Watch her, p.11
Watch Her, page 11
Now, Kate dashed out of the building, her curls bouncing beneath the spring sun, and when Hester offered her a hand, she took it without reservation. How much longer would that last? They walked the few blocks toward the house while Kate yammered about her day and her friends and everything she’d learned. A few weeks earlier, she’d started writing out numbers on copier paper, going higher and higher each day. Yesterday, she’d reached the nine hundreds.
“What comes after nine hundred ninety-nine?” Hester asked.
“Dunno,” Kate said.
“But you’ll figure it out?”
“Duh.”
Kate released Hester’s hand and skipped forward. Hester jogged after her.
“Mommy came to school today,” Kate said.
A part of Hester shattered at the mention of Daphne. What could she possibly want, here, today? And how would Hester and Morgan mobilize to take this on, together, as a team? Hester’s mouth felt dry as she managed to say, “Where is she now?”
“April Fool’s Day,” Kate said, skipping ahead another few steps.
Hester grabbed the girl and yanked her from the street, rougher than she’d planned. “Careful,” she said.
Kate seemed to consider a tantrum. Hester crouched and hugged the girl. Kate submitted to the hug for all of two seconds before squirming away.
“I forgot it was April first,” Hester said. “What would you have said if your mother had shown up?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Kate said, the tantrum, and hopefully any other mention of Daphne, averted.
The threat, though, remained. Hester decided that the best course of action right now might be to ignore the whole conversation.
“How about ravioli for dinner?” she asked as they arrived home.
Kate ran up the front steps. “What kind?” she asked.
“Spinach and walnut.”
“Yuck!” Kate said.
“April Fool’s Day,” Hester said. “It’s plain. But don’t think you’ll get out of eating salad.”
“Double yuck,” Kate said.
Once inside, Hester lifted Ian the iguana from his enclosure and rested him on the counter.
“You set up your Legos while I start dinner,” she said, to Kate, as she sautéed an onion, dug out a can of tomatoes, and took a box of Dave’s Fresh Pasta from the freezer.
A moment later, Morgan’s truck turned into the driveway, followed by the patter of paws on the stairs. The front door opened. O’Keefe galloped in and did a lap around the house, followed by Waffles, who lumbered and sniffed for any new scents, and then Morgan, who greeted Kate by holding her upside down and swinging her back and forth while she shrieked. When he finally got to saying hello to Hester, she nodded at the iguana. “Ian’s hungry,” she said.
“I’ll get him some greens,” Morgan said, hanging his coat in the closet.
Hester glared at him.
“No one takes stray iguanas,” he said. “Not full-grown ones. He’s six feet long!”
The leathery creature flicked his tongue. If the worst thing Morgan Maguire did was take in animals in need, then Hester supposed she’d found the right person for her. Besides, she could use Ian as leverage.
“Go watch TV,” she said to Kate.
In Kate’s world, TV was forbidden before dinner, so she tripped over her own feet running for the remote. Soon, she’d set herself up at the coffee table, Legos spread across the surface and one dog on each side of her, while a cartoon flashed across the screen.
“She told me Daphne showed up at school today,” Hester whispered. “She was joking.”
“If it happens, we’ll figure out what to do.”
Hester resisted a retort, knowing it might blow up into an argument. She and Morgan disagreed on what to do about his sister. Hester wanted Daphne’s parental rights severed—a decision she’d made after the last time she’d seen Daphne—but Morgan wouldn’t hear of it, and Hester didn’t think the case would move forward without his support. Hester, after all, wasn’t even Kate’s actual aunt. “One of these days, this’ll turn into a problem,” she said.
“When it does, we’ll face it,” Morgan said.
If Morgan didn’t want to deal with that reality, then he could deal with another one. “Someone hired me to do a job today,” Hester said. “Maxine. She wants me to find some students.”
Morgan took down two dog bowls from over the refrigerator. At the sound of kibble hitting steel, both dogs ran to the kitchen, where Morgan made them sit.
“Did you take the job?” he asked.
“I thought we could talk about it,” Hester said, even though, technically, she’d already begun the work.
“Very mature.”
“Shut up.”
Morgan cordoned off part of the kitchen for Waffles, who inhaled her food, and another part for O’Keefe, who nibbled. He released the dogs from their “sits.” They each descended on their bowls, while Hester filled Morgan in on the project.
“Any serial killers involved?” he asked.
“Angela asked the same questions. But you can’t know, right? And if so, I’ll hand it off to the cops.”
“Again, very mature.”
“And again, shut up,” Hester said, as her phone pinged with an incoming call from Maine. “You want to say hello to Ethan?”
Kate jumped from the sofa and ran to join them as the face of five-year-old Ethan popped onto the screen.
“Ethan, my man!” Morgan said.
“It snowed today!” Ethan said.
“So much for spring in Maine,” Ethan’s guardian, Lydia, called out from somewhere behind him.
Hester had met Ethan a year and a half ago when his mother had died. Hester had pushed to have the boy come live with her here in Somerville, but in the end, he stayed in Maine with Lydia and his half brother, Oliver, where he seemed to be thriving. Most nights, he called at about this time to say hello and talk about his day. Tonight, he played his recorder for a few minutes while Kate showed him her pages of numbers.
After they hung up, Morgan said, “He’ll outgrow calling us one of these days.”
“Maybe,” Hester said. “Eventually. But not yet.”
Morgan filled a pot with water and put it on the stove. “Tell me more about the project.”
Hester diced a cucumber for the salad. “You might die of boredom,” she said. “Unless . . . there’s something more to it.”
“You already started, didn’t you?” Morgan said. Before Hester could deny it, he added, “What did you find?”
Hester put the knife down and faced him. “The students don’t exist,” she said, and she could hear the excitement in her own voice. “At least most of them don’t.”
“If they don’t exist then they can’t be dangerous. That’s a plus. Maybe Maxine pulled the data from the wrong field.”
“Maybe,” Hester said. “I’ll run that by her tomorrow. But I did find three students. I’ll talk to them too and see what I can learn.”
Waffles finished her dinner and tried to break through the barrier to get to O’Keefe’s bowl. Morgan cut her off, heaving the fifty-pound dog onto his shoulder. She sneezed and sprayed them both with doggy drool. Hester tossed Morgan a roll of paper towels.
“Remember our game?” he asked.
How could she have forgotten? “Are we still playing that?” she asked.
“Ready?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“How did it feel to tell me about this project? To let me help?”
Hester considered the question, and how little she wanted to answer. “It scared me,” she said, finally. “I thought you’d be pissed off. What did it feel like to have me ask for help?”
Morgan leaned in and kissed her. “It was okay,” he said. “Nothing special.”
“Don’t be a sap,” Hester said, even though, in her heart she knew his real answer, and she felt the same.
The front door opened. Butch ran into the apartment, paws barely finding purchase on the wooden floor, followed by Jamie.
“Just in time,” Hester said.
“Soup’s on,” Morgan called to Kate.
“We’re not having soup,” Kate said.
“Technically, that is one hundred percent correct.”
As they sat down to dinner, a text beeped onto Hester’s phone from Angela. I need your help, she wrote. Tonight.
“Intriguing,” Morgan said.
“Now, am I supposed to tell you what she wants?” Hester asked.
Morgan piled salad onto his plate. “I’m pretty sure that’s how this works.”
“I’ll let you know when she tells me.”
MAXINE
When Maxine let herself into Pinebank, the only greeting came from Adele, followed by Fred, both of whom stood halfway up the staircase and yapped. “You two have a vet appointment tomorrow,” Maxine said, offering each of them a treat. “You’ll get about ten shots each.”
They followed her as she wandered through the first floor, into the front parlor, and around to the kitchen, where a pot of water sat on the stove, boiling away. Maxine took the lid off and turned the gas to low. Outside, gray clouds hovered over the pond as the sun finished setting. The flowers in the vases around the house had begun to wilt. Maxine sent a quick e-mail to the florist reminding them to deliver fresh ones to Jennifer in the morning. From Tucker, of course.
Then she checked that off her mental to-do list.
“Anyone home?” she shouted to a silent house.
Upstairs, she found Vanessa, in her sitting room, tapping at her phone. “The coverage from the gala last night is good,” Vanessa said as she flipped through online photos. “Here’s one of you,” she added.
“I look prehistoric,” Maxine said.
Why on earth had she worn that eggplant-colored suit? It made her hair look purple, and not in a hip way. Between dirt falling from the ceiling and everything else that went into moving into a new building, not to mention the conversation with Gavin, the gala seemed as if it had happened weeks ago.
“Haven’t you heard?” Vanessa asked. “Fifty is the new twenty-five. That makes you younger than me. I have to get these to the PR department. Which one?”
To Maxine, the two photos looked the same, and in both, Vanessa seemed impossibly young, impossibly carefree and hip, something Maxine hadn’t managed to experience once in her lifetime. She collapsed onto a gray, overstuffed armchair and let her shoes fall to the floor. “The second one.”
Vanessa clacked something into a message, hit Send, and fell into the chair beside her. “What a day!” she said.
Maxine couldn’t have said it better. “What a day,” she said.
“I’ve been talking to the press since we finished the video shoot. Did you hear me on Radio Boston?”
“You were great,” Maxine said, making a mental note to listen to the broadcast later tonight.
“I wish I could have a drink,” Vanessa said, and Maxine allowed herself a touch of excitement. It would be nice to have a child around again.
“Is Gavin home?” she asked.
“He’s here somewhere. Did something happen between the two of you? You have that look. The pissed-off one.”
For a moment, Maxine considered telling Vanessa about the morning’s blowup, but she didn’t want to test loyalties. It wasn’t fair. To any of them.
“It’s those pipes in the dorm,” Maxine said. “The ones that burst. And the dirt falling from the ceiling. I wish things could go smoothly for once.”
“It’ll all settle itself out,” Vanessa said, flipping through more photos.
The only way anything settled itself out was if Maxine made sure it did.
“My mother had a guest when I got home this afternoon,” Vanessa said. “A Goth with those stretched-out earlobes. Anyway, be careful with the sausage tonight. She asked for help cooking.”
“Where is she?”
“She went to lie down.”
“Your father?”
“He went with her.”
Jennifer and Tucker slept at the front of the house, two doors away. Maxine closed her eyes. Was it her imagination, or could she hear them now, together, tucking.
She stood to leave.
“Where are you going?” Vanessa asked.
“Someone has to cook dinner,” Maxine said. “And I’m starving.”
* * *
“Gavin’s team has done a kick-ass job with recruiting,” Vanessa said. “The numbers are up . . .”
“Two percent,” Maxine filled in.
“Two percent!” Gavin said.
As CFO, Gavin managed the recruiting department, so Maxine supposed he could take credit for the success. They hadn’t spoken, not since this morning, and he sat across from her at the dinner table, refusing to make eye contact.
“That’s not us!” Tucker said, from where he sat at the head of the table and wrestled with a bottle of pinot noir.
“The ads help,” Vanessa said. “But that’s only part of it. There’s a whole, integrated outreach plan that Gavin and his team put in place last year.”
Maxine had developed every aspect of that recruitment plan.
“The cork’s broken,” Tucker said.
Maxine pushed the cork through with a butter knife.
“Do you know what that bottle goes for?” Tucker snapped, and for a moment she forgot their game: they hated each other in public.
“Desperate times,” she said, pouring herself a glass and fishing out the broken bits of cork with a spoon. “And it tastes as good as Gallo to me.”
Jennifer swept in from the kitchen. She wore a string of pearls and a loose-fitting garment that would have been called a hostess dress in another time. “No more business. No more bickering,” she said. “And if we don’t eat soon, I might waste away.”
Maxine stood as if on command and followed her into the kitchen. A moment later they returned to the dining room with a platter piled high with spaghetti and sausage, the salad bowl, and two loaves of garlic bread. “I made enough for an army,” Jennifer said. “Eat up.”
Maxine piled spaghetti and sausage on her plate, and bit into a chunk of bread. Like usual, Jennifer took a quarter of a sausage and a few strands of spaghetti, and then barely touched either as the conversation rolled along. Occasionally, she slipped bites to Fred and Adele, who waited anxiously at her feet.
“Tell us more about the baby,” Jennifer said, a few moments later. “Last night, it was a surprise.”
“We don’t know much,” Vanessa said, putting a hand over Gavin’s. “I’m a week or so past the first trimester, so six months to go!”
“Six months to go,” Jennifer said, drinking down her wine and topping it off again. “Boy or a girl?”
“We don’t know,” Gavin said.
“If you find out,” Jennifer said, “you’ll have to tell me. I’ll want to know who I can look forward to babysitting.”
The words hovered among them, sucking the oxygen from the room.
“We’re already interviewing nannies,” Vanessa said. “The whole process, it’s daunting.” She paused. “We’ll be moving too. We’re looking at a house in Chestnut Hill.”
“Moving?” Jennifer said. “Why?”
“Don’t you think it’s time?” Gavin asked.
“I don’t think so at all,” Jennifer said. “I don’t want you by yourself. Not with the baby. It’s not a good idea. You’ll need help.”
Tucker topped off Maxine’s wine. Again. She had no idea how much she’d had to drink, but her tongue felt loose as this conversation headed toward disaster. “There’s plenty of time for plans,” she said, hoping to steer toward a new topic. “And plenty of time to think about the future. You’ll be out for a few months,” she said to Vanessa. “We’ll need some initiatives to work on while you’re gone. Now that you’ve saved our recruiting, what’s your next big idea, Gavin?”
Gavin glanced at Vanessa.
“Go for it,” she said.
“A shift in focus,” Gavin said. “Away from traditional students. Those enrollments are on the decline anyway, nationally and here in Massachusetts. We need to bring in more adults. More continuing education students. More corporate education.”
“And we’ll use the gallery, like last night,” Vanessa piped in.
“I hope so,” Tucker said. “It cost enough to build.”
Gavin sat up. “Last night, we focused in on the career side of creative by bringing in graphic designers. Students aren’t interested in the arts anymore, liberal or any kind. They don’t want to be sold a dream, which is what the old Prescott University did. They want to leave college and find a job. If we connect the school to those types of careers, and show that we can help students get there, we’ll reach a new market segment.”
This was the exact idea Maxine had been selling for the past year—almost her exact words—and like the new campus center or these family night dinners, it would come true now that one of the Matsons had claimed it as their own. “Sounds like something worth looking at,” she said. “Good idea.”
“I have them every now and then,” Gavin said. “Don’t sound so glum.”
* * *
Dinner was over.
“Sit, everyone,” Maxine said, standing to clear the table.
“Who wants coffee?” Tucker said. “It’s monkey-shit coffee. Costs me forty bucks a pound.”
“Oh, Tucker,” Jennifer said. She laughed in a way that made Maxine hope she’d had enough to drink to forget the earlier conversation.
“You are vulgar,” Maxine said, hoping to sound prudish and angry, but even she caught the note of flirtation in her voice, one that she hoped would be absorbed by the wine they’d all been drinking. Everyone but Vanessa.
