A Window Opens: A Novel (19 page)

I laughed. “Excuse me?”

“No, seriously, I just got back from a fact-finding mission at the Strand. That place is a tinderbox waiting to go up in flames. We have to ask ourselves, what kind of impact is all that
paper
having on our planet?” He shuddered.

“Well, I guess that’s why Scroll is such a great idea.”

“Yeah. You could say that. So, Allison. Tell me how
you
plan to surprise and delight in the marketplace.”

“It’s Alice, actually.”

“Sorry?”

“My name. It’s Alice, not Allison.”

“Oh, yeah, of course, sorry.” Greg was building up his hand strength using two surprisingly loud little devices usually stowed in the top drawer of Matthew’s filing cabinet. (Matthew was big on fleeting self-improvement programs; I knew another drawer was filled with protein bars left over from a short-lived diet.)

“As for our literature selection: right now I have about fifty-six titles in all, give or take. I’m also meeting with agents and editors, who are practically jumping out of their skin with excitement about Scroll.”

“Really?”

“Of course!
Plus I have more submissions for ScrollOriginals than I can handle on my own. We’re thinking of bringing in an intern to vet them—”

Greg held up his hand and made a motion as if to turn down the volume. “All good stuff. But we have to ask ourselves, what does the customer really
want
, right?”

“Right.” I was still getting used to Scroll speak, which involved a semi-Socratic tic of inserting “Right?” at the end of every sentence. “Wait, sorry, Greg, what do you mean?”

“I mean, does the customer really want
books
with his coffee, or might he enjoy something else?”

“Like . . . ?”

“I don’t know. Isn’t that
your
job?” Greg gazed at me through heavy-lidded eyes. Was he high?

“I guess I’m not understanding your question.”

“I’ll break it down for you. What’s the best way for us to gain traction in the marketplace?”

“By creating a bookstore experience like no other? By giving customers something they can’t get anywhere else. Beyond that, I haven’t really thought—”

“Well, start thinking, girl!” Greg dropped the hand exercisers on Matthew’s desk with a clunk. He squinted at the picture on my desk. “Hey, switching gears here, is that your family?”

“Yes, the kids are older now but—”

“Let me ask you, what video games do they like to play?”

I laughed. “Much to my son’s chagrin, we don’t have any video games. I’m not a fan.”

“Do you mind if I ask why?”

“Not at all. I just think they’re stupid. I want my kids to be readers and to live in the real world—not some fake universe. Not to mention the violence.” I congratulated myself on adhering to the sixth tenet: Winners Talk Frankly (WTF).

“Huh. Interesting.” Greg looked contemplative. “Hard to do both, right? The kids and the job?”

“I guess, but—well, the alternative isn’t really an option for me right now.”

“Got it. Anyway. My wife stays home.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, listen, I’m no rocket scientist, but I think kids need their mom.”

Suddenly, on Sixth Avenue, the flow of traffic came to a grinding halt. Distant ambulances silenced their sirens and dogs stopped barking. Or maybe that was just my imagination. I reached up to make sure my hair wasn’t standing on end.

“I guess. I mean, yes—kids do need their mom. I like to think—”

“One more question: has Genevieve brought you up to speed on our pivot?”

“Pivot? Actually no, I don’t think so.” Even as I threw her under the bus a little bit, I felt weirdly protective of Genevieve, who, for all her quirks, was a good-enough feminist not to offer her opinions on major life choices in a business meeting.

Greg made a little teepee out of his fingertips, thumbs touching at the bottom to form a triangle. His stance was prayerful, as if he was about to impart important wisdom or maybe pass me the bong. “I’m sure she’ll bring you up to speed soon.”

I nodded again, but I was barely paying attention. I was too busy formulating intelligent responses to the topic we’d already closed out moments before. Had he really told me that he thought women should stay home with their kids?

I’d have to get to the bottom of our pivot another day.

•  •  •

I came home to find Nicholas playing quarters on the front porch with Susanna. They were cackling raucously when I pounded up the front steps and then stopped, not believing my eyes. Were those really red Solo cups on my teak coffee table? Were those actual Budweiser tall boys rolling on
the floor, mingling among jump ropes and badminton birdies? I felt like I’d stepped through the looking glass into my brother’s college years, except Will’s frat brothers at least had the decency not to get wasted in broad daylight with children riding Big Wheels nearby.

Before I had a chance to say anything, Oliver zoomed past. “Mommy! Race me!”

This was my cue to start timing his “split”—meaning the time it took for him to bike from the apron of the driveway to the garage and back. I started counting loudly, according to protocol, “One Mississippi, two Mississipi,” then, when he was out of earshot behind the house, turned my attention back to the derelict adults in front of me.

Nicholas held up one finger while chugging a beer, then wiped the foam from his upper lip. “Sorry, Al. I realize this is a depressing scenario. Business is slow for both of us so we were just . . . regressing.”

“That’s a good word for it.”

Oliver reappeared and skidded to a stop, inches from the road. “How long, Mommy?” He was red-faced, with a little Alfalfa-style tuft of hair sticking up at the back of his head.

“Only seven seconds this time!”

“Is that a new world record?”

“Oh, I’d say so. Most definitely.
That
is a first.”

I brushed past Susanna and went inside to feed Cornelius and then pick up Margot and Audrey from swimming. Paul was in Atlanta on business and clearly our spouses were in no condition to drive.

Me:
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Georgie:
“A bunny holder.”

Me:
“What do you mean?”

Georgie:
“Someone who holds bunnies.”

Me:
“Like a dog walker walks dogs, you’ll hold bunnies.”

Georgie:
“Yes.”

Me:
“Wow, you’ll have strong arms.”

Georgie:
“I know. It’s the perfect job for me.”

•  •  •

My parents had a week-long rental on Long Beach Island (Exit 63), as they had every single summer since I can remember. This year’s cottage was a cramped ranch in Holgate, steps from the bird sanctuary at the southern end of the island and across the street from the Jolly Roger convenience store, site of my first taste of Ben & Jerry’s Heath Bar Crunch in the summer of 1988. Just seeing the weathered gray building triggered a Pavlovian craving for ice cream and the sense memory of the smell of Coppertone and the chorus of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.”

Everywhere I go on LBI, I sift through the sands of time. The seedy bar we sneak out to after the kids go to bed used to be Touché, a hip turquoise- and pink-lit nightclub where Will took me to test out my fake ID in college. In the mornings, my mom fetches warm boxes of sticky buns and crumb cake from the Crust & Crumb Bakery, just as her mom did when I was Georgie’s age. Even the bike rental place still has the same sign out front—We’ll Teach Your Kid to Ride or We’ll Buy You a Lobster Dinner—which is how I came to watch my six-year-old nephew master a two-wheeler on the same pebbly sidewalk where his dad learned thirty-five years earlier.

On Saturday morning, after we packed our minivan to the gills with bikes, boogie boards, sand chairs, towels, coolers, buckets, and shovels and were sitting in the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the causeway that leads to the island, I received a message from Genevieve: “Alice, it’s too long since we received your input. Please take a moment to share your top three priorities with the team, Cleveland included.”

The first time she made this request of me, we had just come from getting our nails done together. I was a little baffled—my Well Red polish was barely dry, after all, and Genevieve and I had just traded honest assessments of each other’s eyebrows (verdict: mine were too thin, hers required taming). Then it occurred to me that Genevieve might be implementing a new leadership strategy from the
One Minute Manager
. Befriend, then berate. Was that a thing?

That time I gamely listed my priorities and then spent a good twenty
minutes scrutinizing my Monopoly board–sized monitor, reading and rereading the message to make sure all my work was represented and accurate.

Then I hit send.

Within seconds the e-flogging started.

“First off, who
are
you?” (I had to laugh.)

“Why are you pursuing so many titles by women?”

“Why are there no authors from Colorado on this list?”

“When will the detail pages go live for this merch?”

Surprisingly, the hardest question to answer was the first.

This time I put down my iPhone, closed my eyes, turned my face to the sun, and reached my hand over to cup the back of Nicholas’s neck. This vacation would do him good, I thought. As furious as I was at him for leaving his job, the stress of starting a new business was way more intense than either of us had imagined, and I feared that my husband was crumbling under the pressure.

Still, Nicholas had definitely stepped up to the plate for my career. Every morning, he made three breakfasts, packed three lunches, and threw dinner in the slow cooker—all before I finished reading the Scroll missives that arrived in the middle of the night. Sure, I unloaded the dishwasher and kept track of who needed new socks and communicated with Jessie and arranged playdates via text, but otherwise I’d abdicated almost all household responsibility.

•  •  •

When we finally arrived at the house, my nephews were waiting on the roof deck, holding aloft between them a huge crayoned cardboard sign that said “Welcome, NicholasAliceMargotOliverGeorgie!” I dabbed the outermost corner of each eye with an index finger. I was so happy to be there, even at the cost of my remaining vacation days.

My mom was playing tennis in Beach Haven; my dad was taking a nap (something I had never known him to do), and we dispatched the kids to the Jolly Roger to pick up sandwiches for lunch. Nicholas and I huddled around a green plastic picnic table with Will and Mary, who were
in excellent spirits for Mainers downgrading to the Jersey shore in the prime of their own beach season at home.

“So, how does he seem?” I couldn’t help asking; it was so hard to have any perspective on our dad, especially since he always insisted he was hunky-dory.

Will and Mary exchanged a look.
You go. No, you
. As much as I like my sister-in-law, I didn’t want her two cents. This was a conversation for siblings, with in-laws as invested observers.

Thankfully, Will spoke first. “He looks . . . old.”

A lump the size of an apple spontaneously materialized in my throat. I nodded my head and choked out, “I know.”

Will dragged a tan hand down the length of his face, then adjusted the bill of his baseball cap. “And he
reeeally
doesn’t want to talk about what’s going on. When I asked him if he’s in any pain, he looked at me like I was insane.”

“I know. And Mom wants to talk about nothing else. She’s really on his case about nutrition. And while I agree that a fruit smoothie might be a better breakfast than a Frappuccino, I don’t want to get into a big thing with him about it.”

A family rode by in a surrey with fringe on top—rented, of course, from the place with the bike-riding lessons. They were impossible to miss: two adults, sweaty and pedaling; two kids kicking back and repeatedly squeezing the black rubber bulbs of their handlebar horns. The girl wore braids, the boy had a crew cut, and both wore the kind of unisex dime-store flip-flops that had been the one item of apparel Will and I shared as kids.

Nicholas chimed in. “Anyway, I don’t really think it’s your place to tell your dad what to eat. Not your pig, not your farm, right?” This was his mom’s favorite expression—mine too, but not in this instance.

“But that’s the thing, he
is
our pig.” I looked around the table. Even though my sister-in-law’s opinion didn’t matter to me as much as Will’s, it seemed rude to exclude her from the conversation altogether. “Mary, what do you think?”

“I think you want to be there for him, but you’re not going to be able to fix this.”

The kids were back, lugging three plastic bags bulging with Cape Cod potato chips and Arizona iced tea—the official refreshments of New Jersey summer. As the four of us clambered down the mossy wooden stairs attached to the side of the house, Will said, “I’m scared, Al.”

“I am, too.”

We had never been the kind of family who rented a surrey with a fringe on top—our mom was too busy antiquing and our dad was too busy doing the crossword puzzle while wearing penny loafers and black kneesocks pulled all the way up. We weren’t a sporty family, or an adventurous one.

But our parents had always, always been the ones pedaling. Until now.

•  •  •

We brought drinks down to the beach for cocktail hour, and we persuaded my dad to come along. Usually he avoided sand until the last day of the vacation, when he took his one stroll down to the water with binoculars. He’d look left, look right, and then head back to the house to smoke his pipe and read another book by John le Carré, James Michener, or Elmore Leonard. This time, he settled quietly into a chair under our big umbrella. Buzz Lightyear stayed home among the limes, bananas, and beach badges in a wooden bowl on the kitchen table. There was no way it could be heard over the rough surf.

Even though the ocean was freezing, I dove in with Ollie and got battered around until I had a shelf of sand above the underwire in my bathing suit. While I was drying off, sitting among the adults in a horseshoe of chairs, I spotted my friend Mona walking down the beach. She’s a publicist I’ve known since my
You
days and had always been one of my favorite lunch dates. Mona can volley reading recommendations with the fluency of an auctioneer.