Riverside Park. Laura Wormer Van

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СКАЧАТЬ was not the first time they had discussed the mysterious fresh-killed turkey Mrs. Stewart insisted on bringing with her from Ohio every year, or the meat thermometer she extracted from wads of tissue paper as though it were an irreplaceable heirloom. But Amanda felt bad for Mrs. Stewart, who was a widow and lonely, and wanted to make her mother-in-law’s visits as pleasant as possible.

      “Well, it is Thanksgiving,” she murmured. “We can do it once a year.”

      Howard muttered something and used a dish towel to shove the turkey back into the oven and slam the door. “Okay, it’s done.”

      “How can you be sure?”

      “Amanda, we go through this—”

      “Please just cut into it, Howard. We don’t want to poison anybody.”

      They looked at each other and started to laugh. Howard slung the dish towel over his shoulder and moved over to Amanda, sliding his hands around her waist. “You must be exhausted.”

      “I am tired,” she admitted, resting her head on his shoulder as he pulled her closer. She used to have such a narrow waist it was hard for Amanda to let Howard feel what she was carrying around now. She had been watching what she ate and exercised like a mad woman, but after Grace she could not seem to pull herself together like she had after Emily and Teddy. “How do you know this Celia?” she asked quietly from his shoulder.

      “That girl? She’s a bartender at Captain Cook’s.”

      “A bartender?” Amanda raised her head to look at him.

      “Once in a while I’ll stop in and have a burger. And watch a game.”

      Amanda walked over to retrieve the kettle, fill it with water and put it on a burner. She needed to warm the silver serving dishes with hot water before filling them. (She had inherited the silver from her grandmother and it made Amanda’s mother happy to see her using it.) “I didn’t realize you frequented bars while we were away.”

      “Oh, that’s me all right,” Howard said, “in the bars, day and night. We’re talking maybe once in a blue moon, Amanda. It does get a little lonely around here sometimes.”

      Amanda did not point out how, as a literary agent, and a very successful literary agent at that (president of Hillings & Stewart), Howard was inundated with people, phone calls and e-mail all day long. And when he did not have some professional soiree at night to attend, he always told her all he wanted to do was go home and collapse. He never said, “I’m lonely so I’m going to a bar.”

      Their living arrangement was becoming an increasingly unhappy situation for Amanda. After 9/11 Emily and Teddy were frightened of tall buildings, airplanes, staircases, fires and crowds. Like so many families, the Stewarts had gone into counseling with the children, but neither parent could bear the idea of not doing everything they could to make their children feel safer. So Howard found a gorgeous house and property in Woodbury, Connecticut, and after some discussion, Amanda and the children moved out there. Before this, it had never occurred to either one of the Stewarts that they would ever live anywhere but in their beloved adopted hometown of Manhattan.

      The children were enrolled in school, and Howard hoped that when Emily and Teddy were older they would attend Taft as day students. There was a wonderful horse farm next to them, Daffodil Hill, where Amanda boarded a horse for herself and a pony for the children. Madame Moliere lived with them as well (the house was huge), so that Amanda could still get some work in on a book she was under contract to write, about the court of Catherine the Great. Howard tried to come out on Thursday nights and go back into the city on Monday mornings. Amanda would bring the children into New York at the slightest excuse; she did not want them to be afraid of the place their parents loved above all others, Manhattan, and more specifically, the neighborhood of Riverside Park.

      Howard grew up in Ohio, where his father had a landscaping business, and Amanda grew up in Syracuse, where her parents were still both professors at Syracuse University. Howard had attended Duke and then book publishing lured him to Manhattan; Amanda attended Amherst and her (closet) gay husband had dragged her to Manhattan.

      Howard’s first wife had money, so he had not been pressed to make a lot of money while he worked his way up at Gardiner & Grayson to become an editor. He quit his job around the same time that his marriage broke up, started a literary agency, and had never looked back. It was with great pride that Howard had bought the Woodbury property on his own; Amanda knew her husband still considered this apartment as belonging to her, and that Howard wished as a family they did not still rely so heavily on the trust fund Amanda’s grandmother had left her. The money Amanda had earned (and still earned) from her first book, a biography of Catherine the Great, was different, Howard said.

      Amanda was extremely proud of Howard. Men liked his well-defined masculinity and sharp, well-educated mind, and women liked his curly hair, beautiful manners, deeply expressive eyes and easy smile. And while Howard appeared to be every inch the sophisticated New Yorker, he was, at heart, still a boy from the Midwest who loved life.

      The Stewarts had come a long way in their marriage. Certainly Amanda had. When she had met her future husband she could scarcely leave the neighborhood. She had suffered a complete nervous breakdown in her first marriage and had retreated into her work and this apartment. Besides her parents, there had only been two people who she trusted enough to let in. One was her housekeeper, Rosanne DiSantos, and the second, her elderly friend Mrs. Emma Goldblum, who would come for high tea. They were still very near and dear to her, and were, in fact, present this day at the Stewarts’ Thanksgiving dinner. If anyone had told Amanda that someday she would be running after three children, driving everyone all over hell and high water in a Lincoln Navigator and volunteering for The Parents and Teachers Organization in the Connecticut suburbs, she would have told them surely they were mad.

      But that was exactly what she was doing.

      Of course, had anyone told her she would ever agree to live apart from Howard for at least four days a week she would have said, “Never!” And lately it was more like six or seven days apart and getting worse.

      “You can do whatever you like while we’re away,” Amanda said to Howard, trying to sound carefree. “I trust you completely.”

      Howard looked at her from across the kitchen. “Ditto, my dear.”

      Amanda only wished she knew why that pretty girl who called her husband by his first name kept parading around in her head.

      

      Dinner finally reached the dining room table, and given the unusual collection of people they were entertaining went off rather well. Conversation with Amanda’s parents, the professors Miller, could be difficult to follow when Mother got lost in life’s metaphors and Papa wandered through lost civilizations, which is to say, to speak in their respective fields of English and history. Mother Stewart tended to talk about soap operas, so Amanda’s older friend, Mrs. Goldblum, could help out a little there. There were Emily and Teddy, of course; Grace snoozing in her carrier; Madame Moliere, and Miklov, the assistant director of the children’s soccer league in Connecticut. He was from the Czech Republic and the children called him Mickey-Luck. Also present were Rosanne DiSantos, no longer a housekeeper but a hospital LPN, Rosanne’s beau, Randy, a detective in the Bronx, and Rosanne’s seventeen-year-old son, Jason, who had to leave dinner early to go to work at Captain Cook’s. Amanda walked Jason to the door.

      “The tips are really, really good on Thanksgiving,” he explained. Amanda had known this strapping young man since he was two years old. He was attending СКАЧАТЬ