Page 7 of My Favorite Lost Cause
I manage to squeeze in brunch with Kit and convince her to get her hair and nails done before she returns to Everest, where Miller is planning to propose, unbeknownst to her. At least I assume that’s what happening, since he had me help pick the ring and was hell-bent on getting it before he left for Nepal.
I tell Roger that Charlie is fine, which isn’t true, but news about his ex-wife’s death can’t come from me and Charlie isn’t ready to share it. It also works better for me—if my mom knew I was going on this trip, she’d find a way to make it into something it absolutely is not, and poor Roger would pay the price for it. We love Roger—he’s a stabilizing influence and the best thing to happen to our family in a very long time. Kit and I runourselves ragged trying to keep our mother from ruining the relationship, because she makes very bad decisions when Roger’s not around. Of course, if he’d been around when she met my dickhead father—a now-famous artist who took off before I was born—I wouldn’t exist. So I guess occasionally, it has its benefits.
I drop my gorgeous babies, black yorkipoos, off in Brooklyn with Lori, dog sitter to the stars, on my way to the airport. While I’m heartbroken at the idea of leaving them for a week, the puppies themselves are ecstatic, tripping over their own feet as they bolt toward the open back door of her place.
“Should it hurt my feelings that they don’t care about being left here?” I ask with a sad laugh.
Lori elbows me. “They’re going to be excited while they’re here, and they’ll be excited to see you again in a week. I know you love them like babies—we both do—but they aren’t human you know.”
I fight my wince. I’ve been accused before of treating the puppies as if they were my children, and the implication—though I know Lori isn’t saying that now—is that it’s because I’ve been unable to get pregnant.
Maybe it’s just that I worry they’re as close as I’m going to get to having children.
Harvey calls when I’m on my way to the airport, wanting to know if I canceled the housekeeper and picked up his shirts before I left. He always treats me like a worthless assistant he hasn’t had time to fire when he’s pissed off.
When this elicits no reaction from me, he revisits the argument he made when the trip first came up.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this, and I really hope it doesn’t fuck up IVF. God knows what kind of shit is in the air down there—it’s in the south; the place is old. It’s probably full of mold. You shouldn’t be traveling at all, and you sure as hell shouldn’t be traveling withCharlie.”
I was willing to be civil until now. “You thinkCharlieis going to harm the quality of my eggs?”
“No,” he says, “but I think Charlie is eager as fuck to get you alone in an isolated location.”
I slap a palm to my face, stunned. “He’s my stepbrother. He’s been in my family for a decade.”
“As if that would stop him,” Harvey mutters.
Except I’ve been on a hundred modeling jobs with creepy men in isolated places, and he didn’t say a word—so this has less to do with Charlie’s moral flexibility than it does Harvey’s fear that I’d betemptedby it.
“I guess you’re lucky my commitment to our marital vows is a little stronger than yours,” I reply.
He hangs up, which is as close as Harvey ever comes to admitting I’m right.
The driver gives me a curious glance in the rearview mirror. I can’t be the first client he’s overheard fighting with her husband, though I might be the first he’s heard accused of wanting to fuck her stepbrother.
Fifteen minutes later, my bags are checked and I’ve gotten through security. It’s a relief to see Charlie already seated at the gate—long legs stretched in front of him, so handsome that every woman in the vicinity is doing a double take and the teenager over at the nearest newsstand is surreptitiously taking his photo.
Adjusting the overstuffed Goyard on my arm, I move his way until he glances up, studying my face. “How did it go?” he asks.
In my head I hear Harvey sayingas if that would stop him. “How didwhatgo?”
“Dropping off the dogs,” he replies. “What else?”
“You might have been referencing me saying goodbye to my spouse.”
His laughter is so smug that I want to swing my purse athim. “No, I was referring to things you actually love. So it went okay?”
“You don’t care about my dogs.”
“No, I don’t,” he says, “but you do.”
Because he cares about the things that are important to me.
My heart feels as if it’s being squeezed by a tiny fist. Harvey didn’t ask.
Harvey has never asked once.
5
