swore he still loved her more than anyone. Since there still were so many women coming and going, Cassy could not see how this could be true. She did not say the same to him, though, that she loved him best. Because she didn’t. She was very much in love with someone else, but that relationship was fraught with obstacles of its own. Still, it was wonderful to love and be loved.
Somehow Cassy was going to have to figure all of this out.
3
Amanda Miller Stewart’s Family, a Pretty Girl, and an Attentive Young Man
THE PRETTY GIRL lived in their building and came and went at odd hours. Amanda knew this because their eight-month-old precious accident, Grace, was cutting her teeth and sometimes in the wee hours Amanda would take her down to the lobby so she could talk to the concierge and the night security man while walking the baby back and forth, patting her little back. (It was best, Amanda had found, to let the children’s nanny, Madame Moliere, sleep through the night so she could get their two older children—Emily, age ten, and Teddy, age eight—organized in the morning.)
Grace had begun to fret at three-thirty in the morning on Thanksgiving, and since Amanda’s parents and Howard’s mother were staying with them, Amanda had quickly thrown on slacks and a sweater to scoop Grace up and pay a visit to the lobby. About fifteen minutes later a cab had pulled up to the entrance of the building and the pretty girl had come stumbling out of it. She had been rather astonishingly drunk. She was not as tall as Amanda, but taller than average, and had lovely dark brown hair. She also had a sleek body that only a girl in her twenties can possess. The girl had sworn under her breath as she banged her shoulder on the doorway, but did so in a manner that told Amanda the pretty girl was both well-spoken and probably well-educated.
Of course, if the girl lived in their building Amanda knew she must be a young woman of means.
The pretty girl had then almost collided with Amanda and Grace. She had reeled back, her large brown eyes trying to focus. She had looked at the baby and then back at Amanda. “You’re always stuck with the kids,” she’d said. “You should make Howard do more.”
The night security guard, who was an off-duty NYPD police officer (who once showed Amanda’s son the derringer he carried in his boot), had stepped forward to say he would see the girl upstairs to her apartment. Just as the elevator doors were closing, Amanda had heard the girl say, “Thank God I don’t have any kids.”
Amanda didn’t speak of it—the fact that the pretty girl evidently knew her husband on a first-name basis—until they had returned from the Thanksgiving Day Parade and she and Howard were in the kitchen trying to pull things together for dinner.
“That must have been Celia,” Howard said, squinting through the blast of oven heat, trying to see the meat thermometer.
“Celia who?” Amanda asked.
“Honey, I can’t read this thing.”
“Rosanne thinks we should sneak in a turkey with a whatchamacallit,” she said, looking over his shoulder into the oven, careful to hold her hair back. She still wore hers long, basically because her husband liked it that way. (Sometimes when Amanda turned around on the street or in a store she could see the surprise in people’s eyes that she was forty-four and not twenty-four. She had such beautiful hair still.)
“Fresh-killed turkeys from Ohio don’t come with whatchamacallits.”
“I know, darling,” she said. “I think Rosanne meant that, when your mother isn’t looking, we should just switch turkeys.”
“But then it wouldn’t taste awful and she’d know it wasn’t the one she brought and then she’ll start crying.”
This was not the first time they had discussed the mysterious fresh-killed turkey Mrs. Stewart insisted on bringing with her from Ohio every year, or the meat thermometer she extracted from wads of tissue paper as though it were an irreplaceable heirloom. But Amanda felt bad for Mrs. Stewart, who was a widow and lonely, and wanted to make her mother-in-law’s visits as pleasant as possible.
“Well, it is Thanksgiving,” she murmured. “We can do it once a year.”
Howard muttered something and used a dish towel to shove the turkey back into the oven and slam the door. “Okay, it’s done.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Amanda, we go through this—”
“Please just cut into it, Howard. We don’t want to poison anybody.”
They looked at each other and started to laugh. Howard slung the dish towel over his shoulder and moved over to Amanda, sliding his hands around her waist. “You must be exhausted.”
“I am tired,” she admitted, resting her head on his shoulder as he pulled her closer. She used to have such a narrow waist it was hard for Amanda to let Howard feel what she was carrying around now. She had been watching what she ate and exercised like a mad woman, but after Grace she could not seem to pull herself together like she had after Emily and Teddy. “How do you know this Celia?” she asked quietly from his shoulder.
“That girl? She’s a bartender at Captain Cook’s.”
“A bartender?” Amanda raised her head to look at him.
“Once in a while I’ll stop in and have a burger. And watch a game.”
Amanda walked over to retrieve the kettle, fill it with water and put it on a burner. She needed to warm the silver serving dishes with hot water before filling them. (She had inherited the silver from her grandmother and it made Amanda’s mother happy to see her using it.) “I didn’t realize you frequented bars while we were away.”
“Oh, that’s me all right,” Howard said, “in the bars, day and night. We’re talking maybe once in a blue moon, Amanda. It does get a little lonely around here sometimes.”
Amanda did not point out how, as a literary agent, and a very successful literary agent at that (president of Hillings & Stewart), Howard was inundated with people, phone calls and e-mail all day long. And when he did not have some professional soiree at night to attend, he always told her all he wanted to do was go home and collapse. He never said, “I’m lonely so I’m going to a bar.”
Their living arrangement was becoming an increasingly unhappy situation for Amanda. After 9/11 Emily and Teddy were frightened of tall buildings, airplanes, staircases, fires and crowds. Like so many families, the Stewarts had gone into counseling with the children, but neither parent could bear the idea of not doing everything they could to make their children feel safer. So Howard found a gorgeous house and property in Woodbury, Connecticut, and after some discussion, Amanda and the children moved out there. Before this, it had never occurred to either one of the Stewarts that they would ever live anywhere but in their beloved adopted hometown of Manhattan.
The children were enrolled in school, and Howard hoped that when Emily and Teddy were older they would attend Taft as day students. There was a wonderful horse farm next to them, Daffodil Hill, where Amanda boarded a horse for herself and a pony for the children. Madame Moliere lived with them as well (the house was huge), so that Amanda could still get some work in on a book she was under contract to write, about the court of Catherine the Great. Howard tried to come out on Thursday nights and go back into the city on Monday mornings. Amanda would bring the children into New York at the slightest excuse; she did not want them to be afraid of the place their parents loved above all others, Manhattan, and more specifically, the neighborhood of Riverside Park.
Howard grew up in Ohio, where his father had a landscaping business, and Amanda grew up in Syracuse, where her parents were still both professors at Syracuse University. Howard had attended Duke and then book publishing lured him to Manhattan; Amanda attended Amherst and her (closet) gay husband had dragged her to Manhattan.
Howard’s first wife had money, so he had not been pressed to make a lot of money while he worked his way up at Gardiner & Grayson to become an editor. He quit his job around