Sara snapped to as George, showered and dressed at last, kissed her cheek to say goodbye. “Hey. When will I see you?” he whispered in her ear.
She opened her eyes. It was nearly seven. How had that happened?
“Irene’s meeting me to see an apartment in Morningside Heights during my lunch break, and then I’m going to try and get down to Battery Park tonight to see a place for the wedding. But I still have the ‘Hip Spring Break Destinations’ column to edit. Sheldon quit last week, so it got reassigned.”
“You’re already doing the six articles that Meegan left behind when she quit.”
Sara was too tired to get into that. “So I might just do that at the coffee shop until they close.”
George nodded, “Allen got us time on the Gerber satellite tonight, and he wants to go over the materials for the conference next month. And somewhere in there I have to find ten minutes to talk to that guy at Cornell. Someone’s on leave and might not come back. They don’t know when they’ll know.”
“You want to move back to Ithaca?”
“I don’t want to move anywhere. I just want a job.”
“Okay. We’ll just live in this closet forever then.”
“I like this closet. As closets go, this is a good one.”
Sara arched an eyebrow. “Oh yeah? Why’s that?”
“Well, I’ve been checking, but so far, this is the only closet in the city that has you in it.”
She couldn’t help laughing at the thought of George bursting into an apartment, opening the closet doors, and doing an apologetic about-face.
“Run away with me,” Sara said suddenly.
George laughed. “You want to elope?”
“I want to go to France.”
“Oh, is that all?”
“Come on. I’m serious. We’ve been talking about this forever! You, me, Irene, Jacob. Freshman year we found those berets at the Salvation Army, and we promised we would go someday. Remember? We watched all those Godard movies.”
George groaned, still pained by the memory.
“We’ve put this off for a third of our lives already. And I’m saying we should really think about going while we still have the — while we all still can.”
George checked his watch nervously. “Well, okay, but only if you have a few thousand dollars lying around I don’t know about.”
The thing was, she did. And while she loved that George always forgot, he did know she did. Before her grandfather, C. F. Sherman, had completely lost his marbles, his accountants had set up various accounts for her and her sisters. Trust funds, essentially, though she never called them that because it gave people the wrong idea: snobby and spoiled were immediate conclusions. In college, even though she’d worked part time every single semester and interned in the summers and paid for all her own books and meals, the fact that she didn’t have to, technically, had still occasionally caused friction when Jacob panicked about his loans and Irene had needed to sometimes sleep on their couches or raid their pantries when her latest fling had kicked her out.
Sara found it much easier to simply pretend the money wasn’t real and to live paycheck to paycheck like everyone else. Her mother kept telling her to just get a broker, hire a wedding planner, get a cleaning service, go to the tailor. But Sara refused to pay others to do what she could manage to do herself. If everyone else could do it, then she could too. Twice as much of it, even. And meanwhile she always looked forward to the days ahead of them, when everyone’s hard work would pay off, and George would have tenure somewhere, and Jacob would get a Fulbright, and Irene would sell her art for thousands, and they could all finally travel together, with all their future children tagging along behind them.
Sara stroked George’s cheek. “Hurry up. You’re going to get a ticket.”
He groaned. “See you at the end of time, then.”
“See you at the end of time,” she replied, with another quick kiss before he dashed out the door. When the door finally closed behind him, Sara cautiously untangled herself from the sheets, closed the bed, fixed her hair, brushed her teeth, and pulled on the clothes she had laid out carefully the night before.
• • •
Sara had learned of Irene’s cancer in the back of a taxi, sandwiched between the door and a human-sized cocoon made of iridescent silk. She had come down to Fourth Street to help extract Irene’s latest artistic creation from the living room and transport it to the K Gallery, where Irene intended to hide it in the back of the storeroom until she figured out just what the hell to do with it. They had been heading up Sixth Avenue when Sara observed that it was an unusually large piece for Irene.
She had sighed. “I know. Any bigger, and it’d be installation art.”
Sara had complimented the cocoon, which really was quite stunning and had an almost wet texture somehow, from the way the silk shone in the murky January daylight.
“So what happened?” Sara had asked.
“What do you mean?” Irene had replied.
“I mean what came over you? Why’d you make it?”
Sara realized now (knowing what she knew by March) that Irene must have been about to tell her the story of Mrs. Cho’s kimono, but couldn’t do so without explaining how she’d spent Christmas Eve at the Cho household, and that she couldn’t explain that without first explaining how she’d broken down and called William from the MetroStop Bakery by the hospital, and that she couldn’t explain that without first explaining why she’d been in the hospital. Irene had traced this long invisible thread of events back and had landed where she needed to begin, which was to say, “Well, the biopsy results came back positive.”
Sara ignored the apparent non sequitur and hugged Irene firmly. She had been ready for this since before the holiday party.
“Everything’s going to be okay. We’re going to beat this thing, no problem.” She pulled her phone from her purse to start hunting for the relevant numbers. “Luther said he knows someone at Sloan Kettering and someone else at Montefiore. We should make appointments right away for a second opinion, and then our health columnist, Dr. Sammy, he said he’d talk to us about treatment options anytime.”
But Irene had actually seemed annoyed by this. “Actually,” she said, “I started chemo a few weeks ago. At Mount Sinai.”
“A few weeks ago?”
“It only took a few hours for three days. Now I’ve got a little time off before the next round. It wasn’t so bad. I feel pretty good, and they’re very optimistic. I just didn’t want to ruin everyone’s holiday. It’s silly.”
“Silly? Irene, this is serious.”
“Don’t you think I know that?”
“Who else knows? Does Jacob know?”
“No,” Irene sighed. “William’s the only one who knows.”
“But you barely know him!”
“He was here, and I got scared, I guess,” Irene had said matter-of-factly. “It doesn’t matter. He sort of left me at Penn Station. He’s probably waiting for me to call him, but—”
“You told him you had cancer and he — what?”
It had then taken a good twenty minutes to back up and get the whole story before the cab driver deposited them, and Sara helped Irene navigate the cocoon into the storeroom. And though it had all seemed fine at the end of the day, Sara continued dwelling on it. They had always told each other everything. So why hadn’t Irene told her right away? It killed her that when it was all said and done and Irene had been cured, this would still be there between them.