a year younger than I am. We’re still babies.” He had recently met a girl he liked. His parents knew hers. He mentioned her to Coco a few times. Her name was Tamar Weiss, and miraculously, she was Jewish. He was usually attracted to girls who weren’t. He hadn’t told his mother about going out with her or she’d have been all over him, wanting him to get married. She wanted all her children to marry early, and have lots of babies. Sam’s sister Sabra was still insisting that she wanted to get engaged to her Catholic boyfriend, and convert for him. Sam’s mother was going crazy over it, which kept the heat off Sam for now, and he could date Tamar in peace, while no one paid attention. He told Coco that Tamar was a nice girl. She worked in a bank, came from an Orthodox family, and had a lot of siblings. She wasn’t exciting, but she seemed like a solid, reasonable, intelligent person. He enjoyed her company, and when Coco asked him if he was in love with her, he said he wasn’t.
“Your choice of words, ‘solid and reasonable,’ scares me. Can’t you notch that up a little? You don’t need to fall in love with a stripper, but how about someone a little jazzier than ‘reasonable and solid.’ She sounds like a Seeing Eye dog.”
“Jazzy is dangerous, Coco. You just learned that with Ed.”
“Yeah, but ‘solid’ is going to bore the shit out of you after a few years, if it takes that long.”
“Maybe not. My parents aren’t exciting and they’ve been together for twenty-five years. That’s solid.”
“Your mother is a little bit exciting,” Coco said, thinking about it. She had lots of personality and opinions.
“No, she’s not. She just screams a lot. My father ignores it. I hope my sister has the guts to defy them. I really like Liam. My mother will have a coronary if she marries him, but Sabra’s pretty stubborn. She might just do it. You need to go back to school in the fall, by the way. Your father would want you to. He’d be upset that you’ve been out of school for a year now.” She nodded. She’d been considering it too, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to go back, or needed to, although she knew her father would have wanted her to graduate. But school seemed boring to her now.
Instead, she called her boss at Time from the summer before, and asked if he had any internships available. She could at least do that for the rest of the summer. She was tired of sitting around the apartment, especially now that Ed was out of the picture. He had eaten up a lot of her time, which had kept her from doing anything else, including seeing her friends, except for Sam, who showed up faithfully almost every night, and had for a year.
“Funny you should ask,” John Campbell, her old boss, said when she called him at Time. “We do have an opening. I don’t know if it would appeal to you. It’s in the London office. We can take care of the visa from here. We don’t pay living expenses for interns, so no one from here has wanted it. I don’t know if that works for you or not.” He knew enough about her and her late father to suspect that money wouldn’t be a problem. “They want an American, and we haven’t been able to find one. Would that screw up your plans for school?”
“I don’t have plans for school right now. I’ve been debating it. This internship might be just what I need.” Her life in New York seemed flat at the moment. She had been mourning her parents for the last year, and hiding with Ed. She hadn’t seen anyone, and she didn’t want to go back to school yet. “How long is it for?”
“As long as you want. It’s open-ended.”
“When does it start?”
“As soon as you can get there.”
“What would I do?”
“More or less the same as you were going to do here. It’s kind of a jack-of-all-trades/girl Friday position, pitching in where needed.”
“It sounds perfect,” she said, excited about it.
“The salary is ridiculous, which, as I said, is why we haven’t found anyone.” But she could afford it. She didn’t need the money. She needed to get busy and do something useful with her time. “Give it some thought and call me.”