The self made widow, p.16
The Self-Made Widow, page 16
They walked a little farther in silence. The kids continued to treat the stroller like it was their own demolition derby. JoJo was giggling loudly the entire time.
“Sarah, take it down a couple notches,” Andrea said.
Kenny took her lack of response as tacit approval to continue. “Derek wasn’t on the partner track anymore, so he was working an outside opportunity.”
“What happened to him at work?”
“Best guesses?” Kenny said. “He was frivolous. He was a party boy. That made him popular in the office, but probably not with the partners. He was also an HR jacket waiting to explode.”
“Harassment?”
“I’d lean consensual, but I think if you’re sleeping your way around the office for years, eventually it’s going to cost you,” Kenny said.
“Only when the higher-ups want it to,” she muttered. “You have proof on any of this?”
“Lot of smoke,” he said. “Opening some doors and we found some fires.”
“Hey, Sarah, slow down,” Andrea called out.
Sadie had stepped onto the stroller’s standing board, leaving all the pushing to Sarah, who was perfectly fine with that, since it meant she could go full throttle. They were twenty yards farther along the path; her middle child either hadn’t heard or had conveniently ignored her.
Andrea said, “Run it through for me.”
Kenny explained the potential health care insurance scheme and how Wendell had all but confirmed it.
“Should I go through Crystal to get Wendell to break?” she asked.
“No, Wendell is out of the loop. He refused to get involved from the beginning,” he said. With no hesitation, he followed it with, “I think you should go through Jeff.”
“Yeah,” she replied, drawing the word out, exhausted already at the very thought.
They watched Sarah hit a rut in the towpath. The stroller toppled over. Sadie got tangled up in the wheel base and JoJo fell out the side, landing in the grass right along the incline to the unprotected canal.
Andrea screamed and ran to them. Kenny, normally slow to respond to such things, sprinted ahead of her. By the time he had reached JoJo, Sarah had already picked the baby up and carried her away from the embankment.
Sadie was crying, JoJo was laughing, and Sarah knew she was about to get in trouble.
“I know!” she shouted before Andrea could say anything.
“You know what?” snapped Andrea.
“I know that you warned me to slow down and I didn’t listen and I was wrong and now Sadie got hurt and JoJo would have sunk to the bottom of the canal and died,” Sarah responded in a breathless rush.
Andrea and Kenny looked at each other. That had pretty much summed it up.
Except for . . .
“And . . . ?” asked Andrea.
“And if JoJo had drowned, all those swimming lessons were really a waste of money,” Sarah said.
Andrea wanted to laugh and punt her child at the same time.
Kenny just laughed.
“Pick up the stroller,” Andrea said, moving over to Sadie.
“I got JoJo,” Sarah protested.
“Give JoJo to Uncle Kenny and pick up the stroller!”
“Uncle Kenny doesn’t want JoJo,” Kenny said.
Andrea turned on Kenny, ready to punt him, too.
“Uncle Kenny is going to hold JoJo while Sarah straightens out the stroller,” Andrea said through gritted teeth.
“Fine,” Kenny and Sarah said at the same time. Sarah handed JoJo to Kenny, who took her as if she were an oozing bag of toxic sludge.
“She’s not gonna bite, Uncle Kenny,” Sarah said.
“I’m not worried about the puppy teeth,” he said as he tried to properly hold her. “I’m worried about dropping her.”
Sarah struggled to get the stroller upright, saying, “She’ll be fine. We drop her all the time.”
“No we don’t,” Andrea said quickly, as she tried to help the crying Sadie come down from the terrible trauma of a scrape on her knee.
“We do,” Sarah laughed. “Like, all the time.”
“We don’t,” Andrea said, then, looking at Kenny, she softly repeated, “We don’t.”
JoJo grabbed Kenny’s mouth. She had a surprisingly firm grip on his lower teeth and lip.
“What do I do?” he garbled.
“You bite down really hard and she’ll let go,” said Sarah, as she extricated the stroller from the rut.
“No, you don’t!” snapped Andrea, unsure if Kenny would have taken the advice.
“I wasn’t going to do that,” he said.
Andrea patted Sadie on the butt. “Sarah, let your sister push the empty stroller. Kenny, hand me the baby.”
Playing a teething game with her meaty little fist, Kenny said, “No, it’s okay. She’s tasty.”
Sarah laughed. That made Sadie laugh and that made JoJo laugh. Sadie pushed the empty stroller slowly enough that it gave Sarah the bright idea to run circles around her while chanting, “Slowpoke!”
Sadie shrieked at Sarah to stop, which only made Sarah run faster and chant louder.
“Sarah, give your sister a break, will you!” Andrea shouted angrily, her patience expired.
Sarah turned on her mother and with explosive anger screamed, “I can never do anything!”
She suddenly seized. Her eyes rolled up. Her head pitched backward, craning her neck in an awkward arc, and her arms froze spastically. Sarah collapsed to the dirt.
Sadie pushed the stroller past her unconscious sister, muttering, “There she goes again.”
As Andrea casually walked toward her prostrate child, Kenny said, “What the fuck was that?”
From several yards ahead, Sadie said, “Quarter in the swear jar!”
“What the fuck was that?” Kenny repeated.
Andrea cradled Sarah in her arms as the six-year-old slowly opened her eyes.
“Breath-holding spell,” Andrea said calmly.
“What the fuck is that?” Kenny continued.
“Quarter! Quarter! Quarter!” called out Sadie.
Kenny removed his wallet from his back pocket and threw it at Sadie. It fell a few feet short of its intended target, which had been her head.
“Take my fucking Amex card!” he snapped. As Sarah was getting to her feet, he again said, “What the fuck is that?”
“Sarah has breath-holding spells,” Andrea said.
“She stopped breathing!” Kenny said.
“Yeah.”
“She passed out!”
“Yeah.”
“But she’s fine now, thirty seconds later?”
“Pretty much,” said Andrea. “It’s a reaction to anger or shock.”
“Why not just get angry or shocked like a normal person?”
“I am normal!” Sarah said, groggy but with defiance.
“Yeah, sure you are, kid,” Kenny replied as he picked up his wallet. JoJo laughed. “Glad you think this is funny,” he said to the baby. Then, realizing the ticking time bomb he might be holding, he panicked. “Wait, it’s not going to happen to this one, too, is it?”
“Probably not,” Andrea said with a smile. She kissed Sarah on the forehead. “You okay?” Sarah nodded. “What have we talked about?”
“I gotta try not to get so angry about things that don’t deserve getting so angry about,” Sarah said, by rote. She’d clearly been through this drill before.
“And how do we do that?”
“Count down from five when I think I’m getting super mad,” she said. “Step back and away from my anger.”
“Okay,” Andrea said, mussing Sarah’s perpetually mussed hair. “Sadie, climb up on the standing board and let Sarah break the speed limit.”
Sadie cheered. Sarah ran ahead and started pushing the stroller as fast as she could, with Sadie squealing in delight.
“You want to hand her back to me?” Andrea asked Kenny.
“What?” he responded, realizing he’d gotten comfortable walking with the baby in his arms, but now thinking she really might detonate or something. “Oh, yeah, sure.”
Andrea put JoJo on her shoulders and held her hands. The baby squealed in delight. Her father was so tall that it was JoJo’s favorite thing when Jeff put her on top of the world. The much shorter Andrea remained an acceptable option.
After a few steps, Kenny said, “How do you do it?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “Just do.”
“But it’s not what you love,” he said. “I mean, I know you love them, but—”
“It is what it is,” she interrupted, not wanting to dig too much deeper than that.
“I’m terrified of meeting Sitara’s parents,” he said. “I’m even more terrified of having her meet my mother.”
“I get that,” she said. “Not about your mom—I mean, just in general. Now, picture Sitara meeting your mother when she’s four months pregnant. That was me.”
Kenny laughed. “What a nightmare.”
“Total nightmare,” Andrea added.
“This whole relationship thing feels so . . .”
“Terrifying?”
“No,” he replied. “I mean, yeah, but what I was going to say was: unnecessary. Why do we bother? Can you tell me one thing that makes it worth it?”
Sarah and Sadie squealed in delight. Hearing them, JoJo reacted by kicking her stubby heels into Andrea’s collarbone and squealing, too.
“On a good day,” Andrea replied, “they make it worth it.”
They walked several paces before Kenny said, “How many good days do you get?”
She smiled but said nothing, which was answer enough in itself.
“You going to talk to Jeff?” he asked.
“Been figuring out the strategy this entire time,” she said.
“What are you going to do if he is doing something wrong?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“How many witnesses are around when he admits it,” Andrea said.
24
SHORT on time to make dinner, Andrea cobbled together quesadillas using frozen vegetables and leftovers. She only had half a jar of salsa, a quarter bag of shredded cheddar, and zero fucks to give. She was too anxious about her impending conversation with Jeff to worry about dinner. She could have been subconsciously making a bad dinner to set up her excuse to run out and get ice cream as amends, but that wouldn’t explain her routine of making bad dinners on a normal day.
“Sorry dinner was crappy, but how about if we all go get Bent Spoon as my apology?”
The kids cheered. JoJo joined in, even though she had devoured her dinner of Gerber macaroni and cheese.
“Really?” asked Jeff. “Into Princeton on a Monday night?”
“C’mon, Monday is our only night without some kind of activity going on for them,” she said. “Let’s go! Half hour. Maybe they’ll have that ricotta pistachio you like so much.”
Jeff felt the pull of the ricotta pistachio.
“If they do, can you bring it back?” he weaseled.
“If I bring it back, it’ll be half-melted and you’ll make a boo-boo face,” she said.
The kids laughed at that.
“You do make a boo-boo face, Dad,” Ruth said.
Andrea might have to start paying her oldest daughter an assistant’s salary.
“Okay, let’s go,” Jeff said.
The kids applauded. JoJo, on a seven-second reality delay, clapped, too, missing her hands with every other attempt.
* * *
■ ■ ■
THEY FOUND A parking space in Palmer Square. Eli and Ruth opened the stroller as Andrea took JoJo out of the car. Jeff fumbled with the parking app on his phone.
Set across from the Princeton campus off Nassau Street, the square was an open-area mall with several high-end clothing and white-privilege knickknack stores, and several dine-in and takeout restaurants. It had been built in 1938 in a colonial revival style to complement the architecture of the university campus and create a central hub for the town’s traffic flow and commerce. It was considered an act of urban renewal, though people now, as much as then, conveniently ignored the fact that its construction had led to the displacement of the African American community that had lived on a street that would no longer exist. But ultimately, who could be concerned by such things a century later, when good chocolates from Thomas Sweet and fine dresses from Zoë could be had?
Bent Spoon was an uncomfortably small ice cream shop with an eclectic neo-hippie vibe that offered even more eclectic ice cream flavors. The store faced the Palmer Square green, an open space with a few huge pine trees, tables for sitting, and just enough grass to let little kids run around. The green abutted the historic Nassau Inn, which was Princeton’s only full-service hotel.
All in all, it was quite the idyllic setting in which to accuse your husband of graft.
Getting the ice cream was an ordeal, as Andrea had known it would be. Between the cramped space while ordering and the menu variety, she dealt with more noise and questions than she needed. JoJo was the easy one because she couldn’t read and didn’t know any better: Madagascar vanilla bean. Jeff and Eli both went with the NJ ricotta pistachio. Andrea knew it wasn’t Eli’s favorite, but he was in a phase where he desperately wanted to please his father. The dumb kid. Ruth and Sarah agreed to go splitsies, sharing dark chocolate mint cookie and Greek yogurt with candied walnuts. Sadie got NJ blueberry mascarpone, or as Ruth called it, blueberry Al Capone. Andrea and Jeff didn’t ask how she even knew who Al Capone was, but Andrea took an inner pride that she did.
They sat at two empty tables on the green. It was a Monday night in September, so there was less “civilian” traffic. Students passed them by without a second glance. Just a larger-than-average family out for ice cream. Nothing to see here, thought Andrea. No murderers being hunted down or lying, thieving husbands being interrogated.
The kids wolfed down their ice cream and asked if they could run around the green. Andrea told them only if they kept an eye on JoJo. Ruth took the baby from Andrea’s lap.
“Gross! She has ice cream all over her face,” her daughter said.
“So do you,” said Andrea. “Shut up and go play.”
Jeff kept an eye on the kids as he ate his ice cream.
“You want any?” he offered.
“I do, but no thanks,” she replied. “I don’t want to risk my membership card with the Cellulitists.”
“You don’t?” he said, smiling.
“I had a talk with Kenny this afternoon,” she said, ambushing him just as he’d gotten complacent. “Some things he told me got me a little worried.”
“About Molly?”
“About you,” she said.
“Me?” He reacted with a smile on his face that she realized she could take as either incredulity or guile. “Did I kill Derek now?”
“About some business arrangements you were involved in,” she said. “With him.”
“What?” he said.
“You and Derek. And Martin. Involved in something that could be shady?”
“I’m not in business with Derek,” he replied.
She wondered how carefully he was parsing his words. How carefully he had been parsing his words.
“Present tense, sure, because he’s dead,” she said coldly. “I’ve been thinking about something you said.”
“What?”
She considered their conversation from a few days ago in an entirely new context:
I got a secondary assignment. It’s the good team. It’s generated more money than I expected, but it’s probably going to be over pretty soon.
Why?
The project hit a dead end.
“You said ‘the good team,’ but you meant it as in Derek Goode,” she said softly.
He laughed and it sounded genuine, not condescending.
“Andie, honestly, that’s kind of crazy, conspiracy-theory thinking,” he said. “I mean, I wish I could be so clever, but you know I’m not.”
“Except . . . for when you are,” she said.
A flash crossed his eyes—defiance, indifference, fear, or all at the same time? His fingers loosened their grip on his small plastic spoon. The opposite of what someone who was guilty would do. He slowly, casually had another spoonful of ice cream. The opposite of what someone who was guilty would do. He ate the remainder of his cup, even down to scraping the melted remnants at the bottom, without saying a word in his own defense. The opposite of what someone who was guilty would do.
She waited, until he finally said, “Andie, after everything we’ve been through, how stupid would I have to be to do anything illegal?”
When Jeff had originally confessed his financial crimes to her, he hadn’t been repentant or remorseful. He had been annoyed, frustrated that he had been caught, but not truly embarrassed by what he had done. He had rationalized his actions because they had generated exponentially greater returns for everyone involved. Until they hadn’t, and that was when he had gotten caught.
When the market took a dip in 2012, Jeff had predicted it, planned for it, and used it as his bait to lure clients to move their funds to the wealth management company he was starting. He had made his first million by age twenty-five, as he’d promised Andrea he would when they’d met in college.
They had an apartment in Jersey City for the first two years of their marriage, but after Eli was born, it had become too cramped. So, a new baby, a new company—creatively named Stern Wealth Management—and a move to a new house had all happened at the same time. Since Jeff set up shop in Princeton, she reluctantly returned to West Windsor, the town where she had spent her teenage years. They settled into a house that was ridiculously larger than they needed, but—as if she hadn’t had enough warning signs through the early years of their relationship—Jeff had assured her that a bigger house meant they could have more kids. And he had guaranteed they’d have five times as much money before he turned thirty.
