Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,124
might find out that, all along, the city wasn’t the problem. You were.
“Sorry, yes, let’s talk about something else,” she said. “The grill? What’s the latest?”
He’d been working on a prototype. She hadn’t asked him about it lately. In part because he was still upset about Denver. In part because she knew it required more money than the college had agreed to give him, which led them back to that check from her father.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Andrew said. “The provost paid me a nice compliment. He said the students on my project are getting a lot out of it. He said I have a way with them that he doesn’t see all that often.”
“That’s so nice,” she said.
“Yeah. I know we joke about them, but I kind of love working with these kids. I’d been telling the provost how Cory came up with a really interesting idea. You know Cory? The tall kid with the mustache who you met at the Christmas party.”
She nodded. “Ophelia.”
“Right.”
As Andrew talked details, Elisabeth drank more wine and tried to pay attention. But she felt her frustration rising when he mentioned needing a grant, searching for investors sooner than was customary.
She wondered if in every married person there was a pit of fear about whether a spouse had chosen him or her for the wrong reason. Andrew moved to the city and socialized with guys from Greenwich and Darien. Some part of him felt less than. Had he seen her as a way to become the man he wished he was, even as he pretended to understand why she rejected her father’s money?
“Andrew,” she interrupted without meaning to. “I’m not going to deposit the check.”
He looked crushed. At least, she thought he did.
“We keep tiptoeing around it, but I can’t do it. I won’t take my father’s money. Period. He’s an evil bastard.”
“Agreed,” Andrew said. “But he will be one whether we keep his money or not.”
“So that is what you want.”
“Instead of losing all the money we’ve saved? Yes. If I get this grill off the ground, we could fix my parents’ problems right away. It’s killing me that they have to sell that house.”
“And you’re putting that on me?”
“Putting what on you? I was talking about what could happen if the grill is a success.”
“Right. But we’ll only know if it can succeed if I agree to take the money.”
“He’d be paying you back what you loaned your sister. That’s all.”
“When the whole point of loaning it to her was that neither of us would have to be dependent on him.”
“But she didn’t abide by that.”
“Yes, and your dad spends all his time in his man cave ranting on about the goddamn Hollow Tree, instead of dealing with what happened, trying to find more work, admitting that no one is ever going to buy that house and they can’t afford to keep it. But I’m supposed to forget my principles and swoop in to save him?”
“I never said that,” Andrew said softly. “Go ahead, rip up the check. Do what you want. That’s what you always do in the end anyway, isn’t it?”
* * *
—
Improbably, they had sex that night for the first time since the baby came. Not because either of them wanted to, particularly, but because it had been so long and they’d gotten a hotel room and it felt like it was now or never. The sex didn’t hurt like she expected it to. It felt pretty much like it always had. She remembered now how nice it was to feel close to him in this way, especially when they were so far apart on everything else.
Elisabeth fell asleep beside Andrew, but woke up after a bit, restless. She didn’t feel like stewing over their problems. She took her laptop into the bathroom and shut the door. She logged on to BK Mamas, where the fight about a name change was still raging, fourteen hours after it started. Around 6:00 p.m., Mimi Winchester threw in one of her grenades: While we’re on the topic of appropriate naming, can I just say—this is meant to be a board for BK Mamas. That is, moms who live in Brooklyn. I know for a fact LOTS of people here don’t live in Brooklyn anymore.
Twenty-nine women responded, accusing Mimi of elitism.
Sorry people like you came along and priced me out of a neighborhood I lived in for seventeen years, one of them wrote. I may live in Queens, but