I am huffing and puffing when I meet Lane downstairs. “We need to send more letters. Lots of them,” I inform him.
He shakes his head, clucks his tongue. “Kennedy, I think it’s time we call this whole thing off.”
“No,” I say, tension reaching new heights inside my bones. “I have to do this. I want to finish the amends. I want to do this right. I can’t do it without you.”
“Kennedy. Let’s just get a coffee.”
“I don’t want to just get a coffee. I want to finish this off. C’mon. I’m leaving the Balzac letter tonight. My favorite love letter ever and you know it.”
He raises one eyebrow curiously. “I thought you’d never leave the Balzac, since it came out of an affair.”
“It’s for Mrs. Steigler,” I say, staring at him sharply. Using her name. He knows what happened with her. The name should jar him.
But it doesn’t. He shakes his head. “K,” he says in a low voice. “I think we need to stop this. Let’s do something else. Plan a skydiving trip. Go bungee jumping. White water rafting.”
I grit my teeth and purse my lips. “Please.”
He sighs, shakes his head. “You’re on your own.”
But, really, that’s all I’ve ever been.
*
I know Mrs. Steigler.
Well, know is a loaded word. I don’t know what she does for a living, how old she is, or even her true hair color.
But I know she cares deeply about keeping her family together.
I know because she told me. She tried to stop my mom through me.
She is any woman. She is everywoman. She is the devastated face of a woman scorned.
I’m not even sure how my mom’s affair with her husband began, but I can tell you how it ended in excruciating detail because the cuckolded wife caught on. The conversations I overheard between my mom and Mr. Steigler indicated something bad was about to go down. Mr. Steigler said things to my mom like “I think my wife might suspect something,” and my mom said things like “How much do you think she knows?”
That’s why I was enlisted in the cover-up. I was told to answer the phone any time it rang from here on out. My mom was only taking calls from her agent. This rule applied to both the home phone and the cell phone, since evidently Mrs. Steigler had found a potentially incriminating text exchange on Mr. Steigler’s phone, which meant she now had the mobile number of a certain LGO showrunner and was dialing it A LOT.
The orders from on high were clear. Never give in, never surrender.
My mom figured Mrs. Steigler would eventually stop calling if she only reached a gatekeeper. In a one-week period during my junior year of high school I fielded no less than twenty phone calls from Mrs. Steigler. I put on my smile each time, saying “Ms. Stanza isn’t available. May I take a message?” Sometimes I delivered the messages, but mostly I just pretended to write them down, while I closed my eyes and cringed as Mrs. Steigler said through her teary rage, “Please tell her I want to know how she could do this to another woman.”
One morning I saw her across the street. She stood on the opposite side of the block, wearing dark sunglasses, a raincoat, and what was obviously a long black wig. I wanted to go to her, to put an arm around her, maybe even give her a hug, to tell her he wasn’t worth it. He wasn’t worth anyone’s tears.
She came to me, instead, running across the street, cutting me off. “Please tell her to stop,” she said, her palms pressed together as if in prayer.
Someone had just punched a hole in my chest. I could feel my skin and bones collapsing around my heart. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I muttered, letting my hair fall around my face like a shield.
“Yes, you do. You’ve been answering the phone. All I want is for it to end. All I want is for her to stop.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I repeated, like the cover-up robot I’d become.
“Please. We have a daughter too,” she said, grasping for something, anything, to get me to go along with her.
“I have to go,” I said, my heart caving in. She grabbed my sleeve.
“I’m begging you,” she said, her voice like gravel.
I never said anything to my mom about the incident. If I had told her, she’d just have laughed. My mom would end it when she was good and ready.
Two weeks later, Mr. Steigler stopped coming by. I knew it had nothing to do with Mrs. Steigler’s time frame and everything to do with Jewel Stanza’s. When Jewel Stanza is done with a man is when Jewel Stanza is done with a man.
Our Stolen Kisses
Sometimes, I picture all the kisses to come. The places we’ll have them. I see us kissing in the rain on a cobblestoned street in Paris, under the sun while strolling on a San Diego beach, next to a waterfall in Kauai. I don’t just imagine what the kisses will be like though, because I know they’ll be wonderful. I think about how we’ll feel. If we’re in Paris, in San Diego, in Kauai, we’ll feel free.
That’s what I long for the most. The freedom to be in those places with you. The freedom to be anyplace with you.
Someday, right?
Chapter Twenty-Six
Kennedy
For the first time in months, Lane and I go our separate ways after a shrink appointment. I do not go home. I do not call Noah. I do not get coffee. Instead, I tell my mom I’m with my dad and I tell my dad I’m with my mom, and I spend the next few hours doing my best approximation of a bike messenger, crisscrossing the grid of Manhattan, making my deliveries around the island, even as it rains, even while the drops mat my hair and turn my clothes into wet layers I’ll have to peel off later.