to do with his ex-wife and the difficulty he was having in getting to see his son. “There are only so many chances to get things right,” he’d said, but she hadn’t understood very well at the time. She’d been barely nineteen, sure that life was a broad and endless series of chances. After all, didn’t they live in the land of opportunity, where success in business, in life, in love, was no accident of birth but could be made? Wasn’t Mitch in charge of his own destiny? What was there to regret at his age, twenty-seven? He could have a new wife. (Her.) He could have new children. (Hers.) For two promising months she had done a very effective job of ignoring anything that contradicted her vision, and then he’d set her straight. And then … then, he’d set her free.
Less easy to ignore, these days, were the lines in her forehead and the tiny sunbursts spreading, now, from the corners of her eyes. Her softening jawline. Thinner lips. Less easy to ignore was her makeup artist’s insistence that the miracle of Botox was her salvation. Easier, though, if she quit looking in the mirror. She pressed the light switch and left the room.
She now had the whole sixth floor of this historic art deco building. An entire floor was more space than she needed, by far—as if that mattered; what did need have to do with her life anymore? Here it was just her and Peep, her tabby Maine Coon cat. He slept most of the time, and she was gone most of the time, so their pairing worked out well. With the apartment’s lights still off, the falling snow looked like a shimmering veil outside the east-facing windows. In daytime, that view included Lake Michigan as seen between downtown’s towers. Out the north side was a view of slightly lesser buildings, one of which housed the studio. The apartment was swept and dusted and vacuumed weekly, the floors polished monthly—and before and after every cocktail party. The refrigerator was stocked, the wine bottles circulated, all by a Marcy-directed staff that Blue never saw.
She went barefoot down the hallway to the kitchen on marble floors the color of bitter chocolate. Why colors seemed so often to be named for food she wasn’t sure. Her kitchen cabinets were crème brûlée, and her granite countertop was confetti orzo. The wall color throughout all the main rooms was something to do with squash: pale summer squash? Light butternut purée? Whatever. She wasn’t Martha Stewart.
There was time, yet, for Froot Loops before her mother and Calvin arrived. She poured a bowl and ate it standing at the counter, Peep lurking at her ankles until she put the milk dregs down for him to finish. Ten ’til eight. She had better put some socks on; her toenails were ragged, and who knew what kind of garbage this Calvin guy might decide to report to Perez or TMZ?
She could hear her mother’s voice chastising, her, telling her to relax already. Right, relax. Re-lax. “Chill,” she said, heading back down the hallway. That her mother wanted to introduce this latest companion suggested he was, in Nancy’s estimation, higher caliber than most. Even so, after years of exposure to the public’s appetite for gossip—guilty, herself, of spreading it now and then—Blue preferred to be overly cautious. Live by the sword, die by it.
Calvin K., as he was introduced to Blue, was in every visible way her mother’s counterpart. Silver hair, pierced ears, rangy and kind looking. According to her mother’s earlier account, they’d met at the co-op on Lake Park one Saturday morning, buying organic vegetables. Calvin had an endearing passion for rutabaga.
“Calvin, meet my oldest, Harmony Blue—or just Blue, if she prefers.”
“She prefers,” Blue said. “Is it Calvin Kay, K-a-y?” She’d need to know in order to have him checked out. Her practice of getting background checks on her mother’s companions was another of the subjects neither of them spoke of, or not to one another at any rate.
“No, it’s the letter K, for K-r-z-y-z-e-w-s-k-i,” he spelled it out, then told her it was pronounced sha-sheff-ski. “It’s Polish. Ya’d think someone would anglicize it, but there you go.”
“Well,” she said, taking her mother’s coat, and his, “Good to meet you, Calvin K.”
“Hard to beat ‘Kucharski,’ huh?” her mother said.
Which was why Blue had chosen Reynolds.
Though Calvin’s accent had already answered her next question, she needed something with which to make conversation. She did not, after all, know a single thing about rutabaga. She said, “Are you a Chicago native?”
“Nah, Winnebago. I came here in ninety-seven, I guess it was, to run a bookstore in Hyde Park—my brother’s. He had colon cancer.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Is he—?”
“Gone? Yeah. Saw that special you did on it, though. I appreciate that.”
Her mother, hair down, wearing a form-fitting Impressionist print top and jeans, told Blue, “We watched the show today. Calvin’s been a fan for years. What was with the tears? Do you have a cold?”
“A cold?” Blue closed the closet door and led them into the living room. “No, I’m not sick.”
“When you were little, I would always know when you were coming down with something because your emotions would be all over the map. Could be early menopause—are your periods irregular? Are you having hot flashes?”
“No! Really Mom, it’s nothing,” she lied. “I’m tired is all. Hey, I have some of that red wine you like; can I pour you a glass? Calvin?”
After they’d settled onto the L-shaped sectional, Blue listened while her mother brought her up to date on her sister Melody’s latest. For as intertwined as their lives had been as children, she and Mel had a tenuous connection as adults. Blue relied on their mother to keep her current about Mel, while Mel had their mother and the tabloids to keep her updated on Blue, either of which she seemed willing to regard as reasonably authoritative. The question now was whether their mother or the media would be first to alert Mel to her on-air outburst.
Currently, Blue’s mother was saying, Mel and her husband Jeff were leasing out two hundred tillable acres of their central Wisconsin farm to Green Giant and, using the rent income, had just bought themselves an RV. With their sons both grown and out of the house for the first time, they were planning to spend the coming summer touring the country, one KOA campground after another until they’d crossed off all twenty-nine of their sightseeing goals. “They’ve never traveled; Jeff refuses to fly.”
“So they’re gonna knock ’em all out at once, eh? Carpe diem,” Calvin said.
“I can’t get over how differently you and Mel turned out,” her mother went on. “No way can I see you in an RV—or on a farm, for that matter.” She told Calvin, “She’s never been one to settle for what’s ordinary.”
Blue shook her head. “That’s not true.”
“No?”
“No.” She craved ordinary. Grocery shopping. An afternoon in the park with a blanket and a book. “If you mean my career, you know that a lot of my success is owed to luck.”
Calvin chuckled. “A pretty good run of luck, then.”
“You laugh, but I’m sincere. I started out as a production assistant. I never saw myself hosting a talk show; I wanted to do the news.” If she threw herself into her work as though it was a life raft, if she appeared to be far more dedicated than her cohorts, that was only because she’d used work to fill the empty spaces that others filled with spouses or children, with bar-hopping or hobbies or sports.
In her defense she added, “I had Froot Loops for dinner.”
“You just made my point,” her mother laughed. “How many times have you been there, to the farm?”
“I don’t know—three?” She knew exactly. Each exhausting visit had seen her treading the narrow line between tolerance and envy. In spite of Blue’s support of her sister’s choices and admiration for everything Mel and Jeff had accomplished, Mel was still inclined to defensiveness. It seemed her every sentence began with a version of, “I know it isn’t