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  For my family

  CHAPTER ONE

  I’m in the dining room, counting place settings, when the doorbell rings.

  A happy, charming, ladylike clang, it’s a sound only an old house could make, which mine is. I inherited it from my grandmother.

  “That’s probably Amy and Mike,” I call to Kate, who’s sitting in the kitchen. I put down the handful of silverware I was distributing and go to answer the door.

  I love having people over. My house is a brownstone that I never could have afforded on my own, and while it’s not the most extravagant home on the street or the best kept, there is something about it that makes people stop at the bottom of its terra-cotta steps, their mouths open in lustful, longing ohhhhs. Ivy creeps up the brick facade, nasturtium spills from the window boxes, stained-glass panels glimmer above the wide oak double doors.

  To any passing stranger, it looks just like home.

  I turn the brass doorknob and swing open the heavy door.

  “Hell-lo-o!” I sing in three syllables, the way that I’m apt to do when greeting houseguests. Amy is my other closest friend. I hold my arms out for a hug and say hello to her husband as I wrap my arms around her. “It’s so good to see you. Kate’s already here.”

  As we walk back into the kitchen, I glimpse Kate sitting on one of the barstools at the center island, picking a piece of Roquefort off of the cheese plate I put together an hour ago. She hears us coming—Amy’s voice is always two notches louder than it needs to be, and bubbly and eager, like when she was a cheerleader in high school—but instead of turning her head to acknowledge us and say hello, Kate waits, daintily licking a crumb from her finger. This is not unusual. My best friend is a bit of a princess. She’s accustomed to having people come to her.

  Amy walks beside me, telling me how Emma, her three-year-old, is going through a phase where she insists on dressing herself. “I’ve decided to just give in and let her do it,” she says. “Today she went to school in purple tights, a Minnie Mouse nightgown, and the patent leather Mary Janes that I bought for her to wear with her Christmas dress.” There’s no quiet, small-talk easing in with Amy. Conversations with her are of the dive-right-in variety. When Kate and I first met Amy thirteen years ago, in the six feet of hallway that separated the door of our first postcollege apartment from hers, our eyes slid toward each other, silently asking, Is she for real? Unbelievably, she is. In all of the years that I’ve known Amy, I can’t remember a single instance when she was surly, moody, or rude. It can get on your nerves. But I suppose that when I crave surly, moody, or rude, I have Kate, who’s told me on more than one occasion that she and her husband secretly refer to Amy as “the golden retriever.”

  When we get to the kitchen, Amy stops midsentence, her face lighting up as if she’s just stumbled into her own surprise party. “Kaaate!” she squeals. “No Brendan tonight?”

  “Working,” Kate says, smoothing her wool trousers with her hands as she stands to greet them. “Where else would he be?” She hugs Amy hello and halfheartedly holds up a palm to wave to her husband.

  Mike nods back. While Kate and Amy get along fine—they are nothing alike but friends nonetheless, with me as the link between them—Kate and Mike are barely civil, meeting each other somewhere on the continuum between total indifference and outright contempt. “Why did Amy marry him?” Kate often says when his name comes up. After evenings like this one, when she actually has to share breathing space with him, she can be downright evil. On the phone the next day, she’ll denigrate where he’s from. (What is it? Buffalo? Allentown? Some other horrendous place like that?) It’s actually Rochester, New York. Or she’ll criticize his career. (A family doctor? So he asks old people about their bowel movements and takes snot-faced toddlers’ temperatures?) I don’t think that Kate has a right to be as cruel as she can be, but it’s true that Mike’s become kind of a drag. Whenever he’s around, he sulks like he has some thrilling other life that he’s missing out on, as if he might be out clubbing with Brazilian supermodels or chasing down Russian spies if only he didn’t have to spend time with his wife and her friends. I don’t particularly look forward to his company in the way that I used to, and to be honest, I’ve wondered how Amy puts up with it, though I’d never say anything to her. I mean, how do you tell one of your closest girlfriends—particularly one who tends to bounce through her days as if life’s one big Broadway musical—that her husband’s kind of a dud?

  I hand Amy a glass of wine and ask Mike what he’d like to drink. “Oh, wait!” Amy says, pulling a small box of Crabtree & Evelyn soaps out of her bag and handing it to me. “I saw this the other day at the mall and thought you’d like it.”

  “Oh, Amy, you don’t have to do this,” I say, rolling my eyes and pulling her in for a hug. “Really, after all these years, aren’t we way beyond hostess gifts?”

  “Seriously, Amy,” Kate says, twirling the stem of her wineglass between her thumb and forefinger, making the base skitter against the butcher-block countertop. “You’re making me look bad.”

  I smirk at her over Amy’s shoulder.

  “Please, Kate,” Amy says. “You’ve never had a bad-looking day in your life.”

  “I told her that she didn’t need to bring anything, but she never listens,” Mike barks from the corner of the kitchen. The sound of his voice is surprising and sharp. When we all turn to him, he shrugs his shoulders and glances around, shuffling in his leather bomber jacket and Redskins cap. Kate will say something about the jacket later—I can tell by the way that she raises her eyebrows at me. I turn away before Amy notices and open the refrigerator door, loading up my arms with salad greens, a jar of Dijon mustard, and the butter dish.

  Amy clears her throat and starts to tell a story about something they heard on the radio on the way over—something about a pop singer’s affair and surprise pregnancy. While I’m washing lettuce at the sink and listening to her talk, I glance at Kate, who’s taking several healthy sips of her wine. My boyfriend’s coworker and his girlfriend are joining our usual group for dinner tonight, and I hope Kate will behave herself.

  “What are we having? It smells so good,” Amy says as she walks to the stove. She picks up the wooden spoon next to the enamel pot to stir its contents.

  “Beef bourguignon. Julia Child’s recipe,” I say. It had been the kind of pissed-off February weather that makes it perfectly clear that winter is nowhere near over. Plus, if I was going to feed seven people after working in my bakery all day, I needed something unfussy. “I’ve made this a million times. Mom used to make it for dinner parties when I was a kid. I’d stand on a chair next to the stove—in my Dukes of Hazzard nightgown, of course—and she’d taste a bit with her wooden spoon and then hold it out for me to try. ‘Needs more pepper,’ I’d say, feeling very important.”

  Amy laughs. “That’s so cute. I can just see you, Waverly. The budding chef!”

  I wink at her. “Well…” I turn back to my salad and listen to Amy ask Kate whether she ever watched The Dukes and whether she preferred Bo or Luke. What I neglected to mention about tonig
ht’s dinner is that I also chose to make beef bourguignon because stew meat is so cheap—and cheap is becoming increasingly important these days. To be honest, I should be serving ketchup sandwiches.

  It seems like twice a week, I’ll hear some analyst on NPR say that there are signs that the economy is finally picking up, but I have to say, this small-business owner isn’t feeling an iota of those vibes. Maggie’s, my bakery, sits smack in the middle of Maple Hill, Virginia. Less than ten miles from D.C., my hometown has a nearly perfect mix of urban and suburban living, with brownstones like mine surrounding the center of town, your typical family neighborhoods farther south, and supertony old farmhouse-style homes out toward what used to be the country but is now crazy D.C. sprawl. Because it’s so close to the city, Maple Hill has always attracted transplants transferring here for government jobs, and before the economy tanked, houses were snatched up practically the minute a “For Sale” sign went up. That’s not so much the case anymore—there are three foreclosures on my block alone—and over the past year or so, my business has started to suffer right along with everything else.

  I’m someone who’s prone to worry too much as it is—whenever Larry, my boyfriend, gets on a plane to visit his family back home in Minnesota, my latent Catholicism kicks right in and I start muttering Hail Marys—but this problem with my business is a whole other animal. Larry, Kate, and Amy know that I’ve suffered a little—who hasn’t? But I haven’t been totally honest about just how dire things are, particularly with Larry, who lives with me and shares my household bills. He doesn’t know that I barely keep up on the payments for the home equity loan I used to fund my business. Or about the twenty-seven thousand dollars in credit card debt. Or the late rent payments on the bakery.

  “Hey, Mike?” I turn toward him. He’s examining the collage of junk on my fridge as if the appointment reminder from my dermatologist and a postcard picture of three women in old-fashioned swimsuits actually interest him. “Larry should be down any minute. Are you sure I can’t get you a beer? Take your coat?”

  “I’m fine,” he says, shaking his head and shoving his hands in his pockets. I watch him wander off into the living room and breathe a secret sigh of relief. Finally, it’s just the three of us.

  “So, Kate!” Amy says, relieving the room of its five seconds of silence. “I haven’t seen you in, what, two weeks? How’s the campaign going?”

  “You know, luncheon, meeting, luncheon, fund-raiser. Blah, blah, blah.”

  “Oh, Kate, you don’t really mean that! It’s all so exciting,” Amy gushes, clasping her hands to her chest with the wistful enthusiasm of a Disney princess. “Just think, by this time next year, you could be living in the governor’s mansion!”

  “Yes, I know. Fantastic,” Kate says evenly, motioning for Amy to bring her the wine bottle from the counter. “I can’t wait to move to Richmond and spend my days watching hordes of fat tourists in new sneakers waddle by my front door. It will be heavenly.”

  “Oh, Kate, come on,” I say, chopping the thyme I’ve gathered into a neat pile on the cutting board. Lately it seems like whenever anyone asks Kate about Brendan’s run for governor, her response is just as it is tonight, sarcastic and unimpressed, like a teenager talking about some lame school dance. Her obvious bitterness belies the fact that even though the election is still nine months away, all of the newspapers are already running dreamy articles about Brendan’s likely win and their impending Camelot-like reign over the state of Virginia.

  You can’t blame them, I think, glancing at Kate, who’s fiddling with the gumball-sized diamond stud in her earlobe as she listens to Amy reminisce about the first time that she went on the White House tour after she moved to D.C. from North Carolina. Kate has a way of captivating people. I noticed it the minute we met, on our first day of ninth grade at Madeira, the private girls’ school we both attended.

  Kate had waltzed into our American history class a full twenty minutes late, her only explanation a simple nod of her head toward our prim, bespectacled teacher, an Alex P. Keaton type who talked with a lisp. It was the kind of gesture that a royal might give to her underlings while striding the halls of her palace, and it somehow, inexplicably, worked. She then flopped into the desk in front of mine, turned around in her seat, and offered her hand. It was manicured, I noticed. Even my mom didn’t get manicures. “Hi, I’m Kate,” she said, not even pretending to whisper, as if we were sitting on a park bench instead of in a classroom where a lesson was under way.

  Kate is beautiful—the kind of beautiful that you don’t know really exists until you see an old Grace Kelly film or visit Italy for the first time. I soon discovered that she also had a big mouth and a family name that let her get away with things. In short, she was everything we are supposed to want, especially as fourteen-year-olds. William Townsend, her father, had helmed the family business—a multinational shipping corporation—for decades. Her mother, Evelyn, was the daughter of a legendary Supreme Court justice revered by just about every right-leaning politician in Washington. The other girls at school envied Kate as much as they despised her, mimicking the way that she braided her hair and tied her mother’s Hermès scarves onto a strap of the leather satchel she used for a book bag, all the while whispering about what a bitch she was. Men—our teachers, her father’s colleagues, our classmates’ fathers, passersby on the street—looked at Kate in such an unabashedly lustful way that it reminded me of those scenes in cartoons where the object of desire turns into a steak before the predator’s googly, hungry eyes. My mom once said, as she watched Kate bound out of our house in a tennis skirt that just barely covered her ass, that she would grow up to be the kind of woman whom other women didn’t want around their husbands.

  I knew back then, and still know today, that our friendship is an improbable one. I had been able to attend Madeira only because of a financial aid package. My dad was a midlevel photographer for UPI, my mom worked in an insurance office, and though we were in Maple Hill, we lived in the kind of dim ranch-house neighborhood where everyone’s front yards are blanketed with dead leaves year-round. Even if I had come from a family like Kate’s, or like those of the politicians’ daughters we went to school with, I just didn’t look like the kind of girl she would cozy up to. I had my Polish grandmother’s thickish build; I draped myself in loads of the burnout jewelry that my mother had collected while following bands with my father when they were dating; I couldn’t—still can’t—bother to deal with the mess of curls springing from my head like live wires. While Kate starred on the equestrian and tennis teams, I spent most of my time after school watching reruns of What’s Happening? and reading the dirty sections of my mom’s Judith Krantz novels while I waited for someone to come home from work.

  Still, the two of us somehow clicked. There had been moments over the course of our teenaged friendship when I wondered about the very thing that I was certain the other girls around us said: Maybe Kate befriended me because I was such an underdog and posed no threat to her queen bee status. But as the years went by, those suspicions faded and our relationship deepened. If there was anything that initially drew Kate to me, it was that I was too clueless to care about who she was or where she came from. I know now, as you come to understand your close friends’ insecurities without ever speaking them aloud, that Kate loves me because being with me means that she doesn’t have to perform.

  We both ventured north for college—me to Bowdoin and Kate to Brown, a school so liberal that it was obvious she’d chosen it simply to spite her parents, who’d expected her to attend Yale like everyone else in her family. We met Amy when we were twenty-two, on the day that we moved into our first D.C. apartment. Housed in a dirty brick building in Adams Morgan, it was about what you would expect for a couple of recent college graduates—a dim hallway that smelled like cat food and takeout, a sticky galley kitchen, jewel box–sized bedrooms. I’d found it while Kate was in Spain for the summer, and the only person who was more horrified by it than Kate was Evelyn,
her mother, who offered to cover my portion of the rent to put us up somewhere else. As much as Kate hated the place, there were few things she treasured more than defying her mother, so she agreed to slum it with me if I’d at least let her decorate, something I was more than happy to do.

  Kate and I were in 4B. Amy lived across the hall with a roommate in 4A. Kate’s then boyfriend (if you could you call him a boyfriend when she’d just met him four days earlier) had gathered a group of buddies to help us haul our stuff into the six hundred square feet we’d call home for the next four years. They were a rowdy group of fraternity brothers from Vanderbilt, all wearing worn baseball caps and embroidered ribbon belts. After moving day, we’d never see most of them again. Kate’s beau was an aide for Trent Lott, who was about to become the Senate majority leader, and he spent most of his time at work. But even at twenty-two, Kate wasn’t the kind of woman who waited around until somebody had time for her, so she dropped him within a couple of weeks for a bookstore owner who chatted her up at a cocktail party in the Hirshhorn Museum’s sculpture garden.

  We went out for beers with the guys after all of our stuff was loaded in, and on our way back to our apartment we encountered Amy in the hallway. Kate was fiddling with our new keys. “Hey, y’all.” Amy smiled, approaching us. “I’m sorry to bother you, but my air-conditioning just broke and I can’t seem to find the number for the super.”

  We invited her in and offered her a beer, which she initially refused, until we both opened our own, and Kate began to interrogate her—I knew that she was sizing Amy up to determine if she was worth getting to know. We learned that Amy had come to the city to work as a guidance counselor at a new charter school in southeast D.C., an area once deemed “the murder capital of the world.” The administration had set her up with a roommate, another new teacher, but her boyfriend lived in the Maryland suburbs so she was almost never around. Amy was nervous about essentially living alone. Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was her hometown and the only place she’d ever lived. She’d spent the last four years in a sorority house at UNC, less than a two-mile drive from the house she grew up in.