Keep Me Posted (19 page)

Stevie, always the conspiracy theorist, piped up. “That’s bullshit. I wouldn’t pay that. I bet her table was a knockoff. What does Quinn weigh—thirty pounds, maybe? He’s supposed to so easily shatter a sixteen-hundred-dollar coffee table? They’re gonna use tempered glass on a table like that.”

Then Becky chimed in with, “I don’t understand how this even happened in the first place. Where were you?”

“Oh, you know, lounging in the tub,” I said, with panache.

“And eating bonbons—right, dear?” Mary laughed. “Boys will be boys, Becky. These things happen.”

I couldn’t resist shooting Becky a rueful look. She had three
girls and simply couldn’t share the soldierlike bond that Mary and I did.

“Come on,” Stevie said. “Let’s go throw a watermelon through the patio table—that thing was three hundred bucks and I bet we couldn’t break it.”

“You will not,” barked Mary.

“Your friend is pulling one over on you,” said Stevie.

Leo just laughed, but I could tell Stevie’s comments had his wheels spinning.

“Did it look real to you?” Leo asked.

Honestly, I had my doubts. “I don’t know. But if it was a knockoff, she probably didn’t know it,” I said. I was tempted to jump on Stevie’s bandwagon, if only to ally myself with Leo against a common enemy.

Then Sal spoke up. I hadn’t even noticed he was there, but he was leaning in the doorway, filing his nails with a big pink emery board. “You need a designer table? Why didn’t you say so? I got a guy.”

“Of course you do,” said Emma, smiling brightly at me, practically rubbing her hands together in anticipation of more mob clues.

Leo’s always been a Boy Scout—he doesn’t even download pirated music—but he looked at me with his thick black eyebrows raised to the sky, and I shrugged. We were in a tight spot, so why not avail ourselves of one of the perks of being related to a low-ranking official in the Italian-American organized-crime syndicate?

I spoke up. “Really?”

Emma jerked her head around and bulged her eyes at me. She was either thinking that this was finally our chance to find out for
real if Sal lived up to our
Sopranos
fantasy, or just shocked that I was about to hop into it.

But what I was thinking was that maybe I was simply taking my natural place in the world. So far this year I had become a cheater and a liar. So why not a receiver of stolen goods?

Accepting my fate, I took the lead on making the arrangements with Sal. He said he could have it for me in a few days. I texted Rachel back and told her I’d order her the table this week, and felt the rush of satisfaction of having a
project.

M
aster of denial and avoidance that I was, I managed to parlay the few days I allotted for perspective into nearly two weeks, during which time I had come up with all kinds of explanations as to why this whole thing was a nonevent. It happened in August. A throwaway month. Nobody remembers things that happen in August. We were into September now. The city was running as it should, and everything was back to normal. The blog going viral was a blip. Fifteen minutes of fame? Try fifteen seconds. It was done. I still punished myself silently, but I saw no reason to upset Sid and Leo if this whole thing was blowing over.

There was one little problem with my line of thinking, though: After my initial total immersion, I had avoided the Internet as best I could while I instinctively hunkered down with my family. Knowing that my character might soon be called into question, I was too busy shoring up my key witnesses to root around the Web. Unfortunately, any dummy knows that just because you don’t follow baseball doesn’t mean they canceled the World Series.

My campaign wasn’t totally manufactured, though. I was getting on with what I had set my mind to do before the awful discovery. I became playful and sentimental with the boys and more loving toward Leo. The constant undercurrent of fear and dread didn’t work wonders for my patience levels, but it was offset by my determination to be remembered as a good person, should I be dragged away to jail for crimes against common decency.

My whole Jake fantasy disappeared as quickly as it had started. I suspect it would have died out on its own, but things getting real between us turned out to be a turnoff. I shifted my energies in that department to where they should have been all along: my marriage. I became bolder in bed with Leo, initiating sex at least as often as he did. Instead of feeling like we each had a heavy weight in us that rolled around under our skin, constantly pulling us down to the bed, I now visualized the backs of my hips and shoulders attached by long strings to the ceiling. The living room floor became our spot. With a solid wall and two doors between us and the kids, we had leeway for more than the hushed quickies our bedroom allowed. My self-preservation instincts led me to figure that if Leo found out, he’d be less likely to divorce a sexually available wife than the sexually distant one I’d been for longer than I cared to admit.

Simultaneously, I was bracing for the worst. I made myself a punishment playlist: Lots of Morrissey, Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” Rihanna’s “Take a Bow,” Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable,” plus some extra-angry Fiona Apple and Lily Allen, all of whom I’d imagined singing to me.

As if to further castigate me, Sid’s letters kept coming in at a good clip.

Singapore

Sept 10

Cass,

First, I love that stitches story. Scars
are
cool! Send me a photo of Quinn and his badass scar, please. And don’t beat yourself up. It takes an exceptional person to recognize her own failures in a relationship. I’d say you are going to be fine. You love Leo, right? He’ll forgive you, Cass. I think you should tell him about the kiss.

XO, Sid

When Leo came home from work on Tuesday night two weeks after our return from the shore, the boys and I were sitting on the floor listening to Birds of Chicago and eating Peanut Butter Panda Puffs right out of the box.

I was nervous and distracted. Tonight was the night. I had to tell Leo. Instead of rehearsing my lines in my head, I was in a total daze, focusing on the loud rhythmic crunching in my head.

“Daddy!” the boys screamed, snapping me out of it.

Leo always got the rock-star greeting from the boys. The three of them collapsed in a hug-wrestle pile while I shoved the last of the cereal in the box into my mouth.

“Hey, you cheated!” Leo said, still smiling. He was looking at me.

Is this it?
I thought while I blinked in confusion.

“Real food week,” he said, nodding to the box of cereal, which I’d been clutching like a security blanket most of the day.

“What?” I said.

“Real food week! It was your idea. I thought we started this morning.”

“Oh. I didn’t realize we were really doing that. I thought we were just talking hypothetically,” I said.

We’d exchanged e-mails yesterday regarding this. There was a blogger who’d pledged to feed her family only real food—nothing processed or artificial or packaged—for one hundred days. I had suggested we try it for a week—but not
this
week.

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Leo said, with a sudden edge.

“Leo. We can do the real food thing. I didn’t realize it was that important to you.”

Shit. How did this happen?
These were not the conditions under which I imagined telling him what I needed to tell him. Things had been going so well between us. I opened my mouth to apologize, but he was busy getting the boys drinks of water and telling them about a huge rat he saw on the subway platform earlier.

There was a lot of information I had to relay to him, and I had to do it quickly—before the boys did, because
they
knew that I was leaving on an airplane to visit their aunt Sid in the morning, that I would be gone for four days and Grandma Rita would be here with them and Dad. They did not know the more crucial information—that thousands of strangers knew intimate details about Mommy and Daddy’s marriage and that I’d made out with an ex-boyfriend and broadcast it to the world. Nor did they know about the troubling events of my day leading up to and just after my purchase of the single airline ticket. Still, I wanted to tell Leo everything myself before they could start spilling the beans.

“Sorry. I’m just irritated because I have to go back to Fourteenth Street in an hour,” Leo said.

“Seriously? For how long?”

“Yeah—the new membership cards aren’t scanning, so I’ve got to figure it out. No idea. Maybe an hour, maybe more. I just got the message but I was almost home, so I thought I’d come up and have dinner and say good night to the boys.”

Dinner? Since when did I have dinner waiting for him when he came home? And now apparently there was some rule about it being “real.”

“Uuuuh. The boys ate at the Hudson. I thought we’d just order Thai—I mean, or something more healthy?”

“That’s all right. I’ll pick something up on my way back.”

When Leo had left for work earlier that morning, I was still happily biding my time, with vague plans to tell him soon. But after the day I’d had, a confession moved to the front burner.

“I love starting the workweek on a Tuesday,” he’d said on his way out.

“Oh my God—it’s Tuesday. Wanda’s coming today!”

“She is?”

“Yeah, just today and next week, until school starts. She needs the money, and we haven’t been great about those weekly date nights I told her we’d be using her for.”

“It’s cool. Enjoy your day,” he’d said, and left.

I calculated that once Wanda arrived, I’d drop the clothes off at the Chinese laundry on the corner, buy groceries, prep lunch and dinner, and maybe even squeeze in a quick pedicure.

But I didn’t get the pedicure, nor did I drop off the laundry or even buy groceries. Because when Wanda left with the boys for the park, I decided to check my Yahoo account. Since I’d switched to Gmail for personal mail years ago, my Yahoo account was almost
exclusively spam, but I still checked it and occasionally read the e-mails from BabyCenter or the West Village Parents.

I had forgotten that this was also the address I had used to set up the blog. There were four urgent e-mails from Fishfood, the blog’s host, instructing me to check and reset my privacy settings because many of their blogs had their settings wiped out when a server crashed.
Ah, so that answers that,
I thought, taking a moment to imagine the brief panic followed by quick relief I’d have experienced had I read the e-mails in time. I didn’t get to revel for long, though, because my in-box contained several personal e-mails with subject lines such as “Seeking Representation?”; “Book Deal and Speaking Opportunities”; “Introduction.” Confused, I read a couple of them. They were from agents, one of whom outlined a plan for a speaking and talk-show tour. Another promised a lucrative book deal with one of a number of publishers.

The one I found most distressing was this:

Dear Cassie,

I am a producer with
It’s All Relative
, a program on ALM Radio. We’ve been alerted to your blog,
The Slow News Sisters
. I would like to speak with you about doing an interview for our segment, which will focus on ways long-distance siblings stay connected. Jessica Ronan, author of the bestselling book
Sisterhood
, will participate. I hope that you will join us on air, as the story is pegged on the sudden popularity of your blog. Please let me know if you’d be interested in participating. And would you mind putting me in touch with your sister, Sid? I can’t seem to find a valid e-mail address for her.

Regards,

Caroline Stein

Senior Producer, ALM

The e-mail was three weeks old, and I had two more recent e-mails from her, asking if the blog was down.

My family listens to ALM. It’s on in the kitchen at my parents’—and my grandparents’—house around the clock. The little Tivoli radio on our windowsill was tuned to its local affiliate. This had to be stopped.

I grabbed that same box of Peanut Butter Panda Puffs off the table and started pacing. I finally worked out the perfect handful size and chewing pace so that I could get a fresh mouthful at the same spot where I turned on the ball of my foot each time, when I realized what I needed to do. I checked for flights to Singapore and bought a single ticket for $1,700, then called Mom and asked if she could come back to New York. She assumed I was going to be there for Sid, given the whole mess with Adrian, and I didn’t correct her.

I had just completed purchasing Mom’s ticket and was wondering what the chances were of Leo checking the credit card statement online today. I was about to search ALM Radio’s website to confirm my hope that the story had gone forward without mentioning my blog, figuring that if not, I’d call Caroline Stein and beg her not to include me in her story, but the buzzer rang.

Assuming it was Wanda with the boys, I buzzed them up without checking the intercom. I was disappointed that they were home so soon, but when I opened the door and poked my head out,
instead of Quinn’s and Joey’s voices, I heard heavy breathing and quiet cursing. A few moments later, up came Sal with the glass top for Rachel’s coffee table.

“No, no, no, no, no! Sal! Not here. It goes to my friend’s place in Hoboken. Remember?”

Ignoring my comment completely, he said, “Wednesday. There is no way Quinn could have busted through this thing. It weighs sixty pounds at least.”

“Sal, listen. This has to go to Hoboken. Not here.”

“Hoboken? I just came from Hoboken! Why didn’t you say so?”

He stopped in the hall and rested one side of the plate-glass oval on his knee. It wasn’t even wrapped in anything.

“Be careful. Here, I’ll help you get this back downstairs,” I said, slipping on my flip-flops and rushing to grab a corner of the glass, which was indeed heavy and thick.

Out on the sidewalk, Sal and I stood facing each other, each holding a side of the tabletop and waiting for his ride to circle back around the block, when Jenna and Valentina approached. Jenna had been leaving notes on my door and sending me text messages, but I’d been ignoring her and didn’t want to deal with her now.

“Oooh. Pretty,” Valentina said, pointing at the glass, the side of which was sparkling blue in the morning sun. And then, before anyone realized what she was doing, she removed a sticker from the sheet she was holding and affixed it to the glass.

“What the fuck?” said Sal.

Jenna hurried to peel off the rainbow sticker, but not before holding up a hand to Sal and saying, “Please. Language.” Sal just stared in astonishment.

As she picked away at the sticker, licking her thumb to get the
last remnants of the adhesive off of the glass, Jenna said, “Valentina, do we put stickers on other people’s glass?”