bless Emily Godwin—How on earth does she do it? Cleo thought. “Oh, I also got you a salad. They were on sale. I figured after . . .”
“You saw the video from Seattle?” Cleo laughed. “This is a pity dinner, isn’t it?”
Emily laughed too. “No, just, Jonathan’s working late, and the other two kids are accounted for. I hated the idea of you on your own after . . . all of that.” She paused. “I hope you don’t mind. I know we’re not . . . I mean, I’m sure you have other friends to do this kind of thing with.”
Cleo reached for a wine opener. “I don’t really. Believe it or not, cutthroat young women do not make friends easily.”
“I wouldn’t call you cutthroat.”
“You’re not on the Judiciary Committee with me.” Cleo grabbed two wineglasses and poured generous fills. “Should we call the boys?”
“Let’s drink this first,” Emily said. “They’ll still be there when we’re done.”
Cleo clinked her glass to hers. She liked her more and more by the minute.
With a belly full of chicken and salad, Cleo felt better than she had in days. She really should make a better effort with her diet, she told herself. She didn’t have to be Gaby and enter a marathon and swear off gluten (and dairy and anything else remotely pleasing to her palate) to be a little healthier. And maybe it was the protein and vitamins or maybe it was the wine (Emily had stopped at one glass because she was driving Benjamin home, but Cleo had poured herself a second), but she finally felt brave enough to cull her list, to whittle it down to ten actionable items that she really did regret and had courage enough to admit to. And possibly face publicly if both Gaby and Veronica Kaye insisted. There probably was not a lot she wouldn’t do for a check from Veronica Kaye. In a different line of work, some might call it prostitution. In politics, it was fundraising.
She grabbed a red pen from her desk, unlocked the drawer, pulled out the worn yellow paper. Two hundred and thirty-three regrets over twenty-four years really wasn’t all that many, she thought. She made a mental note to raise this with Gaby, who seemed gobsmacked at the number. That was what?—Cleo did the quick math—something like ten or so a year. Imagine going through your life with only one regret a month! That was nothing! That was one bad day’s worth.
Cleo clicked the top of her pen up and down, admonishing herself. Frankly, the list should probably be double what it was. She checked the dates next to each regret—she hadn’t updated it in some time; the last entry was from January.
She rolled her shoulders forward, then back, trying to assess how best to narrow down two decades’ worth of missteps. It was really something to read through them all, to wonder what could have been if she hadn’t, say, weaseled out of her required art credit at Northwestern (she had signed up for dance, thinking maybe she had underestimated herself and had a twinge of her mother’s talent, but then sprained her ankle on the steps of her dorm one week into school and had happily used the injury and the accompanying doctor’s note to get out of the class). Maybe she would have fallen in love, as her mom had, with the movements of Martha Graham or Alvin Ailey, and even if it hadn’t changed, say, her trajectory toward law school and politics, maybe it would have made her more comfortable with her body, gotten her on the dance floor at those rare parties she attended, challenged her to take up more space in the world. Maybe she’d have Gaby’s posture and her stomach wouldn’t sag over her waistband, which it had ever since she gave birth. Or maybe taking that dance class would have given her more confidence in herself—not her intellect, not her drive, just . . . herself, because those were different things—and she would have been someone else entirely. She wouldn’t have gotten too drunk at that party her senior year and forgotten to use a condom and gotten pregnant, and Lucas wouldn’t be here and everything would have shifted. Maybe she wouldn’t have made dumb decisions with Alexander Nobells; maybe she would have stood her ground when she lost her summer position; maybe she would have confronted him and who knows what would have happened from that.