On Second Thought

That question would be answered tonight.

“Ainsley, the house looks amazing!” said Beth, my across-the-street neighbor, who’d been wonderful about bringing food and leaving little bouquets of flowers from her garden when Eric was sick. “What a happy day!”

“Thank you, Beth! You’ve been so great. We can’t thank you enough. Get a martini, quick!” She smiled and obeyed.

So many friends were here—Eric’s fraternity brothers, his coworkers from Wall Street, Eric’s parents and grandparents. My friends, too, from town and college and the magazine, though no one from my old job at NBC had even RSVP’d. My brother and his wife hadn’t been able to make it, but their older two kids were here, not by choice. I had the impression Sean and Kiara left Sadie with a sitter, dropped the teens off here and sneaked out to dinner rather than come to the party.

Esther, who was thirteen, was slumped in a chair, the only sign of life her thumbs moving over her phone. Matthias, at fifteen, was similarly slumped, eyeing the young female servers when he thought no one was looking.

“You guys can go down to the cellar if you want and watch TV,” I told them, stroking Esther’s curly hair. They jolted back to life and practically trampled each other in the race to the cellar door, Esther shielding her eyes as she passed the photo montage. Poor kid. No teenage girl should have to see that.

“Hello, Ainsley.”

I managed to catch my flinch at the sound of the voice. My boss was here—Captain Flatline, as we called him. Ollie trotted up to greet him, cheerfully sniffing his shoes, then putting his paws against Jonathan’s knee. Jonathan ignored him.

“Hi, Jonathan!” I said brightly, though almost everyone else at the magazine called him Mr. Kent. I didn’t. I had an Emmy, thank you very much (though I probably should’ve given that back after the debacle).

“Thank you for inviting me.” He looked like he was at a funeral, still in a suit and tie from work, face as cheerful as the grave.

“I’m glad you could come,” I lied. “Is that for us?” I nodded at the bottle of wine in his hand.

“Yes.” He handed it to me. “I hope you enjoy it.” Still no smile. “I’m sorry you couldn’t make your employee review this afternoon.”

I faked a frown. “Yeah. Me, too. That call with the pumpkin farmer went on longer than I thought.”

He lifted an eyebrow. We both knew I was dodging the review. The thing was, the job wasn’t that hard, and I did it well. Or pretty well, anyway. As the features editor, it was my job to assign articles to our vast army of freelancers, all of whom wanted to be the next host of This American Life and/or winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Hudson Lifestyle, however, was glossy fluff. Lemonade stands and barn restorations, new restaurant openings and the history of Overlook Cemetery. Before I worked at the magazine, I’d been a producer on The Day’s News with Ryan Roberts, the second most-watched news program in the country. I could handle Ten Ideas for Fall Porch Decorating.

That being said, yes, I had some difficulty in following every one of Jonathan’s many rules to the letter. He liked us to roll in at exactly 8:30 every morning, which didn’t take into account the fact that I might change outfits or get caught on the phone with my grandmother. He didn’t allow food to be left in the employee fridge for more than four days in a row. No personal phone calls at work? Come on. No checking Facebook? What century was this?

These were the things Jonathan had discussed last year in my review, before I knew that dodging them was a friendly competition held among all Hudson Lifestyle employees. The current champion was Deshawn in Sales, who’d gone three years without one and was now flirting with Beth at the martini bar.

“Hello! Are you married?” Gram-Gram, my stepmother’s cheerful and slightly senile mom, popped over and beamed up at Jonathan.

“Gram-Gram, this is my boss. Jonathan, my grandmother, Lettie Carson.”

“Hello!” she said, taking his hand and kissing it.

He glanced at me, alarmed, then said, “Very nice to meet you.”

“You, too! Ainsley, I was wondering if you could help me, honey. I’m on a dating website, but I can’t seem to swipe. How do you swipe on your phone? My swipe is broken.”

“Um...well, show me, and I’ll help you.” She handed me her phone.

Jonathan didn’t seem compelled to move on. He watched us, expressionless.

“Tinder, Gram-Gram? It’s kind of...trashy. And hey, that’s my picture! Not yours! You have to use a picture of yourself, you know.”

Gram-Gram humphed. “I hate pictures of myself. Besides, you’re so pretty.”

“Well, you’re misleading people.”

She winked at Jonathan. “Maybe they’ll date me if they think I look like her.”

“Shame on you,” I said. “Here. Smile!” Before she could protest, I’d snapped a shot, opened Tinder and changed her profile shot.

“Fine,” she grumbled, scowling at it. “Thank you, I suppose. I’m getting more champagne! Nice to meet you, young man!”

“Go easy on the booze, Gram-Gram.” She wandered away, patting people in her wake. I force-smiled at Jonathan. “She’s quite a character.”

“Yes.”

I suppressed a sigh. Though my boss was somewhere around my age, he gave the impression of being a seventy-year-old minor British lord, an ivory-topped walking stick firmly impacted in his colon. In the two years I’d worked at his little magazine, I had yet to hear him laugh.

“Well, thank you for coming, Jonathan, and for the wine. That was very thoughtful. Here, come talk to my sister. I don’t think you’ve met her. Kate! This is Jonathan Kent, my boss.”

Yes. Let Kate have to deal with him. Like Nathan (and now Kate), Jonathan, too, was a platinum member at the Cambry-on-Hudson Lawn Club. From the corner, Rachelle, who answered phones at the magazine, made a sympathetic face. To be honest, I’d invited the boss only because he overheard me talking about the party this very morning. Jonathan was, to put it kindly, a downer.

But he had given Eric the online column—just a WordPress spin-off that Eric posted himself, the magazine’s website providing a link and a byline. Eric loved writing The Cancer Chronicles, so I guess we owed Jonathan for that, though it hadn’t been easy convincing him to say yes.

“Nice to meet you,” Kate said. “This is my husband, Nathan Coburn.”

Being that it was Cambry-on-Hudson, Nathan and Jonathan had met sometime in the past. Ah, yes. Hudson Lifestyle had done a feature on Nathan’s house a few years ago, before my time.

I wondered if I’d ask Kate to be my maid of honor, even though she’d eloped and hadn’t even asked me to come as a witness. If I asked, would she somehow make me feel dumb? Then again, she was my sister...well, my half sister, but still. Nathan could be in the wedding party, too. He was a sweetheart, that guy. He caught me looking at him and gave me a wink. In some ways, he felt more like a brother than Sean, who was eleven when I was born, fourteen when I came to live with them.

Kate was lucky to have Nathan, though I never would’ve put them together. At least she seemed to know it. She and Nathan were holding hands, which was sweet.

“Hey, Ains!” said Rob, one of Eric’s fraternity brothers. “What kind of cancer was it again?”

I bit down on my irritation. If Rob had been a true friend, he’d have read The Cancer Chronicles (or the CCs, as Eric called them). Or maybe even called during the past year and a half. Like a lot of Eric’s friends from college, he was something of a dolt.

I picked up Ollie and petted his fluffy little head. “It was testicular,” I said, still wishing I didn’t have to name boy parts. They all sounded so ugly. Penis. Scrotum. Sac. Girl parts, on the other hand, all sounded rather exotic and beautiful. When I was at NBC and we did a story on teenage pregnancy, there was a girl who wanted to name her daughter Labia. I could almost see it.

“Testicular? Shit!” Rob winced comically and turned to Eric. “Dude!” he bellowed. “Your nuts? Ouch, brother!”

“That’s the good cancer, isn’t it?” asked Rob’s wife.

“There is no good cancer,” I said sternly.

“I mean, the cure rate is really high. Like 98 percent?”

Her statistics were accurate. “Yes.”

“So it wasn’t like Lance Armstrong, then? The really dangerous kind?”

What was this? An interrogation? “It was the same type Lance had, but thank God, we caught it earlier. And all cancer is dangerous. I hope you never have to find that out.”