Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,121
responses in the comments section from every angle of the argument. She began to read them, each so incredibly heated you might mistake this for an actual problem.
She had read through thirty or so and texted Nomi screenshots of the most hilarious ones, when Andrew asked, “Have you ever been to New York before, Clive?”
“No. Never even came to the States until I met Sam.”
“You’ll love it,” Elisabeth said. “It’s the greatest city in the world.”
She put her phone in her purse, admonished herself to try harder.
“I’ve lived in London for years, and Barcelona before that. But I’m a country boy at heart,” Clive said. “I want to convince Sam to move to a cottage after we’re married, get some sheep and a few dogs.”
Sam giggled, her meaning hard to decipher.
“Don’t forget the honeybees,” she said. An inside joke, perhaps.
Elisabeth ignored this, and said to Clive, “Did Sam tell you I met one of her professors and he thinks she’s seriously gifted? One of the best he’s ever seen?”
She could feel Andrew’s eyes on her, wordlessly pointing out that she was stretching things. But Christopher had said that, or something like it.
“Of course he thinks so,” Clive replied. “She’s brilliant. I have one of her paintings framed in every room of our flat.”
Our flat, Elisabeth thought. His and hers.
“It’s true,” Sam said. “The place is like a shrine to me.”
Elisabeth faced front. It was worse than she thought. Sam wasn’t some plaything for this guy. He actually wanted to marry her.
In an attempt to talk about something not related to their relationship, Elisabeth asked about the royals.
“Did you ever see Will and Kate out at a bar or anything, back when they were in college?” she said. “I’ve heard stories like that from people, and they make me so jealous.”
Sam squealed. “She’s so beautiful. I love her clothes. I would die if I saw her out at a bar.”
“Why?” Clive scoffed. “The royals are a bunch of inbred parasites, mooching off the people and doing nothing for anyone but themselves.”
“Oh, Clive,” Sam said, like the statement was somehow adorable.
Andrew asked if anyone was hungry. They pulled over at the next rest stop. Elisabeth requested a turkey wrap and took Gil for a diaper change.
In the crowded ladies’ room, hand dryers blasting, she put Gil down on the plastic changing table and smiled at him. He was a source of comfort she could plug in to at any time, a piece of herself outside of her.
“What do you think?” she whispered. “Not good enough for our Sam, is he?”
Gil looked up at her, revealing a new front tooth poking through.
When he was changed, Elisabeth went to find Andrew and tell him about the tooth. She spotted him in line at the sandwich place. Sam and Clive stood behind him, whispering, as if they were his teenage children.
Andrew had just gotten to the cash register when Elisabeth reached his side.
“So that’s two large turkeys, a roast beef, a meatball, and four Cokes?” said the girl behind the counter.
“Umm, yes,” Andrew said. He handed her his Visa.
Elisabeth looked to Clive and then to Andrew and back again. She met her husband’s eye and he knew what she was asking—why was he paying for all of them?
Andrew shrugged, and Elisabeth understood. Clive hadn’t offered to pay for his and Sam’s.
It bothered her to a degree that was out of proportion with the offense. Were they to take Sam along on a road trip alone, they would buy her lunch, no question. But Clive was a grown man.
Sam deserved someone solid, someone her own age. A younger version of Andrew. Elisabeth remembered thinking early on in their relationship that he was dad smart. He knew about art and world history and the nuances of every country’s political, economic, and social climate. If a child were to ask him anything, he could answer. While she had been known, when trying to make a point but fuzzy on the particulars, to say that something had happened “in the olden days.” She looked at Andrew and thought: Husband. She looked at Clive and thought: Fling.
Sam had stayed too long at the fair, but she didn’t realize. She seemed to think they could go on forever. Elisabeth recalled an email Sam sent over Christmas break, a sliver of doubt poking through. But she retreated quickly from it, and never raised the issue again.
* * *
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Sam and Clive were staying with a friend way uptown for the