shouldn’t have, and the market dropped hundreds of points the other day, whatever that means, and it seems we’ve all lost everything.”
“But, Nan!” Sarah is shocked. “What are you going to do?”
“When you get to my age, you tend not to worry about these things happening. It’s only money, after all.”
“So you have more?”
“Well . . . not really. But I imagine it’s highly unlikely I’ll sell the house. We’ll all have to put our thinking caps on and come up with something.”
“Have you told Michael?”
“Not yet. I’ll call him later.” She stubs the cigarette out roughly in the crystal ashtray that is now yellow and cloudy with age, and she looks Sarah firmly in the eye.
“I’m not going to sell this house, though,” she says. “Hell will freeze over before I sell this house.” And Sarah leans back in her chair with a sigh of relief.
“Do you really think it’s that simple? We go away for a weekend and it makes everything okay?” Daniel looks doubtfully at Dr. Posner, who raises his eyebrows.
“No,” Dr. Posner says. “I don’t think anything is that simple, but I certainly don’t think it can do harm. I think it may be a good opportunity for you and Bee to reconnect, to remember what you both saw in one another before you got caught up in being parents, in the frantic pace of life with children.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell him,” Bee says. “And it was a wonderful opportunity. Hardly anyone else was bidding on the weekend in Nantucket, it includes flights, and it’s only for a couple of days. It cost almost nothing,” she concludes defiantly.
“I think you did a good thing,” Dr. Posner says, validating Bee. “I think you should both go and enjoy it.”
The weekend away was one of the silent-auction prizes at the breast cancer charity gala they had been to a few weeks before. It was one of the galas that all their friends went to, all of them working themselves up into a tizzy of excitement at the items on offer in the auction, the biggest prize being a week at Atlantis in the Bahamas, leaving the field free for Bee to swoop in and claim Nantucket.
She hadn’t even particularly wanted to go, even though she had a vague recollection of her dad talking about Nantucket, saying what a magical place it was, but she wanted to bid on something, and there were only two other names and it had been so cheap. Perhaps a weekend away was what they needed, although of late it had seemed they would need nothing short of a miracle to bring them back together again.
For while they lived as husband and wife, they were feeling, increasingly to Bee, like roommates, and roommates who were drifting further and further apart. Daniel was still perfectly nice, pleasant, but it was as if someone had reached in and switched off the light. Any warmth, any intimacy that they had once had had disappeared, leaving Bee with the peculiar feeling that it had all been an illusion.
Jordana dusts a fine coat of translucent powder across her nose and tucks her hair back into her chignon before slipping into the workroom.
“I’m just checking to see how that necklace is coming along for Mrs. Branfield,” she says, as Michael looks up from his workbench and smiles at her.
“I finished it yesterday,” he says. “Hang on.” And he walks over to the safe, quickly turns the combination and pulls out a velvet box.
“Oh Michael!” Jordana gasps as she looks at the diamond flower, the pear-shaped diamonds, at the petals, set prettily around an emerald, with delicate marquis-cut emeralds as the leaves. “She’ll love it.”
“I hope so,” Michael says. “It may make coming to terms with the divorce a bit easier.”
Lesley Branfield was the former wife of the very successful owner of a large makeup company. She had never managed to have children during their seven-year marriage (her first, his fourth), and had consequently considered herself somewhat screwed during their divorce (wives one, two and three had ended up with smallish alimony but huge child support).
She had, however, been left with their Upper East Side apartment, a cottage on Shelter Island, and all the furnishings, clothes and jewelry, which is where Michael came in.
Her husband, while wealthy, was too cheap to pay retail. If Lesley Branfield fell in love with a ring, or a pair of earrings, or a beautiful necklace at Cartier or Tiffany, they would borrow