Emma's Table (19 page)

Tina didn't care who heard her anymore.

She followed him back to his tiny office, next door to the
gym. She peeked into that wide-open room and found an army of boys inside, divided into two camps—each one hurling bouncy red balls at the other, throwing them ferociously, with all their might. The gym teacher blew his whistle, but the boys didn't care. They kept beaning each other just as hard. She heard balls whizzing through the open air, and the splat of stinging contact.

“That's enough!” the teacher cried finally.

Tina wished for a bouncy red ball herself. She could feel the pleasure of whipping it at Benjamin's face. She'd put everything she had into it too—just like those little boys did.

Benjamin stood outside his office door, waiting for her to enter first.

More of his phoniness, Tina thought with annoyance.

She pulled roughly at the guest chair and took her regular seat.

“Tell me what's going on,” he said. He looked confused.

She'd always suspected Benjamin of disliking her, ever since their first meeting, when she watched him flirt, then turn against her in a flash. She hadn't the vaguest idea what she'd done to deserve his ill will, but all that seemed beside the point now—now that she'd read the cruel note in Gracie's file.

“I took Gracie to the Free Clinic this morning,” she said.

Tina heard an unexpected flutter in her voice, as if she were running short of breath. She felt a quickening in her chest too: her anger shifting just a little, enough to let some nervousness in.

“Did you meet the nurse I was telling you about?” he asked.

“I know what you said about me,” Tina replied, ignoring
his question—her voice trembling more than before, like the fast-beating wings of a tiny songbird.

“I'm sorry?” he said, polite but confused.

“Don't treat me like a fool,” Tina snapped. “I read it in Gracie's file.”

She let her voice grow loud and harsh. She was aiming for the antithesis of his. “You told them I'm to blame for Gracie's weight. You said that I'm making her fat on purpose.”

Tina glared at him hard. She expected him to wilt on contact. That's what they said about standing up to bullies, wasn't it?

“Yes,” Benjamin replied calmly, not wilting at all. “I did tell her that was one possibility.”

Tina was impressed with his nerve, acting so cool in the face of confrontation, but she could be tough too. “What are you talking about?” she said, bringing her fists down hard onto his desk.

Benjamin didn't flinch.

Tina felt a flash of fear, a burgeoning sense of what she was up against. When she first met Benjamin—back in January—he'd told her that he wanted to work with Gracie because of some nasty business on the playground. She'd taken it all at face value then, but now she wondered if he'd suspected her all along.

“I wish there was a better explanation,” he said, his voice measured still and calm. “But the people at the clinic assured me there's no medical reason for Gracie's obesity.”

He wasn't backing off at all.

“That means,” he continued, looking straight into her eyes, “that the people who've been entrusted with her care are letting her down.”

That's me, Tina thought. He was blaming her without using her name.

“And I'm not going to let it continue,” he said.

Neither was she. “Are you crazy?” Tina shot back at him, his calm demeanor like an accelerant to her own. “Do you have any idea what we go through,” she cried, “Gracie and I? Do you know how many times I've dragged her to that Free Clinic, begging for help? How many times I've come in to see your useless school nurse?” Tina felt walls of frustration building all around her—as tall as mountains and pressing in close. “So you solve the problem by blaming me?” She was nearly shouting then.

“Please,” Benjamin answered, bouncing his hands lightly in the air—a polite request for modulation.

“Please
what
?” she said, ignoring him and his sign language both.

Tina heard the trace of a sob breaking on that final word.

Please, God, she thought—don't let me cry. She begged herself not to, even as she felt her eyes welling up. She wanted to kick herself for being so weak.

Benjamin reached his hand across the desk, as if to comfort her.

It was just the push she needed.

“
Don't touch me
,” she said—three hard pellets, fired at him fast.

She pulled her hands away from him and dug them into her purse instead, pulling out a sheaf of yellow papers.

She thrust them across the table at him, her hands trembling with anger and more than a trace of fear: six yellow pages—one for every week of Gracie's latest diet. She saw
their pale blue lines through watery eyes; she watched them swimming across the pages.

Benjamin took the papers from her hands, turning them like a steering wheel in both of his—from vertical to horizontal—like some kind of treasure map that needed orienting to the west.

He kept his eyes fixed on them.

Tina had drawn vertical lines down every one. She'd used a ruler to make them straight: three lines making four columns, with underlined headings at the top: “Breakfast,” “Lunch,” “Dinner,” and “Snack.” She'd been meticulous about it, recording every morsel of food that Gracie had eaten since the diet began—even the gingersnaps she'd caught her with the day before.

The papers looked worn from all her constant handling, the folding and unfolding. Tina updated them all day long.

A nurse at the Free Clinic had suggested it: a food log.

Benjamin was quiet still, studying the pages one after the next.

Tina began to settle down then, breathing more easily as she watched him read. These papers would prove that he was wrong.

They will, she thought, won't they?

She summoned the determination she felt in making them. The breakfasts were easy, she remembered, the dinners too. She fed them to the girl herself, after all. Sometimes Tina recorded a meal before Gracie had even eaten it. Her bowl of cereal barely moistened with milk, the chicken breast cooling on the counter still, and Tina rushing to the bulletin board—so anxious to record every bite.

She saw the messy trail of tack holes running across the yellow pages, the pinpricks of light that came shining through.

They looked like track marks to her.

Benjamin sighed a long, deep breath. He looked up at her finally with a benign expression on his face.

“It's the lunches that give me trouble,” she said, blurting it out in spite of herself. It was the one weak spot on her careful log. She wanted to admit it before he found her out. The school sent lunch menus home for the week, and Tina did the best she could: poking and prodding, as gently as possible, trying to work out what the little girl had eaten, without making a federal case of it.

The lunches may not have been complete.

“Thank you,” he said, in a gentle voice, nodding his head a little.

For just a second, he looked—to Tina anyway—as if he weren't quite sure how to proceed, as if he'd been set down on the open road without a map or any clear directions for getting to the place he wanted to go.

Welcome to the club, she thought.

“Are you telling me that this is
everything
she's eating?” Benjamin asked, gesturing down to the papers in front of him.

Tina nodded her head. She told him it was.

“And you do all the grocery shopping?” he asked, as if to cover every angle.

“We live on our own,” she replied.

With that, Tina watched him begin to harden on his side of the desk—like a lump of molding clay that had been left out in the open air. He sat a little taller in his chair.

“I appreciate your showing me this,” he said; his voice sounded harder too. “I can see it took a lot of work.”

Tina nodded her head.

“It shows me that some part of you wants to make things better,” he said.

Tina kept nodding, straight through her confusion. It wasn't
some part of her
that wanted things better. It was every fiber of her being.

Doesn't he know that? she wondered.

Tina had to find a way to make herself known to this man. She thought she'd done that though, in their earlier meetings. She thought her food log would make things clear as day.

Tina began to feel a little helpless.

If Benjamin reached his hand to her again, she might not pull her own away so fast. She and Gracie needed all the help they could get.

“I'm confused,” he said.

“How's that?” she asked. He didn't sound confused at all.

Tina stared across the desk at him like an animal in the wild: she was frozen in place, just waiting for the smallest twitch.

“It doesn't make sense,” he said, “for Gracie to be eating as little as this, and still not losing weight.”

It didn't make sense to her either. She stayed quiet.

“I
know
she's eating more than this,” he said finally—laying the yellow papers down on the desk.

But how could he know that? Tina wondered.

She tried not jumping to conclusions, or landing on the accusation she heard so clearly in his voice. Tina picked up the yellow papers from the desk.

“
This
is what she's eating,” she said. “I swear it.”

Those yellow pages weren't wrong. They couldn't be: she'd kept such careful track.

“But I see her loaded down with junk food every time we meet,” Benjamin said. He sounded exasperated. “That's not written down.”

What junk food? she thought.

“And Gracie as much as told me you give her boxes of cookies,” he said, “and candies from the place you work.”

Tina was stunned. “Gracie wouldn't say that,” she told him. “I never give her sweets.”

There's something physically wrong with the girl, she thought—there has to be.

“Then where's she getting all that food?” he asked, his voice sharper than before. “I've seen it myself.”

Tina didn't know the answer.

“She's only nine years old,” he said, pounding away.

Tina shook her head.

She wasn't convinced that he was telling the truth about Gracie—her daughter never lied—or about the junk food either, for that matter, but it was clear enough that he was back to blaming her.

“I want to help you,” Benjamin said. “I really do.”

Tina stared back at him, as worn out as if she'd lain awake for three days running. She wanted desperately to believe him, in the prospect of some kind of help anyway, but he'd already made it plain enough that he couldn't be trusted—putting lies into Gracie's mouth, dismissing her careful food log.

Benjamin wasn't the help she needed.

“We're going to get to the root of this problem,” he said. “I promise you that. We're going to find out
why
this is going on.”

Tina breathed a long, deep breath.

That was all she'd ever wanted—from him or from anyone
else, for that matter. She only wanted to know why this was happening to her little girl.

“We think a psychiatrist might be helpful,” Benjamin said.

“For Gracie?” she asked. “I don't understand how—”

“No,” he said, shaking his head and interrupting her fast—as gently as possible, under the circumstances. “For you.”

Café con Leche

AT THE STROKE OF FIVE, EMMA'S DRIVER PULLED
up to Modern Edge, the finest shop for mid-century furniture in the city. Its proprietress, Christina O'Dowd, stood in the doorway, a dark-haired woman in her middle forties. Emma could see, from behind her car's tinted windows, that the shopkeeper was already on high alert, looking out for her special guest like a duck hunter in a wooded blind—peering out through squinted eyes, searching for movement in the brush. Christina opened her glass door the moment Emma stepped out of her car, and she held it open too, taking careful aim as Emma crossed the busy sidewalk.

“
Querida
,” she sighed, once the eagle had landed.

It was some kind of Spanish endearment.

Emma knew that, but she couldn't say which exactly, and she couldn't imagine what prompted it either, suffering both her cheeks to be kissed by the woman.

Ridiculous, she thought—of the foolish kisses, and Chris
tina's getup too. She was dressed as an Old World widow that afternoon, in a loose black shift with heavy brogues on her feet.

“
Café con leche
?” Christina offered—again, in Spanish.

Emma shook her head, brushing imaginary lint from the sleeve of her sweater. She'd left her fur in the back of the car. She couldn't imagine why a woman no more Hispanic than herself would cling so fiercely to a Latin identity. Emma studied the shopkeeper's ruddy cheeks and bright blue eyes.

What a fake, she thought—Christina's surname was O'Dowd!—but a consistent fake, at least: the woman had been doing this Spanish Rose routine for as long as Emma had known her, coming on twenty years now, with Spanish endearments pouring forth and that strong black coffee bathed in sweet milk.

Emma never cared quite enough to get to the bottom of it.

Everyone's got their shtick, she supposed.

She began to look for Tanaguchi.

It was a sea of white inside the shop, with bright white walls and shiny bone floors, dozens of hot white lights burning down from above. The furniture couldn't help but blaze against so clean a canvas. Emma was impressed with the upkeep too. She knew that scuffs would be inevitable on a floor like that, but she didn't see a single one.

“Is my friend here yet?” she asked. The shop looked as empty as a graveyard—a tidy one, at least—giving the place its due.

Christina pointed to the back of the shop, to a massive globe that hung down from the ceiling. It was three or four feet in diameter, and made of woven rattan. Emma saw Mr. Tanaguchi then—his back, anyway—sitting inside the hang
ing chair, perched like a bird in a woven cage, his short legs dangling down.

“He likes the Nana Ditzel,” Christina said, a sale blooming in her eyes.

Emma began to cross the room, the shopkeeper at a barely respectable distance. She didn't like being bird-dogged this way, but if anyone could help her, she suspected, it was going to be the senorita.

Christina had an excellent eye; there was no doubt about that. Her shop was filled with exquisite things—a Santa's workshop for the mid-century set. Any number of dealers could claim that much, Emma supposed, but Christina had more than inventory: she had a knack for moving it too. She sold every stick that came her way, and all at premium prices, her shop growing bigger and grander as the years wore on. Emma had seen the woman in action: making people hungry for the things she had, sprinkling them all with glittering appeal—the furniture and the shopkeep, the customer himself.

People wanted to join Christina's club; they couldn't wait to whip their checkbooks out. Emma had done it herself.

She knew you couldn't fake that.

Taste is easy, she thought, crossing the room—it's selling that's hard. Emma hoped she'd work her magic on Tanaguchi too.

He turned to her in the suspended chair.

He must have heard her shoes clacking hard against the lacquered floor. She planted her feet more gently down, smiling sweetly as she approached.

Emma couldn't help wondering if Christina had grown as tired of the grind as she had herself. She
created
this wave
she's riding, Emma thought—she'd built the shop up from scratch, inspiring the hunger for all that furniture, growing it ravenous through will and hard work, the same way that Emma incited her much larger audience: all those women watching at home, yearning for her cozy sitting nooks and the festive accessories that she sprinkled throughout. Emma tended their desires with the greenest of thumbs, selling them every ingredient they could possibly need—fanning a seedling interest into a forest of cash flow and desire.

She felt dog-tired.

“I'm glad you could meet me,” Emma said, extending her hand to him.

“Please,” Mr. Tanaguchi said, wrestling himself free from the hanging chair, like an awkward boy on a jungle gym.

She admired his trim custom suit.

“It's for me to thank you,” he said, “Ms. Sutton”—the hanging chair bumping softly against the back of his legs. His hand felt delicate in hers, like a sparrow she might inadvertently crush.

“Call me Emma,” she said, smiling sweetly.

She wanted to be gentle with him. And she wanted penance for herself: a furniture outing to clear the slate from her double-cross at the auction house.

So
unnecessary
, she thought, begrudging her bad behavior.

She was always going to win that table; there'd been no need for any high jinks at all.

And if I hadn't won, she considered then, growing harder on herself with every passing second, would
that
have been the end of the world?

Emma felt a soft nudge of self-awareness. Small, but persistent, it had trailed her all day, flitting like a firefly on a
summery lawn. She kept grabbing at it, over and over; she knew it was important, and here it was again, its faint light seeping from inside her cupped hands: she couldn't afford to be the kind of person who won at any cost—not anymore, she decided. She saw the terrible toll it took, every stolen victory another excuse to run herself down. Just as it had been since she was a girl—running endless laps around a cul de sac of sabotage and shame.

“Winning isn't everything,” her father always told her. “It's the only thing”—barely suppressing a chuckle as he laid his winning cards down, collecting the last of her allowance dimes and gloating victorious every time.

Here's to new leaves, she thought.

Emma was determined to discredit her father once and for all. She was going to make amends to the man she'd wronged—or one of them, anyway. She thought of Bobby and his secret flat. On the surface, of course, it was she who was the injured party, but she wondered about that too, standing in the corner of Modern Edge.

Emma turned to Christina, who was lingering nearby—a light switch just waiting to be turned on. “We're looking for a Nakashima table,” she told her.

“Of course,
querida
.” Christina smiled. “Your office called ahead.”

“It has to be spectacular,” Emma announced, just stating the ground rules for everyone to hear: only a table better than hers could erase the stain of her bad behavior. “Mr. Tanaguchi is making a present to his wife,” she said.

“What a generous husband!” Christina cooed, turning to the man with blushing cheeks. “You wouldn't like to marry me, would you?” she asked, with a flirty smile.

Mr. Tanaguchi stared back at her blankly, Emma too; they didn't like that kind of talk.

“I've got two tables down here,” Christina said, recovering quickly—never one to keep a losing tack. “And one upstairs,” she added, almost like an afterthought.

A phone rang inside Emma's bag. It didn't sound like hers.

What on earth? she thought.

But then she remembered: it was Benjamin's phone. She'd forgotten to give it to her assistant. “Sorry about that,” she said, letting it ring through to voice mail.

Christina led them around the shop.

“
Fantástico
,” she'd cry, from time to time, landing hard on that second syllable, admiring some irrelevant table or chair—in Spanish, no less.

Emma wished she'd get on with it already.

“Here's the first one,” she said, pointing to the most ordinary dining table Emma had ever seen: just a single plank of dark wood and four doweled legs beneath it. It didn't look like Nakashima at all, not to Emma anyway.

“It's an early piece,” Christina sighed—as if that made its dreariness something to aspire to.

Emma hoped their visit wouldn't be a waste of time.

“I have a client who's
desperate
for it,” Christina whispered, with emphasis on the desperation. “But if you like it…,” she said, letting her voice trail off.

She'll screw the other client, Emma thought.

Mr. Tanaguchi looked appalled.

Don't worry, Emma wanted to tell him, as reassuring as a pat on the shoulder—there's no other client. It's an imaginary footrace.

“I don't care for this one,” Mr. Tanaguchi announced.

Emma agreed entirely.

The second table was better, but not near enough: it had a gorgeous walnut top—no doubt about that, it stood gleaming before them. And it had the rosewood butterflies of Emma's table, those elegant insets that joined the planks together, but it was awkwardly shaped—too short somehow for its substantial width.

“It's a little stunted,” Emma said. “Don't you think?”

Mr. Tanaguchi nodded quickly.

Christina didn't see it that way at all. “Oh no,” she said, pointing to the table, as if there must be some confusion about the one in question, her loose black sleeve dangling down. “This is one of my favorite shapes,” she said, with a gush in her voice, as if she were repairing an oily vinaigrette, adding as much balsamic as it took to make things right. “And the shorter length works like a charm in city apartments,” she said, balancing Emma's criticism with an equal dose of praise.

“Do you live in the city, Mr. Tanaguchi?” Christina asked.

It was clear that he did—to Emma, anyway—from the frightened look on his face. Tanaguchi went mute, refusing to admit it, as if the wily shopkeeper might stick him with the table if she learned the hard truth.

“Mr. Tanaguchi lives at the Japanese embassy,” Emma said.

She had no idea where the man lived, but she'd heard the bossy trap in Christina's voice too. She wanted to take him off the hook.

Mr. Tanaguchi's eyes widened with gratitude.

“We need something grander than this,” Emma said. “And
more beautiful. I told you, Christina, we're in the market for an
exceptional
table.” She didn't want to hear another word about the squat little thing in front of them.

Christina nodded thoughtfully, as if Emma had clarified an important point. “I may have just the thing,” she said—never one to hold a grudge, not in the middle of a sale anyway.

Emma couldn't blame her for trying.

“It's just upstairs,” she said.

Benjamin's cell phone rang again.

Somebody really wants to get through, she thought. The phone hadn't rung all day, and now it was ringing every five minutes.

Christina led them up a flight of stairs to a loft apartment above the shop. Everything was even whiter and cleaner up there. She walked them straight to the third Nakashima table, set off in a small anteroom. She made no introduction or preliminary comment. Just looked down at the table, then grinned up at them both.

It's perfect, Emma thought, the moment she saw it, like Goldilocks laying eyes on that third bowl of porridge: just the right size, and piping hot too! It was exactly what she'd been hoping for, every bit as elegant as the table from the auction house, its edges curving as gently as a coastline. The book-matched planks were perfectly symmetrical, and she counted four ebony butterflies joining them at the hip. Plus, this one had an extra feature—a gap at the center where the tree itself seemed to grow apart. So dramatic! And it looks to be the right size, she thought: ten feet long and four feet wide, just like the one she'd stolen at FitzCoopers.

Emma looked at Tanaguchi. He was no poker player.

She suspected then—thinking back—that Christina might
have choreographed the entire affair: showing them the ordinary tables first only to heighten the thrill of this last one, claiming even greater victory after the prospect of so much defeat. She might have had it
moved
upstairs, for all Emma knew, keeping it out of sight until the perfect moment.

Mr. Tanaguchi nodded his head in brisk little strokes.

“How much do you want for it?” Emma asked.

“Seventy-five thousand,” Christina said, her Latin charm gone south of the border. She was all business now.

“That must be list,” Emma replied, with a curt note in her voice. “How much for me?” she asked.

“I suppose,” Christina warbled, ever so reluctantly—like a little bird peeking out from its nest—“that I could go to sixty-five,” she said, “for you.”

Emma looked at Tanaguchi one last time.

She saw the eyes of a birthday wish, flickering like waxy candles atop a chocolate cake. “We'll take it for sixty,” Emma announced—her penance complete, or so she hoped.

 

“
BOBBY
?”
HIS SECRETARY CALLED—THE WAY SHE
did all day long—in through the open door that separated her desk from his.

“Yes,” he replied.

He didn't care for the shouting back and forth. When he wanted to speak with her, he walked to the doorway.

Bobby was one of the named partners at an expensive law firm that specialized in real estate transactions. They made money hand over fist during those times of year when sunlight shone through glassy windows—at the height of spring and the beginning of fall—but it was February now, and
things were decidedly slow. He had the corner office there, like Emma had hers, and his secretary, Susan, sat right outside, in a cluster of secretaries who worked for the higher-ups.