The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (7 page)

The name gave Kate a jolt.

The pizzeria was on the edge of town, plain and inexpensive. Heat radiated from the kitchen and bent the air in waves of haze. Industrial fans had little effect, did not even blow free the lines of dust clinging to the fan’s cage. Kate pushed sweaty bangs off her forehead, and looked at Chris across the Formica table.

“I can’t believe we got the house for seven whole weeks.”

“You mean you can’t believe I took seven weeks away from the office.” He drank the last of the water from his cup, and shook the ice at the bottom.

“How many times do you think you’ll have to go off-island?”

“I’m not sure. I probably won’t have to fly out more than once a week.”

Kate kept her eyes down on the table. She fiddled with the glass cheese shaker, tapping its edge on the gray laminate.

He gave a crooked smile.
Really?
She did not usually complain about his travel. “I’m not on vacation this whole time. You knew that.”

“I know. It’s fine.” Tiny planes, dipping from side to side. She held a neutral expression.

“It won’t be an overnight all the time. Most of the work is out of Boston this summer, but sometimes I might have to get a room.”

It was the kind of thing they’d said when they were younger about others oversexed in public.
Get a room
. She gave a wry grin.

“Kate.” He’d misread her. “If I have to do anything longer, maybe your sister could come out.”

Rachel still lived near their parents in Palo Alto, had married and settled there, and was now well known at Stanford and beyond for her research on the economics of minimum wage. She was always pressing for Kate to fly and meet her somewhere, “just the two of us,” without seeming to appreciate that it was not easily done with children. Rachel’s willingness to adjust her frenetic teaching and conference schedule to make time for her little sister, her only sibling in the world, seemed to trump any difficulty Kate might have leaving young children and a traveling husband.

Their trips, when they managed them, were conceived with the best of intentions. There was always a subtext of sisterly bonding and closing the age gap, those four years that made Rachel seem so distantly ahead in every way. What was harder to bridge were the things Rachel had said in their childhood, the patronizing praise for Kate’s grades that made it all too clear that different standards applied to Kate. And in rare cruel moments, things like
You just NEVER know what you’re going to get with adoption
, murmured with innocent wonder. Of course, suggesting a younger sibling was secretly adopted was just the kind of thoughtless thing kids did to one another. And when Kate had needed proof it wasn’t true, she’d known where to find her mother’s pregnancy pictures, but still. In a family that thrived on ephemeral debate and valued intellectual vigor, Kate had been different, and Rachel’s words stung.

Brilliance doesn’t always come with social dexterity and Rachel wasn’t the easiest party guest, not much for light conversation and not easily entertained. Sometimes Kate wondered whether her sister’s choice not to have children had been a result of her intellectual
intensity, or if it was the other way around. Raising children meant having an appreciation for the absurd and the mundane, Kate thought—the bad puns and potty humor and endless knock-knock jokes—or at least a tolerance for them.

And yet there was a connection between them that was undeniable and enduring. Whether it was her imitations and dry wit or the memory she evoked of lighter childhood days, Kate accessed something in Rachel that brought out a rare girlishness in her. Rachel had a mellifluous laugh that could be startlingly unrestrained, uncomplicatedly happy. When their father heard it, he would look up from his paperwork in the book-lined study, pull his glasses down his nose, and gaze at them, smiling. At those moments his joy was transparent, all his hopes and needs satisfied should his compromised heart give out tomorrow. But for Kate, it was at times a tiring tap dance knowing that was your role, the funny one to balance the smart one.

“Can I draw while we wait for the pizza?” James asked, and Kate handed him one of the notepads in her bag.

“Me too. Let’s play hangman, Mom,” Piper said, with the enthusiasm of someone who doesn’t know what she doesn’t know and doesn’t care. She held the pen between fingertips dark with marker from drawing on the ferry, and under crude gallows, drew seven horizontal lines. The resulting word would likely be unknowable to anyone but Piper.

Confident, the preschool teacher said. Willing to try new things. But so sensitive to criticism. When she saw she’d done something imperfectly—coloring outside the lines, writing too many
p
’s in her name—she would put down the crayon and walk away. Kate rarely corrected her daughter’s efforts; it was not in her nature to impose perfection. But where had Piper’s shame come from? Had a teacher chastised her too emphatically? A babysitter? It was so hard to account for what someone else might say to the children.

The waiter arrived with the pizza, fully loaded with vegetables and pepperoni. The children each took a slice and began plucking off toppings according to their dislikes.

“You going to call Max while you’re here?” Chris folded a wedge and inverted it, letting grease drip onto the paper plate.

“Yeah. He needs the help even more this year.”

Chris took a bite, and half of the slice disappeared. “I thought he was going to sell.”

“He got an offer. He hasn’t decided. But he has to do something.”

“Well, it’s a shame if he does.” The bell on the pizzeria door jangled as another family walked in, parents with four small children. Chris watched as they took a booth on the far side of the room, and each of the kids sat calmly and picked up menus. “Did you call back that guy about the thing?”

Kate frowned, not following his train of thought. She watched Piper pick up the cheese shaker a second time, though her slice was already coated with a white mist. Kate tapped the girl’s plate, signaling her to eat, and placed the cheese shaker back beside the other condiments.

“The job guy,” Chris said. “Your friend’s place opening in Dupont Circle.” He removed a few broccoli florets touching his pepperoni and then each small square of green pepper, and piled them to the side like seeds from watermelon.

Kate’s friend Anthony from culinary school had called just before they’d left for vacation. He’d accepted a chef position at a new restaurant opening in Washington, and wanted to submit Kate’s name for pastry. It was a great opportunity. The menu would have an emphasis on organic locally grown ingredients, and the decor was being done by the team credited with design awards throughout the mid-Atlantic states.

She shook her head. “I haven’t gotten around to calling him back.”

“Too much.” He nodded.

“No. It’s not that. It’s just—”

“Ow, it’s hot!” Piper began to wail, holding her mouth.

“What? Oh, hon, you shook the red pepper flakes on it,” Kate
said, cupping a napkin around the girl’s mouth. “You were only supposed to shake the
cheese
.”

Chris took a fresh slice for Piper and placed the cheese shaker in front of her. “It’s just what?” he asked Kate. James toyed with the pepper flakes, and edged the shaker back toward his sister’s plate. Kate took it from him and moved it to the adjacent table.

“Just … I just have trouble imagining it,” she said. “How it would work with the kids.”

Restaurant hours were brutal. They would have to hire a nanny who could work creative hours, and when Chris traveled, long ones. They had done it once before. When Piper was a baby Kate had worked with a start-up bistro in town. The nights were late, and when she’d come home she would still be electrified, her thoughts crackling with menu combinations and disappointing vendors, so that many nights she’d needed herb tea with a NyQuil chaser to ease herself back to the home front. One morning she came downstairs to find she had left the stovetop burner on the night before, a menace of flame licking low for hours. For two weeks she’d been haunted by what might have happened—the spark and swell, Chris away and her in an antihistamine haze—and eventually she’d given notice at the restaurant. She had not been done in by the late hours so soon after having a baby, though that was what she told everyone, even Chris. What did her in was knowing she could be so engrossed in her work as to neglect her family’s well-being, and she could not stand knowing that about herself.

“I don’t see how it would work either. It’s so complicated,” Chris agreed. “I mean, what would we do, get full-time help? Or an au pair?” He glanced at the other family across the room. The four children were sitting quietly and drawing, a portrait of discipline and good behavior—testimony, no doubt, to a household with one stay-at-home parent, or two parents with complementary schedules.

She began to say,
Au pairs are cheaper
. But she stopped herself. It might seem as if she were referencing their finances, as if she were
suggesting that a second income might be a useful thing. Such suggestions had not gone over well in the past.

“Pastry is usually more early mornings,” she said, as if that would make it easier.

“Not in start-ups. You get sucked into both. How would we cover a schedule like that?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Chris. We could juggle, get creative. That’s what people do when they love their work, don’t they? They find a way to make it all happen?” They looked at each other across the table, entry-level adversarial. The kids noticed their change in tone and looked up.

“What are you guys talking about?” James asked.

“Just debating what we should do tomorrow,” Kate said.

“I want to go to the beach. And play miniature golf,” said James. “One in the morning, one in the afternoon. Then swim.”