BY NOON THE PARTY was in full cacophonous swing. Eden Falls was a small town in Crane County, near the banks of the Hudson River, about fifty miles from New York City. Situated north of Westchester County – and therefore further from Manhattan, and therefore more affordable to young families – it seemed to boast an inordinate number of children under the age of ten.
To Michael it looked like every one of them had been invited. He wondered: How many friends can four-year-old girls have, anyway? They weren’t even in school yet. Did they have their own Facebook pages? Were they Twittering? Socially networking at Chuck E Cheese?
Michael surveyed the partyscape. In all there were about twenty kids and matching moms, all in some version of J. Crew, Banana Republic, or Eddie Bauer motif. The kids were a constant buzz. The moms were all standing around, cellphones at the ready, chatting softly, sipping herbal tea and raspberry acai.
At twelve-thirty Michael brought out the cake. Amid the oohhs and ahhhhs, his daughters looked concerned about something, little brows creased. Michael put the huge cake on one of the tables, got down to their level.
“Does it look good?” he asked.
The girls nodded in union.
“We were wondering something, though,” Emily said.
“What, honey?”
“Is this organic cake?”
Coming from a four year old, the word sounded Chinese. “Organic?”
“Yes,” Charlotte said. “We need organic cake. And guten-free. Is this guten-free?”
Michael glanced at Abby. “Have they been watching the Food Network again?”
“Worse,” Abby said. “They’ve been making me Tivo reruns of Healthy Appetite with Ellie Krieger.”
Michael soon realized an answer was required. He looked at the ground, the sky, the trees, again at his wife, where he found no shelter. “Well, okay, I would say this cake has guten-free properties.”
Charlotte and Emily gave him the fish-eye.
“What I mean is,” he continued, reaching into his lawyer’s bag of tricks. “It has guten-absent characteristics.”
The girls glanced at each other, in that way that twins have, a secret knowledge passing between them. “It’s okay,” Charlotte finally said. “You make good birthday cake.”
“Thanks, ladies,” Michael said, enormously relieved, and also a little disbelieving, considering that this was only the third cake he had made them, and found it hard to believe they remembered the first two.
As Michael prepared to cut the cake, he saw the moms whispering to each other. They were all looking toward the side of the house, fluffing hair, straightening clothes, smoothing cheeks. To Michael, it could only mean one thing. Tommy had arrived.
Thomas Christiano was one of Michael’s oldest friends, a man with whom Michael had, in the gaudy plumage of youth, closed every bar in Queens, and not a few in Manhattan; the only man who had ever seen Michael cry, and that was the night Michael and Abby brought Charlotte and Emily home. To this day Michael claimed it was pollen. Tommy knew better.
When Tommy and Michael were in their twenties they’d been a holy terror. Tommy with his dark good looks and smooth lines; Michael with his boyish face and ocean blue eyes. They’d had that Starsky and Hutch, Hall and Oates, swarthy and fair thing down pat. They were both around six feet tall, well dressed, and carried with them the confidence that came with authority. Where Tommy’s tastes went to Missoni and Valentino, Michael’s went to Ralph Lauren and Land’s End. They were the dynamic duo.
But that, too, was a few years ago.
Tommy swaggered across the back lawn, on display, as always. Even at a kid’s party, he was turned out – black Armani T-shirt, cream linen slacks, black leather loafers. Even at a kid’s party, or especially at a kid’s party, Tommy knew that there would be a number of women in their twenties or thirties present, and that a certain fraction would be divorced, separated, or separating. Tommy Christiano played the percentages. It was one of the reasons he was one of the most respected prosecutors in Queens County, New York.
The number one spot, the most feared assistant district attorney at Kew Gardens, was Michael Roman.
“Miss Abigail,” Tommy said. He kissed Abby on both cheeks, Euro-style. “You look beautiful.”
“Yeah, right,” Abby said, waving a hand at her battered sandals and frayed jeans. Still, she blushed. Not too many people could make Abby Roman blush. “I look like something that just washed up on Rockaway.”
Tommy laughed. “The prettiest mermaid ever.”
Blush number two from Abby, followed by a playful slug on Tommy’s shoulder. Considering Abby’s nearly demented devotion to Pilates, Michael bet it hurt. Tommy would rather die than show it.
“White wine?” she asked.
“Sure.”
As soon as Abby turned her back and headed to the house, Tommy rubbed his shoulder. “Jesus Christ your wife is strong.”
“Try playing touch football with her. We always have paramedics standing by.”
Over the next half-hour, a number of people from the mayor’s office and Queens County DA’s office made their perfunctory appearances. Michael was a bit flattered and more than a little surprised when Dennis McCaffrey, the district attorney himself, showed up with a pair of outlandishly big teddy bears for the girls. Michael had recently been to a party for the deputy mayor’s five-year-old son, and at that gathering Denny McCaffrey – a nineteen-year veteran of the elected position, and the most politically savvy man Michael had ever met – only brought a rather puny Beanie Baby penguin. It seemed that, as Michael’s reputation as the hottest ADA in the city grew, so did the size of the plush toys for his children.
At one o’clock the entertainment arrived in the person of a tall, feathery woman who went by the professional name Chickie Noodle the Clown. At first Michael thought she might be a little too long in the tooth for a kid’s party, but she turned out to be a trouper, with more than enough energy and patience to deal with twenty little kids. In addition to the balloon-twisting, face-painting, and something called the Merry Madcap Olympics, there was also the obligatory piñata. The kids got to select which one they wanted, a choice that came down to a shark piñata and a butterfly piñata. The kids chose the butterfly.
Two questions instantly arose in Michael’s mind. One, what kind of clown buys a piñata in the shape of a shark? And two, perhaps more importantly, what kind of kids wanted to pick up a plastic bat and beat the crap out of a butterfly?
Suburban kids, that’s who. They should have stayed in Queens where it was safe.
At two-thirty the pony clopped onto the scene, and there was near pandemonium as Chickie Noodle was left spinning in the dust, holding a stack of cardboard cone hats. One by one the kids got to ride an indifferent Shetland named Lulu around the perimeter of the backyard. Michael had to admit that the act was pretty good. The owner of the horse, the guy who led the animal, was a short, kindly looking cowpoke in his sixties, replete with droopy white mustache, bow legs, and a ten gallon Stetson. He looked like a Shetland-sized Sam Elliott.
At three-thirty it was time for presents. And man were there presents. Michael considered that he and Abby would be buying reciprocal gifts for every child at the party during the next year or so, a suburban kid pro quo.
Midway through the consumer love fest, Abby picked up a pair of small square boxes, read the card. “These are from Uncle Tommy.”
The girls ran over to Tommy, arms extended. Tommy knelt down for a pair of big kisses and bigger hugs. It was his turn to blush. Despite two brief marriages, he had no children of his own. He was godfather to both Charlotte and Emily, a position he took with the solemnity of an English archbishop.