Benny only uses some bizarre fake sugar substitute. One time he made a flan and it gave Frank diarrhea for a week.”
* * *
The party swirled and heated. Beer and food made tanned shoulders sweaty even as the temperature dropped and dusk came in from the ocean. Loud chatter about property taxes and Lake Tahoe, kombucha starters and quinoa chips, the problems with Whole Foods but also how it offered so many options. Weed smoke in the air.
Everyone Kate met wanted to talk about the Brands. One guy who had been on the zoning board in the ’80s said that when Jake and Miranda moved to Callinas, they had wanted to construct an outbuilding to use as their art studio, but it would have needed another water line, so the town had declined their proposal. The Brands made a huge fuss, he said, “but we won in the end.” A librarian told Kate that Miranda had once checked out forty books from the library—books she could certainly afford to buy!—and returned them stained and defaced with notes in pen in the margins.
Roberta, Wendy, and Wendy’s husband were there, twelve-month-old Texas hoisted on Wendy’s hip. It seemed they had used their best Brand story the other day, because now they just kept listing expensive nearby restaurants, as if Kate could afford to spend ninety dollars on a tasting menu. Kate was trying to steer the conversation away from Wendy’s Whole 30 diet when a force collided with the back of her leg, almost buckling her knee.
“Kate.” Jemima sighed happily and wrapped her arms around Kate’s midsection. “There you are.”
Kate turned awkwardly, dragging Jemima in a circle with her. Theo and Oscar were coming in from the parking lot. Theo was handsome in a black windbreaker, his face tanned and angular in the setting sun. She felt a strange, piercing relief to see him, which she attributed to knowing she wouldn’t have to field any of Louise’s complaints later.
As they got closer, Theo said, “Say hi to people before you run into them, Jem.”
“It’s not people,” Jemima replied, still clinging to Kate. “It’s Kate. She’s my friend.”
“You still have to be polite to your friends.”
Jemima sniffed. “You didn’t say hi to her either.”
Theo smiled at Kate. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Kate said. She realized that she had never seen him off his property, and out here he looked larger, more alive, as if the house had been slowly squishing him into a small cube.
“I thought maybe you guys had decided not to come,” she said.
“They really wanted to. And I thought about what you said.” He looked down at Oscar, who was sucking his thumb as he stared in wonder at the balloons. Theo reached down and gently pulled his son’s thumb out of his mouth. “So here we are.”
Kate wanted to ask what he was so afraid of, then realized that an hour ago, she had been stressed about the party, too. She felt less stressed now. She actually felt kind of light, like she was levitating. She looked down at her margarita cup and saw it was empty.
“This is Roberta and Wendy,” she said. They were standing at attention, eyes trained on Theo. “I guess maybe you knew each other when you were younger?”
“Did we?” Theo smiled politely at Wendy. “Nice to see you again. Listen, I better help get the kids some food.”
He took Jemima’s hand, too, and the three of them walked toward the picnic tables like they were heading into battle.
Once he was out of earshot, Wendy turned to the others and widened her eyes. “Well, hot damn. He turned out all right.”
“You know, I’m right here,” her husband said.
Wendy smiled at him. “Yes, and you’re much nicer.”
“Like mother, like son,” Roberta said.
Kate said nothing. She didn’t know how to explain to them what it meant for Theo to come here. That what felt like a brush-off … well, was a brush-off, but for good reason. Just think what they had been saying in Pawpaw’s the other day. The knot inside Kate seemed to grow another loop, and as she changed the subject to local hikes, she clutched her plastic cup until it began to crack.
* * *
Nikhil was at the party with his girlfriend, Sabrina, a rock-climbing instructor who was wearing a fanny pack unironically and somehow pulling it off. They had brought along their roommate Josh. Josh was the kind of guy who would describe himself as “sarcastic” on a dating app. His main redeeming quality appeared to