The one thing they need to remember is the one thing they can’t recall.
What was Daisy wearing when she left for school this morning?
It had been one of those mornings. An underwatery wake-up after a very late night.
Charlotte and Eli and Daisy were supposed to land at JFK by seven. But their plane was delayed in Mexico City. They didn’t get back to their East Village loft until well after eleven.
Unforgivable on a school night. But what else could they do? Charlotte tells herself that the wooziness she feels has nothing to do with the two bottles of red wine she and Eli drank last night to celebrate getting back from Mexico in one piece.
Well, not exactly in one piece. In one piece if you discount the fact that they’d had to leave Charlotte’s brother, Rocco, behind in Oaxaca.
Rocco’s girlfriend, Ruth, lost her US passport.
Charlotte hears herself groan.
“What’s the matter?” Eli asks.
“Nothing.” The first lie of the morning.
She doesn’t want to think about what happened to Ruth’s passport. She doesn’t want to think about Ruth.
Anyhow, Rocco is safe. In the taxi back from JFK, Charlotte had gotten a text from him:
Boarding plane home. All good. Talk tomorrow.
Thank God he’s okay. And thank God that Charlotte doesn’t have to feel guilty about leaving him in Mexico, with Ruth.
NOW, THE FIRST morning they’re back, Charlotte tries to convince herself that the goofy disorientation she feels has nothing to do with the fact that, buzzed out of her mind from drinking all that celebratory red wine with Eli, she took Ambien to fall asleep. How much? Enough that now, when she turns her head toward Daisy’s voice, her brain doesn’t seem to be turning along with the rest of her.
Probably that sloshy brain is why she and Eli didn’t hear the alarm on her phone, or the backup alarm on his phone, why they didn’t open their eyes until Daisy ran into their bedroom.
“Mom! Dad! Don’t I have school today?”
Yes, sweetheart. You have school.
So now the problem of Daisy’s breakfast. Charlotte can do it, even though she’ll probably be late for her nine o’clock meeting.
The event planners have to understand—Charlotte has a school-age child!
They don’t have to understand anything. There are dozens of hungry, creative floral designers in New York who can take meetings at dawn because they don’t have to pack their kid’s lunch.
The milk is sour, and someone (no one’s perfect, not even Eli!) put an empty Cheerios box in the refrigerator. What else is there? A banana. A massive Sub-Zero with nothing inside but spoiled milk and one dead banana. Daisy hates bananas, even when they aren’t mottled with gray-green splotches.
Eli can buy Daisy a doughnut on the way to school. It’s not the ideal breakfast, nothing Charlotte would admit to when the mothers get together, not even when everyone’s bitching about what their kids won’t eat. But it’s better than nothing. Better than Daisy going to kindergarten with an empty stomach on her first day back after spring break. And Daisy will love it. Charlotte worries about how much her daughter likes sugar. Most kids do, she knows, but she can’t help thinking that sweets might really pose a danger to her daughter’s fragile health.
At eight in the morning, the loft is already bright, with a view of the pinkish, early-spring sun warming the beautiful bridges—Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg. Charlotte counts them—one, two, three—as if she’s afraid they might have vanished while she was out of the country.
Eli says, In this city you pay for sunlight. Whenever Charlotte thinks about how much the loft cost, she has to knock off $400,000 from its terrifying price.
Charlotte smells smoke. Dear God, is the building on fire? Welcome home.
Last month, the city fire marshals came to warn them that they have six months to replace the old wooden staircase in the hall with metal, or the building will be condemned. The marshals don’t care if Charlotte and Eli own their loft, or how beautiful they’ve made it.
All that money, all that costly, painstaking renovation—so their home can smell like an ashtray.
Charlotte’s pretty sure that the building’s not on fire. Her downstairs neighbor, Ariane, the stubborn, difficult widow of a famous painter, refuses to stop smoking. One spark, and all her late husband’s canvases will go up in a flash.
Charlotte’s family house in upstate New York burned down when she was in high school. So she’s sensitive about fire. Not obsessed or phobic, but definitely aware.
The last holdout when the building went co-op, Ariane