately two minutes. And he just hated Cleveland.
“I get back early tomorrow, though.”
“Okay.” Inside, Emira heard Shaunie and Zara call for Josefa. Josefa replied with an annoyed “What?” Emira bent to glance inside the kitchen and saw that she was still alone. “I’ll let you go. Sorry,” she said. She sidestepped and winced. “Sorry, I know this was weird.”
“Why would it be weird? Wait—are you going out right now?”
“Yeah, I think I have to.”
“Well, hey. Go sleep in my bed when you’re done.”
Emira laughed and said, “What?”
“I’ll call my doorman and tell him you’re coming. Sleep there and we’ll do breakfast tomorrow.”
This, Emira thought, was the most adult thing that had ever happened to her.
“Wait, no,” she said. “Kelley, I can’t do that.”
“There’s absolutely no reason you can’t do that,” he said. “It’s a perfect opportunity for you to steal whatever you want. I’ll call the front desk right now. Does that sound good?”
It sounded so good that Emira said, “Umm . . .”
Kelley said, “What do you mean, ‘umm’?”
Inside the window, Zara yelled, “Bish, you need to relax your shoulders!” Emira looked up into the dark clouds and said, “Lemme think for a second.”
“Emira, come on.” Kelley laughed. She heard him take a breath before he said, “Are you gonna be with me or what, miss?”
She placed her hand to her forehead and grinned.
By the time she crawled back into the kitchen, she had a new text from Kelley. Frank knows you’re coming. Bring your ID. Emira helped herself to another glass of wine as she heard Zara say, “Sefa, you gotta get closer, sweetie.”
Emira pushed Shaunie’s bedroom door open. Inside, Shaunie was topless and kneeling on top of her bed, cupping her breasts with one arm and hanging the other at her side. Josefa was holding a desk lamp above her head and saying, “I feel like you have to get even higher, Z.” Zara stood on a chair with Shaunie’s iPhone held out in front of her.
“Wait, Emira’s better at this.” Zara tossed Emira the phone. “I’ll get down and hold your tits up, though.”
Eleven
Alix didn’t care that she was plateauing eight pounds above her pre-baby weight. She didn’t notice that she and Peter hadn’t had sex in almost three weeks. (To be fair, he didn’t seem to notice either. He was getting insane camera time while covering the current snowstorm.) And she was also fine to ignore her editor’s emails and calls, asking how the book was going, and if there were a few chapters she could read over the holiday. Everything could stop for just a second, because Rachel, Jodi, and Tamra were coming to Philadelphia for Thanksgiving. Even better, Alix would go back with them to New York City for five whole days. The Clinton campaign had finally reached out and asked her to attend a women’s event. It would be her first time back in eight months, and Catherine’s first visit to the city. And as Alix removed her gloves and hat in the front vestibule of her home, Emira’s phone glowed with a text banner across the top. We regret to inform you that flight WX1492 is no longer in service.
Outside, snow raced so quickly that it seemed impossible that it would settle. But it did, burying cars and trees, slamming storefront doors shut, and then keeping them spread open like very used books. The top of the Chamberlain porch stairs had been the stomping ground for mud and ice for the past three days. Alix still made the trek to swim class in Ubers and cabs—she and the girls were often the only ones in the pool—because she was quickly running out of patience and indoor activities (games like Let’s look at pictures on Mama’s phone. Let’s play go underneath the blanket. Let’s pull all the books down from the bookshelf and put them all back again). But tomorrow was Thanksgiving, and this Thanksgiving was going to be different.
Alix and Emira hadn’t been the same since Briar’s fish died three weeks ago. On a Monday, Emira turned down the offer to take extra cookies home so that Alix wouldn’t eat them. And on a Friday evening, when Alix offered her a glass of wine, Emira had said, “I’m actually okay, but thank you.” This shift in their relationship haunted Alix in everyday places where she never would have imagined she’d ruminate about her sitter. In a bookstore, Alix found herself pondering what time Emira went to bed. While breast-feeding Catherine, she wondered if Emira had seen the movie Pretty Woman, and if she found it contentious. On the escalator inside Anthropologie, Alix imagined what Emira had said to Zara about her, and if Zara was the type to blindly agree or push back.
Alix also found herself reorganizing her lifestyle around Emira, despite the fact that she didn’t have an explicit reason to. If Alix went shopping, she took the tags off clothes and other items immediately so Emira couldn’t see how much she’d spent, even though Emira wasn’t the type to show interest or ask. Alix no longer felt comfortable leaving out certain books or magazines, because she feared Emira eyeing her Marie Kondo book and subsequently thinking, Wow, how privileged are you that you need to buy a hardcover book that tells you how to get rid of all your other expensive shit. Sometimes, Alix found herself pretending—in front of Emira—that she was about to eat leftovers for dinner. In reality, she’d be thinking to herself, Just order the sushi. Just text Peter and ask him what he wants. What point are you trying to prove by eating leftovers? But still, she’d wait till Emira closed the door behind her to go to her computer, ask Peter if he wanted the usual, and place her order via Seamless.
In the beginning, Alix would search Emira’s name on the Internet and Instagram, to see if she’d finally gotten an account (she’d convinced herself that this was a safety precaution concerning her children), but now Alix had taken to looking at her own Instagram account while imagining she was Emira and viewing it with fresh eyes. She’d slowly scroll through her own feed, and guess which pictures Emira would click on. Emira never hinted that she felt this way, because why would she, but Alix often felt that Emira saw her as a textbook rich white person, much in the same way that Alix saw many of the annoying Upper East Side moms that she and her girlfriends had always tried to avoid. But if Emira would only take a deeper look, if she gave Alix a chance, Alix knew that she would begin to think otherwise.