She nods and rings him up, and I can breathe again.
When we finally escape the store, we burst into laughter.
“You, only you, would do that.”
“Only me,” he says, then he presents me the umbrella. A red polka-dot umbrella with a curved wooden handle. “For you.”
My face is warm and I can’t help but smile. “I love it.”
“Try it out.”
“It’s not raining.”
“So?”
I open the umbrella and we stroll through the streets of Scarsdale like that, looking in shop windows, commenting on the oh-so-suburban garb of passersby, then stopping for a seven-layer bar to share on the return trip home. As we walk to the station, he puts his arm around me.
“I’m going to prom,” Lane says abruptly.
“You are?”
He nods and looks at me. “Yeah. To try to be normal. To try to have fun. My mom wants me to. Will you go with me? You’re my closest friend.”
“Yes,” I say, and in this second I don’t care about who my heart belongs to. Lane is here for me; he knows my everything, and so I will go. As his friend.
“I guess that makes you my prom date now,” he says, after we buy our tickets and sink into a pair of seats on the train back to Manhattan. I tense at the word date. I thought he was asking me as friends.
“I guess it does,” I say in a flat tone, because I’m not sure what being Lane’s prom date means, or if it means anything, or even why I feel like I’m betraying him.
Prom was never in the cards for Noah and me. Unless it was a prom held in his office.
But something about being someone’s prom date just seems so normal, and for now I like that. As the lights on the train dim, I tell Lane, “I love the umbrella.”
Chapter Fifteen
Kennedy
I suppose it was his office where we came together. Ironic, because we never did business together, but in the safety of those four walls, we removed the biggest barrier—not age, not jobs, not station in life.
But the physical presence of my mother.
A week after Noah and I listened to 42nd Street at his desk, my mother finalized a deal for Lords and Ladies in Russia. She handed me the papers and I happily delivered them to Noah’s office in the afternoon. It was the summer before my senior year and I was taking a pre-college course at NYU, so I stopped by after class.
I knocked twice on his open door.
“Hey. Come on in,” he said.
I gave him the envelope and helped myself to a chair.
“Sit down,” he joked.
“Don’t mind if I do. What did you study in college?”
He shifted in his chair, surprised by my quick segue to a question.
“Psychology. Why do you ask?”
“Just curious,” I said. “Did you enjoy it? Your major?”
“I did. I’d thought about studying business, but I read an interview with another agent who said he wished he’d studied psychology, that it would have been more useful than econ. So I picked psychology. What do you want to study when you go to college?”
“Art history. Like my dad.”
“You’re close with your dad, aren’t you? He’s where your love of musicals comes from?”
“Totally. We saw Wicked and Billy Elliot and Chicago and the Evita revival. We even went to see this one-night Patti Lupone concert at Lincoln Center two years ago, and I teased him that we were the only two straight people there.”
Noah laughed, then corrected me. “Three. The only three straight people. I went to that Patti Lupone concert.”
“You did?”
“Hell, yeah. Wouldn’t miss Patti for the world.”
“You went alone?”
He shrugged. “Not everyone shares my musical taste. But that’s okay. I didn’t mind going alone.”
“That’s cool. That you like Patti Lupone.”
“I don’t just like Patti. I love Patti. But really, it’s not as if I had a choice. My mom sang Patti Lupone songs every single day of my life.”
“Do you miss your mom?” I asked.
“Yeah. Yeah, I do,” he said, and he sounded wistful, lonely even.
“It’s just you now, right?”
He nodded. “Man against the world,” he said, like it was a joke, but I could tell there was a kernel of pain beneath the offhand comment.
“It must be hard sometimes. To feel that way. To miss her,” I said quietly. I got the sense he didn’t talk freely about himself. Maybe he needed someone who wanted to know him, truly know him, and to listen.
He looked down at his hands in his lap, then back up at me, his blue eyes meeting mine. “It is hard,” he said in the barest voice.
“How long has it been now?”
He scrubbed a hand over his jaw and swallowed. “Three years.” Each word was a scrape. Dry and harsh. I wanted to take away the hurt, so I did the one thing I could do. Keep talking. About musicals. About art. About Patti Lupone. Until the raw edge left his voice.
When it was time to leave, I stood up, but Noah told me to wait. He handed me an envelope.
“Can you believe they’re making Lords and Ladies fragrances now?” he said and laughed. “Just got these from the licensing team. But it’s kind of a rush.”
“Should I bring the papers back tomorrow?”
He nodded, but didn’t say anything more. The smallest sliver of a smile told me he was glad I’d be coming by tomorrow.