Best Behavior Page 4

  She watches while two young men roll a steel fire pit across the lawn out to the private beach. Roger insisted they have a bonfire, a family tradition, after the day’s festivities. But when Lily went out to the garage to dust off the old fire pit a few weeks ago, it looked as if one strike of a match would set the entire house ablaze. She’d found a suitable replacement online and stocked the pantry with graham crackers, chocolate bars, and marshmallows. A pile of tinder wood sits next to the garage, at the ready.

  She cranes her neck from side to side and hears a sharp crack. It feels as if she has been planning this party for weeks. In fact, the whole graduation celebration is beginning to feel a lot like a wedding. Which strikes her as hugely ironic because for their own wedding, Roger insisted on eloping to Vegas. Lily isn’t sure why she cares so much that everything goes well on Saturday. Maybe because she wants to impress Roger? Dazzle Meredith with her good taste and flair for parties? Make the kids happy? Ha! Dawn and Cody can barely stand her. But that won’t stop Lily from trying. They can’t hate her forever, can they?

  Well, maybe Dawn can.

  When she’d treated her stepdaughter to lunch the other week, Dawn had acted put out, as if spending time with Lily was a colossal inconvenience. Lily thought they were past the awkward stage of taking the measure of each other (she’d gotten to know the kids a little on the odd weekend when they’d come home to do their laundry or grab a home-cooked meal). They’d had pleasant enough chats at the kitchen island over plates of microwaved nachos, or so Lily thought. By now, she’d assumed everyone would be inching their way closer to feeling like a family. But then, at lunch, she’d found herself backpedaling, struggling to make conversation while Dawn kept checking her cell phone that was blowing up with texts.

  “Can you at least turn the ringer off?” Lily had implored.

  “Sure.” Dawn shrugged. But it didn’t stop her from texting, even while she nibbled at her salad. Any visions Lily might have been harboring of the two of them shopping arm in arm like best friends had gone up in smoke.

  No, Dawn isn’t interested in hanging out with her. And Cody, while nice enough, seems to assume Lily is just another one of his dad’s temporary diversions, despite the gleaming ring on her finger. Maybe, Lily allows, everyone simply needs some more time to get used to each other. After all, six months is but a blink in a family’s lifetime.

  She glances at her watch, relieved to see there are only fifteen more minutes to go before she can take another pill. This morning she woke up with a throbbing headache (no doubt stress related), and the first Tylenol of the day has done little to dull the daggers shooting through her head. Happily, the medicine cabinet is well stocked with painkillers, ever since Roger broke his hand a few months ago—thanks to Meredith, who had the audacity to run him over with her car. Well, “run over” might be a bit of an exaggeration, but Meredith did hit him with the front bumper of her trusty Subaru in Roger’s own driveway. I stepped on the gas pedal instead of the brake! she’d explained, as if the whole incident were incredibly funny.

  Sure thing, thinks Lily.

  On bad days, she suspects that Meredith’s run-in was less of an accident and more of a comeuppance. A little wedding present for Roger only a few months after he’d married Lily. But Roger insists it was an accident, as well—he was looking down at his cell phone when Meredith was inching along the driveway and had practically walked into the car himself. Next thing he knew, he was flying across the front lawn. He and Meredith laugh about it now, as if it’s their own private joke. Lily doesn’t get it. If she were Roger, she would have been pissed. But as her friend Alison likes to remind her, if Lily invests too much time analyzing every interaction between Roger and his ex-wife, she’ll drive herself crazy.

  And she has zero interest in doing that.

  Though why Meredith seems to dislike her so much baffles Lily. Meredith and Roger have been divorced for almost ten years. Ten years! Ten years is sufficient time for the country to conduct a new census, for goodness sake. And Meredith seems happily married to Joel, who strikes Lily as a sweetheart. Lily’s friends say Meredith can’t contain her jealousy, that she’s envious Roger married someone so much younger. But Lily considers that naive. She and Roger love each other, and when you love someone, age doesn’t matter a whit. And if Meredith truly loves Joel, why should she care if Roger found someone else?

  Her thoughts are interrupted by the sound of Moses barking downstairs, probably another delivery that Donna can handle. Lily should really take the dog for a walk before she heads off to yoga. She searches for a pair of yoga pants, discovers them balled up in her bottom dresser drawer, and throws them on along with a fresh T-shirt. Once she finds a brand of clothing she likes, she tends to stockpile it, and these Cut Loose shirts fit in all the right places without being the chintzy, see-through material of some of the chain store T-shirts. About a dozen T-shirts, all in different pastel shades, sit rolled into tight cylinders in her drawer like so many burritos. She snaps a quick photo and posts it on Instagram for today’s “enhancer.”

  Even though Lily would never call herself a social media influencer—she doesn’t have nearly enough followers to warrant that title—a suitable number of companies send her free samples to chat up online and, as a result, she now has close to fifty thousand followers. It’s not a job exactly, but with the amount of free clothing and products she gets to play up on Instagram, she’s saving Roger a bundle—and it’s a far cry from her waitressing days. Companies like prAna, Fresh Produce, and Athleta reach out to her whenever a product needs a little extra nudge, usually after it’s been available for a while or might be going stale. Like the understudy to a Broadway musical, Lily shows up when reinforcements are needed, and she’s made a bit of a name for herself as a fashion maven, albeit with eclectic, slightly bohemian tastes. She adds a hashtag of #cutloose #comfiestshirtsever to the photo. That’ll do for today.

  She’s looking forward to her class and stretching out her back muscles that feel as tight as a stitch. Even at thirty, her body is already starting to show troubling signs of middle age, with saggy bits and niggling lower back pain. Once graduation weekend is over, though, she can finally relax. She’s simply trying to approach the weekend with as much grace as possible, with as much grace as Roger will expect from her.

  A knock on the bedroom door interrupts her thoughts. “Mrs. Landau?”

  “Yes?” An awkward jolt runs through her whenever she hears her name attached to Roger’s. In her mind, she is still Lily Sullivan. The party coordinator pokes her head into the room.

  “We need your okay on the floral arrangements in the dining room. Would you mind taking a look?”

  “Of course, I’ll be right there. Thank you, Donna.”

  Lily dots her lips with a faint gloss, pulls her hair up in a ponytail, and goes into the bathroom to grab a tiny pill from the bottle. With a long drink of water, the tablet winds its way down her throat like a smooth pebble. Then she heads downstairs to approve the centerpieces and take Moses for that walk.

  TWO

  When they pull up to join the jagged line of cars in front of the Boston Harbor Hotel, Joel jokes, “Check it out, honey. Our Subaru fits right in.” There’s a Lexus, a Jaguar, a Porsche, and a Range Rover—they might as well be attending the Emmys in Los Angeles.

  Meredith nods absently, unamused—she’s watching a cluster of millennials striding by on their lunch hour, their navy blazers slung over their shoulders in the afternoon sun. To Joel, they look about fifteen years old. Mixed in with the young businessmen are the easy-to-spot tourist families, their fanny packs looped around their bellies, cameras slung about their necks. One dad lugs a toddler’s car seat with him. God bless him, thinks Joel. He would have never been willing to do that with the kids when they were little. Safety be damned—he’d have strapped the twins into a cab on his lap with his own seat belt and called it a day.

 
When they reach the head of the valet line, a gray-suited man in a top hat steps forward to claim Joel’s keys. Not exactly a Motel 6, Joel thinks. I could get used to this. He climbs out of the front seat, hands the guy a few bucks, and trots over to the curb to join his wife and mother-in-law. Laid out before them is Boston’s sprawling financial district, an appealing jumble of stately historical buildings and sleek modern architecture. Skyscrapers, seemingly conjured from nothing but air and glass, stretch above them, and Joel feels a bit like the country mouse come to visit the big city.

  Zipping up the middle of Atlantic Street is the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a welcome bit of nature in the heart of capitalism. Flowering trees and random sculptures dot the park, where couples lounge on blankets. A few kids toss a Frisbee back and forth. Others are enjoying a quick sandwich on one of several artfully painted benches. It’s as if a coquettish maiden has come to town to remind the captains of industry what it’s like to have fun. Joel recalls some grumblings a while back about the accumulating years and exorbitant costs of moving the city’s highway system underground, but, boy, is the park ever inviting today.

  “Well, isn’t this wonderful?” Meredith says, as if reading his thoughts.

  “Lovely,” agrees Carol.

  The fact that his wife has chosen one of the swankest hotels for their stay—and not some dorm room on campus offered to parents at a reduced rate, but that is surely up four flights of stairs with no air-conditioning—buoys Joel’s mood even further. Typically, they would be among the first to reserve a dorm room, but Meredith insisted they splurge for this weekend. For a brief moment, he’s seized by the urge to grab her hand and toss down a blanket on the Greenway, where they can enjoy a romantic picnic. They haven’t done anything spontaneous or fun in what feels like forever.

  “Well, I suppose we should check in?” Carol says.

  Joel sighs at his mother-in-law’s unintended buzzkill, but yes, he supposes, they should. They stroll through a massive archway that opens onto a pavilion with striking views of the harbor. Joel doesn’t know much about architecture, but even he can tell that this place, with its lofty rotunda and intricate masonry, is a piece of art disguised as a hotel. He can’t stop grinning. Just as Meredith promised when she booked the rooms, “It should feel like a vacation, not a goodbye.”

  He gets it now. She’s processing a lot. This place will most definitely help alleviate the sting of the kids’ graduation.

  “Maybe after we check in,” he suggests, “we can grab lunch outside on the patio?” Already, a number of hotel guests sun themselves while nursing glasses of wine over salads.

  “Good idea.” Meredith consults her watch. “Only one o’clock. We’ve got plenty of time—the kids aren’t expecting us till five.”

  They file through a revolving door, depositing them inside the hotel’s marbled lobby. At the center is an enormous mahogany table flecked with long-stemmed vases, each one filled with a white iris that stretches like a swan’s neck. Men in white oxford shirts and women dressed in boldly colored summer dresses mill about the lobby, as if they might be here for a Lilly Pulitzer trunk show. Joel feels distinctly out of place in his khaki shorts and Life Is Good T-shirt, but the front desk lady gladly accepts his credit card at check-in nevertheless.

  An elevator swoops them up to the tenth floor, where at the end of a winding hallway, their rooms await. And Joel, as much as he likes his mother-in-law, is pleased to see that Carol’s room sits a comfortable few doors down from theirs.

  “We’ll meet you in the lobby in fifteen, okay, Mom?” Meredith calls out, but Carol has already disappeared into her room.

  Meredith shrugs and slides the electronic key into the lock, allowing their door to open onto a room with a king-size bed covered in a fluffy white down comforter and a gazillion pillows. Against the wall rests a cherry armoire, a giant television, and a mirror that can accommodate even Joel’s generous frame. At the edge of the room, two wingback chairs abut sliding doors that open onto a small patio with views of the harbor.

  “This,” Meredith says, flinging herself onto the bed, her arms outstretched as if she’s backstroking across it, “is how the other half lives.”

  He chuckles. “Well, honey, you’re in luck. Because today you are the other half. In fact, this whole weekend, you’re the other half.” Which is when it hits him.

  They’ve often joked that once the kids graduate, they’ll be able to travel to Turkey or Budapest or Tanzania—wherever they can dream of on a moment’s notice. Just think, they would say on lazy Sunday mornings over coffee. All that tuition money channeled into travel, a new deck, a fancy car. Crazy to think that the moment is almost upon them. Not two years out, not four months, or even three days. As of tomorrow, no more tuition bills will be arriving in his in-box. Now the only fiduciary debt left for the twins’ education is their nominal federal loans, for which interest hovers around 2 percent (and which, he’s made quite clear, will be the twins’ sole responsibility). It’s enough to send Joel humming as he pokes his head into the bathroom to investigate further—more white marble, a glass-encased shower with a rain showerhead and, he notes, interestingly, a bench.

  “Are you humming?” Meredith calls out.

  “So what if I am?”

  “Nothing. I could have sworn it sounded like ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,’ which I haven’t heard a soul hum since Cody walked into Toys ‘R’ Us when he was four years old.”

  “Can’t a man be glad that he gets to spend a long weekend with his lovely wife in a luxurious hotel?” Meredith is standing at the patio slider now, and he comes up behind her, wraps his arms around her. Her hair smells like lemons, the scent of her shampoo.

  “Of course he can. I guess I was a little worried that this weekend might be tough for you,” she says.

  “Tough?”

  Meredith leans back against him. “Yeah, you know, what with Roger and Lily and the whole family descending.”

  Joel pauses a millisecond before responding. Should he admit the truth? That as much as he doesn’t look forward to seeing Roger and his crew, Meredith is really where his concerns lie for the weekend. He just wants her to survive this rite of passage for the kids.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he says, watching the flotilla of sailboats dipping and climbing on the water below. “I’m perfectly content.” A ferry churns its way across the harbor, and farther out to sea, an old-fashioned galleon with massive white sails glides by, as if straight out of a movie. “Wow, isn’t that a sight?” he says and squeezes her tightly.

  “Amazing.” She gives him a quick kiss before heading over to the bed to unpack, and Joel collapses in one of the chairs to watch her pull out sundresses, multiple skirts and jackets, and even more shoes from her suitcase, scattering everything across the bed. It looks as if a small but mighty hurricane has swept through their suite.

  “Are you really going to wear all those outfits this weekend?” The two pairs of slacks, a couple of shirts, and the navy blazer he has packed for himself swim through his mind.

  Meredith pretends not to hear him while she stares into the closet—or maybe she genuinely doesn’t hear him because she’s lost in thought. “Why is it,” she asks, “that hotels, even the fancy ones, never give you enough hangers?”

  “It’s a conspiracy. Meant to drive you insane.”

  “Ha,” she says, as if she suspects this might be possible, even true. “You know, now that the kids are out of college...” Her voice trails off while she works to slip a purple sundress onto a hanger. “We can live a bit more extravagantly.”

  “Funny. I was just thinking the same thing.”

  “Does that make us selfish?” Joel ponders her question, and decides that, if it does, then he much prefers selfish Meredith to bereft Meredith, which is how she’s been acting these last few weeks, as if the kids are moving to another planet, not halfway across the country. Though it�
�s not as bad as The Year That Shall Not Be Mentioned, Meredith has retreated into her own private world of late. As if she’s made a silent pact to refuse herself anything that might afford her pleasure. He’d been so glad when she announced she was going to book club last night, but then she’d come home upset because all anyone could talk about was Dawn and Cody’s graduation. “I went so that I could discuss the book,” she complained. “Not to be reminded that my kids are leaving me for good.”

  Joel has debated suggesting some kind of therapy but worries that Meredith will only scoff at him—it’s not her style. And the thought of having to pay someone to listen to her empty-nest troubles will, he knows, smack of self-indulgence to her. “That sounds like something Roger’s new wife probably does. After she’s done with her morning yoga and massage and shares a chai latte with her friends, she heads off to her therapist to confess all her worries—though what those could possibly be, I can’t imagine.” This had been Meredith’s pointed retort when he casually floated the idea of therapy for a friend across the dinner table one night, to see if his wife might be open to counseling in general.

  Not so much.

  But selfish Meredith? That he could get used to. Selfish Meredith possesses a joie de vivre that reminds him of the woman he fell in love with. One who is a bit of a dreamer, who’s happy to shuck her responsibilities at least for a few hours. Maybe selfish Meredith will want to visit Ireland with him and kiss the Blarney Stone. Maybe selfish Meredith won’t worry about the kids quite so much and will accept that the future that’s about to unfold could quite possibly, actually, be wonderful.

  “If it does, then I think I like selfish,” he says finally, getting up to grab the remote from the bedside table and flopping down on the wedge of bed free of clothing. ESPN comes on, but it’s a random college lacrosse game, which Joel enjoys about as much as watching grannies bowl. He lets his mind wander as he anticipates tonight and how much glad-handing will be required of him at the banquet, indeed for the entire weekend. He’s pretty sure that most of the other dads will be hedge fund managers or otherwise involved in the financial industry. Money-printers, Joel’s dad used to call them disparagingly.