The sun wouldn’t set for a few more hours, but it had dipped behind the mountains, and the blue was darker now, as if a watercolor brush had swabbed over the trees and rocks and hillside. Jim could have walked farther, but the road was steep, and more than exercising, he just wanted a few minutes away. Jim sat and watched the sheep until they all stopped moving and just stood, staring off into the distance or at one another or at the grass underneath their bodies, as if they’d all coordinated it beforehand, this moment of silence. It was the sort of thing you might remark on to the person sitting next to you, a tiny and unimportant but nonetheless noteworthy part of the day. If he had been a different kind of man, he might have written a poem. Instead, Jim swung his legs back over the wall and started his way down the hill. Behind him, the sheeps’ bells began to ring again, without hurry. It was all up to Franny, in the end. She wanted to take these two weeks, she’d said. These two weeks to make her decision, with all of them together like a real family. He’d already started to mentally mark things as the last time—the last time he’d do this with his daughter, the last time he’d do that in his house. It had taken thirty-five years to build, and would take only two weeks to fall apart. Jim couldn’t take back what he’d done. He had apologized, to Franny and to the magazine, and now it was up to them to decide what his punishment would be. He only hoped that his wife would be less harsh than the stony tribunal of board members, though she (Jim knew, he knew) was entitled to the most ire of all.
It didn’t matter that most of the party had flown in that morning, and that they would need to have a third wind in order to stay awake through dessert. Franny had cooked, and everyone was going to sit at the table together. She’d bought fish at the market, and lemons, and Israeli couscous, and fruit for a tart, and enough wine to make the whole thing float. Her hands smelled like rosemary and garlic, which was better than soap. She’d found the rosemary growing in the yard, a great big bush of it, well tended and right by the kitchen door. Carmen was in the shower, and Bobby was changing out of his swimsuit, but everyone else was already dressed and in the dining room. Franny liked this moment most of all: being alone in the kitchen after almost everything was finished, and listening to the assembled guests chatting happily, knowing they were soon to be fed. Charles hadn’t come with them on vacation since Bobby was a baby, not for longer than a weekend, and Franny’s pulse quickened happily at the sound of his voice and Sylvia’s together. They were friends. How had that happened? It felt impossible that Sylvia was already eighteen, and that she would be leaving so soon. Leaving. That was the word she liked to use. Not going away, which implied a return, but leaving, which implied a jet plane. Franny would never have been so cruel to her own mother, who had insisted on weekly dinners throughout her first year at Barnard, as if Brooklyn and Manhattan had anything to do with each other, as if she hadn’t just moved to another hemisphere. If she and Jim were really over, Sylvia would have it even worse. When she came home to visit, where would she go? To her mother in an otherwise empty house? To her father in a bachelor apartment, slick and sad with all new furniture? Franny stared into space, her hands still on the corkscrew.
“Can I help with anything?” Carmen appeared just behind Franny’s right shoulder, startling her.
“No, no, all done,” Franny said. “Well, you can carry this to the table.” She put down the bottle of wine and handed Carmen a bowl. “No, wait,” she said, and handed her a different one. Franny always wanted to carry in the most impressive-looking dish, no matter that everyone knew she’d cooked everything on the table.
Carmen’s dark hair was wet, and her curls hung heavily over her shoulders. It was what Franny’s hair had looked like before she’d had the Brazilians zap it with lasers, or whatever they did at the salon. It was the first beauty treatment she felt was truly life-altering, after discovering mustache bleach when she was a teenager.
“Thank you for having us here,” Carmen said. She had put on makeup, which Franny found distasteful. After all, it was only the family, and they were only having dinner. She would just have to wash it off in a few hours. Putting on makeup for this crowd, at this hour, smacked of deep-seated insecurity, which Franny had little patience for, both as a host and as Carmen’s boyfriend’s mother, on his behalf. Of course, Franny didn’t trust anyone whose life’s work was shaping other people’s altoids, anyway. No, Altoids were the mints. Deltoids. Still, it was nice that she was making an effort.
“Of course,” Franny said. “We’re so glad you could join us. And how is everything going, at the gym?”
“It’s good! It’s busy. Really good. Yeah.” Carmen nodded several times.
“Well, shall we?” Franny asked, gesturing toward the dining room. She waited until Carmen had passed in front of her to roll her eyes. Life would be so much easier, Franny often thought, if one were permitted to select romantic partners for one’s children. There was nothing physically wrong with Carmen, save for the lack of egg production in her forty-year-old ovaries, but that wasn’t even the worst of it. She was a deadly bore, and that problem couldn’t be solved with in vitro. Still, she had shown up, and offered to help, which was more than Franny could say for either of her children.
Day Four
BOBBY AND CARMEN’S ROOM WAS BETWEEN SYLVIA’S room and the bathroom and overlooked the pool, which meant that any noise louder than a whisper could potentially be heard by everyone in the entire house. Bobby was awake but hadn’t moved yet, not even wiggled his toes—Carmen was still snoring softly next to him, and he didn’t want to disturb her.
At their apartment in Miami, Carmen was up before dawn. Her clients liked to get in a workout before heading to the office, and so she started seeing people at five-thirty a.m., straight through until ten a.m. Then there was a break until the lunchtime crowd, and then she was booked again from eleven a.m. until two p.m. She saw up to eight clients a day, sometimes more. Everyone at Total Body Power knew that Carmen got results, and that she worked you harder than the other trainers. She’d been seeing some of her clients for more than a decade, back from when she was fresh out of kinesiology school and working at the YMCA. Bobby’d come to the gym looking for some help with his lats and traps, and that was that. Of course, that was when Bobby had the money to spend on a personal trainer twice a week.
His mother was up—Bobby could hear the pans banging onto and off the stove, the sound of pancakes being distributed or eggs being cracked. Maybe both. Franny liked to show off for a crowd, to separate whites from yolks with a single hand, to warm the syrup on the stove. His mother’s favorite currency was food. When Sylvia was small and Bobby was still at home, Franny would pour pancakes into the shapes of animals, which thrilled them both, even though Bobby had always felt that it was his duty as the older child to pretend not to care.
Carmen grumbled and turned onto her side, taking the sheet with her.
“Good morning,” Bobby said, using his best newscaster voice. Carmen thumped him in the chest without opening her eyes. “It’s late.”
“How late?” she said, eyes still closed.
“After eight.”
“Jesus.” Carmen shimmied her body backward until she was sitting up against the wrought-iron headboard. She was wearing her pajamas: a pair of faded boxer shorts that preceded her relationship with Bobby, now going on six years, and a pale pink camisole that clung to her rib cage and small breasts, her dark bull’s-eye nipples showing through. If you asked the Posts, they would all tell you exactly what kind of body Bobby found attractive: a thickened teenage gymnast, women who looked like they couldn’t ovulate if you gave them a million dollars. He didn’t care. Bobby loved how hard Carmen worked on her body. Her thighs were her calling cards; her biceps were her advertisements. She looked strong and serious, which she was. Bobby respected that she always knew what she wanted, from herself and from her clients. If she told him to drop to the ground and give her twenty push-ups, he’d do it. She had a strong sense of the human body, and of what people could do, if encouraged. It was one of the things Bobby liked most about her.