At the elementary school gates, the boys tumbled from the car without so much as a backward glance, and Isabel remembered only at the last moment to call out to them, to remind them that Lily would pick them up right in this very spot. When they parked at Greenwich Prep a few minutes later, a block away from the main entrance and the logjam of the senior lot, Madison lingered in the front seat. But when she looked at her mother, Isabel was leaning her head against her window, looking toward the bus line, as if the car were already empty. She looked not unpretty but deflated, all color withdrawn from her body.
After a few moments, she turned her head slowly and fixed Madison with the same gaze that usually appeared in response to something rude, an insult or maybe a personal question.
“You’ll be late,” she said, and Madison got out of the car. By the time she had reached the main entrance to campus, her mother had driven away.
TWO
The second she heard the SUV pull out of the garage, Lily returned to the kitchen. She sat down in the breakfast nook, just where Matteo had been, and put her head to the table.
Isabel had reclaimed this wood from some farmhouse in western Massachusetts, a town they’d passed through on their way home from the partners’ retreat at someone’s Berkshires estate. She’d apparently all but yanked the wood from its heap in a field, saving it from its bonfire destiny. But of course he’d insisted they restore it, clean it up, resurface the tabletop to get rid of pesky, uneven planks that might upturn a little boy’s cereal bowl. And so by the time it was finished, just like the rest of the house, it had strayed a bit from Isabel’s original plan.
This, at least, was the story Lily had heard from Isabel. Like the other stories about the construction of Bob’s envisioned home, Lily was mistrustful of this one. She worked for Bob and she worked for Isabel, but she had yet to see any evidence that he could strong-arm his wife into doing much of anything. Which seemed to Lily like a fair trade, for a razor-sharp woman who expressed placid disinterest in the intricacies and machinations of her husband’s career. It seemed only right that, in exchange, he accept the house as her domain.
Still, the brute-force approach might have been helpful this morning, if he’d been here. Madison had been in the kitchen for only ten minutes, but Lily felt like taking a bow, then a nap. And she wasn’t usually wrung out like this before nine o’clock. There were a million balls in the air each day, yes, but Lily had kept this job for this long because she knew how to juggle. She wasn’t usually asked to lie to these kids, though; she wasn’t usually given enough information to make lying a viable course of action.
It bothered her, to be already thinking along these lines. No one had asked her to lie. All that had happened was that Lily had walked through the rose garden and into the main house an hour ago to find Isabel awake and fully dressed, her drained espresso cup sitting on the precious wooden table. And Isabel had presented her employee with a plan that wasn’t so much a plan as a series of orders not to ask further questions.
As if that would work with the kids, as if they wouldn’t balk at their mother suddenly driving them to school.
Jesus, they were only a month into the school year, Lily thought now. Too much was already flying out of her hands. The early return from their summer vacation, and now this.
She began loading the breakfast dishes into the enormous spacecraft this house classified as a dishwasher. This was the smaller one, not even the industrial one they used for the events that were too small to be catered, and still it felt like an enormous churning maw that might swallow her at any moment. All this kitchen for a woman who didn’t cook. But that wasn’t Lily’s business, obviously; judgment wasn’t her job. Her job had taken care of Lily’s parents, paid off her loans, built her grad school fund from mere scrimped money into something that actually deserved to be called “a fund.” Something that could even pay for one of the big ones, law school or something. It was too easy to forget, sometimes, to roll your eyes and start to feel like the fact that you were the one cooking in a kitchen actually made it yours.
At what point did you have to stop saying you were “saving money for school”? If she never did it, never went back to school, never gave shape to her amorphous interest in child psychology, could she still say this job had served a purpose? In the past two years, she’d gradually withdrawn from anyone who might press her on this. Her old adviser from Columbia, who had gotten her this job in the first place because he trusted her to use it as a stepping-stone. (“These aren’t the kind of people to whom you don’t wish to be connected,” he had once told her, taking delight in the wordplay, as if cleverness would make it sound less like social climbing.) Her friends from her major, many of whom had already gotten their master’s degrees and were either mulling over or in the midst of Ph.D.s. And her father, who didn’t share her mother’s thrill at the sheer amounts of money she’d been able to earn.
Her father who always said that anything you did that you felt good about, you wouldn’t feel any need to hide from anyone, no matter how noble the reasons for secrecy. Lily didn’t believe he thought this actually, didn’t believe any human adult could make it to his advanced age and still be spouting such inaccuracies, but still. He loved to say this when she was over for dinner, dodging his questions about when she’d quit her job and start “her next phase.” When they were eating the groceries she’d bought, sending the leftovers home with the handyman she’d paid. (She never pointed this out, and also never reminded her father that if his landlord ever forced him out to make way for the invading gentrifiers, it would also be Lily’s money he’d use to find another place.)
Of course, Jackson was different. Her boyfriend was always telling her that he didn’t judge her for wanting to stay long enough to reap the benefits of all the work she’d put in. But you don’t want to get complacent, he always said. You don’t want to grow afraid of leaving; by then, it’s too late. You don’t want to fall for it. Start thinking you need them.
Lily punched at the faucet, ducking her hands beneath the scalding jets of water. Nobody, not any of them, wanted to hear that she liked this job. She liked being the woman Isabel D’Amico, who needed no one, relied upon for help. And these kids; she loved these kids. She wasn’t in denial. She knew that eight years was at least five years too long for a girl with her options to remain a glorified nanny.