Does that mean she liked my shoes? Maggie looks down at her worn, gold ballet slippers and sincerely doubts it. Maggie instinctively tucks her legs beneath herself, and pulls her hair behind her ears. It is something she does when she is feeling nervous, tugging on her best feature, or what she thinks is her best feature—her long, dark hair—and really, combined with her dark eyes and skin, someone could make the argument that she, Maggie, is pretty. But, Maggie knows, someone could make the other argument too. Not like Murph. There is only one argument to make about her.
“Maggie and I are getting married,” Nate says.
“Seriously? I don’t believe it!” Murph says. “You are engaged? I didn’t think that day would come. No judgment or anything. I keep saying I’m not done with marriage, and I’ve been married two and a half times at this point, but . . .”
Nate interrupts her—in a very un-Nate-like moment, as he doesn’t usually interrupt people. It may be the first time, or at least the first time she remembers, that she has heard him interrupt anyone. But she can see something in his eyes when he does it—the defensiveness—that kicks up in Nate so rarely that it surprises her, unnerves her, to see it now.
“Murph and I grew up down the road from each other,” he says. “Really next door to each other . . .” He makes a triangle sign with his hands, as if to show the location points of each of their houses—Murph at the thumbs, Nate at the index fingers. “We went to high school together.”
“If you can call it high school,” she says. “It wasn’t exactly chock-full of homecoming dances or pep rallies. More like eleven of us sitting in my parents’ living room every day with a private tutor because our parents deemed East Hampton High unworthy.” She shines her shiny teeth at Maggie. “Not exactly hard to win most popular when my kitchen supplied the Diet Coke.”
Maggie tries to catch Nate’s eyes. Is that how half billionaires are educated?
“Maggie loves Diet Coke,” Nate says.
Maggie nods, because she knows this is his way of trying to include her, which ends up making her feel worse. That this is the best way he found: utilizing a soft drink.
“Who doesn’t?” Murph says.
“Probably the people who make Diet Pepsi,” Maggie says. She is surprised by the anger in her own voice, the edge beneath the joke, but Murph doesn’t notice. Or at least Murph pretends not to notice, laughing loudly instead, her head flying back.
People are scrambling to pass her in the aisles, which makes Maggie hope that maybe Murph will just go back to her own seat, already. But she doesn’t seem to notice the people who need to get by. Or maybe she just doesn’t care.
“So I have a bone to pick with you, by the way . . .”
Guess not.
“How could you just skip out on our reunion? Leave me alone with all those lunatics when you know it is the end of me?”
“I’m sorry about that. We were still out in California, and trying to get it together to move here.”
“Excuses, excuses! We all had dinner at Soho House. Gray-son came in from Boston and Lis and Marlo flew in from Dubai. And Bedlan Blumberg hosted the whole thing because, you know, he’s so over trying to impress anyone. Yeah, right. Anyway . . . we drank like nine magnums of Veuve. I swear, I nearly passed out at the table. And, at three A.M., we are all totally hammered, and Buddy rises up to make a toast, and tells us that he has an announcement to make, and the announcement is that he is gay. We were like, Buddy, no fucking kidding. We’ve only known this our entire lives. But thanks for the tip, Jackass.”
She pauses, breathes in. “It was a blast.”
Nate starts to laugh, a little too loudly, and Maggie wonders if she missed something. It’s possible. What had she and Nate discussed about their high schools? She can’t remember now. Could it be so little that she has somehow assumed that Nate’s high school looked something like hers? One with a big gym and bad cafeteria food and an even worse football team? Or did he say something that made her think those things? She looks at him more carefully. What else did she assume that maybe she should remember to ask him about now? What else about the way he grew up is going to come into focus in the next twenty-four hours?
Murph is holding her hand over Nate’s chest, over his heart. “So have I been hearing right? You are back from San Fran, for good, and opening this very big-deal restaurant?”
“I wouldn’t jump to calling it a big deal, but, yes, we’re opening a restaurant out in Brooklyn, Red Hook, actually,” Nate says. And, thankfully, he steps back, so Murph has no choice but to let his chest go.
He shrugs at Maggie, as if to say, I’m sorry.
She shrugs back, as if to say, it’s okay. But truthfully—if she’s allowed to be truthful with herself—it doesn’t feel okay, or at least, not exactly.
“Red Hook, huh?” Murph says. “I didn’t know that anyone actually lived there. Wow! It’s like you’re an explorer.”
“Something like that,” Nate says.
“When is opening day?”
>
“Our soft opening is Halloween weekend. And, if all goes as planned, we want to be up and running in time for the holidays.”
“That’s exciting.”
The person behind Murph in the aisle clears his throat loudly. Murph moves over, a drop, so he can almost squeeze past. When he waits for her to really move out of the way, when he gingerly coughs again so she will, she gives him a look as if to say, up yours.