The Wedding Sisters (11 page)

Meg felt her face flush. She looked around the street, half expecting every passerby to be staring at her.

Her first impulse was to call Stowe, but before she could dial, the phone came alive in her hand and Amy's image filled the screen.

“Crazy, right?” Amy squealed.

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Isn't it hilarious?”

“That's not quite the word I would use.”

“You look gorgeous. Of course they didn't even use a photo of
me.
”

“Yeah, Amy … I don't think you're really getting how absolutely uncool this is for me.”

Since the engagement last month, she'd gone out of her way to minimize all mention of her relationship at work. Everyone knew she was dating a Campion. But now that they were engaged, it was different. She had to make it clear to her boss—and the staffers working under her—that it would in no way influence her reporting, or the editorial choices she made for the site. She worked for Poliglot, not for Senator Campion.

But something like this …

“Who leaked your engagement?” Meg said.

“I don't know! And who cares. You might as well get used to the attention. What did you think was going to happen when you married into that family?”

“Amy, I have to get to work.”

“Okay, one more thing—have you heard from Jo? Her phone's going straight to voice mail.”

“No. Listen, I'll talk to you later.”

Meg hung up and walked back into the office building. Her only consolation was that no one in D.C. read Page Six.

The Poliglot office occupied the sixth floor of the building. She'd first walked in the doors as a college junior looking for an internship, and she'd been working for them ever since. Eight years later, she still felt a high flashing her ID card at the security desk, knowing she belonged.

Closing the door to her office, she couldn't resist looking at the offending Page Six post one more time.

A knock made her jump. She shoved her phone into her bag like it was contraband.

Her boss, Kevin, opened the door. “Got a minute?”

“Yep.” She slid behind her desk, logging on to her computer.

Inside, he closed the door. Meg felt the weight of the trillion things she had to get done before the two o'clock editorial meeting, including getting the Stackhouse story live ASAP.

“How'd things go with Stackhouse?”

“Fine. Got some good stuff. I have to look at the video. Definitely enough to post.”

“Did you call him out on not giving you notice?”

“Of course! He laughed it off. Said it's just a Web site.”

“Asshole.”

“It could be worse. He'll never get the nomination, so it's not exactly like we lost the scoop of the century.”

“I know. But I feel like this is a warning shot. Things are going to be moving quickly from here on out. And I don't want to be playing catch-up every damn day.”

“You think I do? Trust me—I'm more frustrated than you are.”

“I know, I know. So that's why I was hoping you'd have a sense about where things are with Reed.”

“Reed? What about him?”

“I heard he's off to the Middle East next week,” Kevin said.

“That's right.”

“What do you know about it?”

“I know it was organized by the State Department and the Senate Banking Committee.”

Kevin nodded. “Everyone thinks he's going to run.”

“What? Says who?”

“You're really going to play this game with me?”

“Kevin,” she said slowly, her mind racing. “I am not playing anything. This is the first I'm hearing about this, and if Reed were thinking about running, I don't think that would be the case.”

Kevin nodded, considering this. “Meg, you're a very important part of the team here.”

“Thank you, Kevin.”

“And your part in this team is changing.”

“What?”

“I see you in a much larger role.”

Meg's heart began pounding. She'd imagined this conversation countless times in her head over the past year or so. She had steadily worked her way up the masthead to senior Congressional editor. But she had her eyes on the prize, namely the White House beat.

“Obviously I'm thrilled to hear that,” she said. “What do you have in mind?”

“Senior editor, White House,” he said. “I figure I can take it to the powers that be after the new year.”

She nodded coolly, as if this were absolutely to be expected.

“That is, if nothing goes wrong,” he added.

Meg nodded again. It took a few seconds for his comment to register. “What? Wrong? What do you mean?”

“Oh, I don't know,” Kevin said with an exaggerated casualness.

“I'm confident that nothing will go wrong,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “I've performed solidly for five years.” She ticked off a list of half a dozen stories she broke about the current administration, and added a few about the Middle East that she didn't break but augmented notably. Her media presence on behalf of the Web site—Bill Maher, CNN, the Sunday morning shows—was unspoken but obvious. She didn't like being put in the situation of making the case for her promotion like this—impromptu, pre-caffeinated, with her mind barely bouncing back from the Page Six debacle.

Kevin held up his hands. “Meg, you're preaching to the choir,” he said. “That's why it would be such a disappointment for another outlet to break the news of Senator Campion officially running for the Republican nomination for president of the United States.”

Meg froze. Was she hearing him correctly? Her promotion depended on breaking the news of a campaign that didn't even exist?

“First of all, Reed Campion is not running for president. Secondly, even if he were, it's unethical for me to leak information—it's bad for me personally, and it's bad for all of us professionally.”

“Meg, I'm not asking you to leak anything. And I'm not even asking you to make us look good by breaking the news first. I'm just asking that you save us the embarrassment of
not
breaking the news first, since it's all over the papers that our editor is practically a member of the Campion family.” He dropped a copy of Page Six on her desk and tapped the paragraph with her name in bold newsprint. “Do you get what I'm saying?”

Meg nodded slowly once more—anything to get him to leave her office so she could call Stowe.

He smiled at her on his way out the door. “Big things ahead, Becker. Big things.”

He left the newspaper behind.

 

nine

Meryl woke up with every intention of drumming up more freelance work.

But then there were the voice mails.

First, from Jo.

“Mom, sorry I missed dinner last night. Caroline and I are having a … I don't know. A rough night. But I'm on my way over there now to work things out. Fingers crossed. Sorry again. Love you.”

And then Amy.

“Hi, Mom! We didn't get a chance to go into detail about Andy and my thoughts about the location of the wedding. I didn't want to hog the floor, so the speak, but I
do
want to nail that down. Give me a call later. Oh—and Jeffrey is designing a dress for me! Love you!”

Meryl made coffee and pondered the facts: (a) Amy was going to get married in a one-of-a-kind Jeffrey Bruce gown—a dress that cost more than a year of their rent; (b) Jo was having relationship troubles just as her sisters were happily getting married. Jo was the least competitive of the girls, but still, it wasn't exactly ideal timing. She hoped Jo was right, that they'd work it out. Meryl really liked Caroline—as did Hugh.

While neither of them had been surprised when Jo came home with a girlfriend, they were surprised that the girlfriend was Caroline.

“She just doesn't seem that way,” Hugh had said.

“What way?”

“Gay.”

“And Jo does?” said Meryl.

“Nothing Jo does would surprise me,” he'd said. And Meryl had to agree. Jo had always done things her own way, in her own time. Meg had been the easy baby, the obedient toddler—not even the twos were that terrible—and an ambitious and studious teenager, and Amy had been the colicky baby, the tantrum-prone child, and the lazy teenager. But Jo had been an odd hybrid. She did everything late—talking, walking, reading. The more Meryl tried to push her into something, the more she resisted. But she when she finally did it, she embraced it and ran with it. It just had to happen on her timetable. By middle school, Jo had become fascinated by astrology. Meryl's Aquarius child had found the explanation for her sensitive and rebellious soul, and Jo seemed to take comfort in the belief that there were forces in the universe that would buffet her and guide her along her path in life. She started looking for “signs,” and to this day tended to make unexpected decisions based on things that Meryl and Hugh considered less than firm ground but knew nonetheless that it was useless to fight her on. “Jo is going to do what Jo is going to do,” they would tell one another.

The third voice mail was from the superintendent of her mother's building.

“Mrs. Becker, Tom Curello here from the Clarion. Please give me a call as soon as possible.”

Meryl jotted down the number. Had her mother forgotten to pay the rent again? Things like that were happening more and more lately. “Part of aging,” her mom's physician had said. Basically, everything undesirable fell under that category. Lately, Meryl wished she had a sibling. Watching your parents age—and in the case of her father, dying—is terrifying and lonely. Of course, her mother had always been a challenging person. Not just overly opinionated, but also enigmatic in a way that Meryl could never quite explain. She had memories of her mother shutting herself in a dark room for entire days. Those days were fewer and fewer as Meryl got older, and now it seemed she'd almost imagined them. But if she'd had a sibling, she could discuss these things with someone who really understood.

At least she'd done that right. No matter what life threw their way, her girls would always have each other.

“Mr. Curello? This is Meryl Becker returning your call.”

“You need to get over to the building immediately, Mrs. Becker. We have a situation.”

*   *   *

From the passenger seat of Toby's car, Jo stared at the entrance to her apartment building, the lump in her throat growing. Her home looked different than it had the last time she saw it in daylight, and she knew it was because she was seeing it through different eyes. This time yesterday, her life had been whole. Now it had a giant crack running through it.

“Thanks. For everything,” Jo said, kissing Toby on the cheek.

“Maybe I should walk you in,” he said.

“Tobe, I'm a big girl.”

“I know. But these things are rough.”

“How do you know? You've never had a serious relationship. At least not in the five years I've known you.”

“That's because the woman I'm seriously interested in happens to be in love with another woman. Isn't irony great?”

Regret flooded through her. In her blindly selfish quest, groping in the dark (literally) to stanch the bleeding of her heart, she had done some damage to Toby's.

She opened her car door, filled with sudden urgency.

“I'll text you later,” she called out, rushing to the front door without so much as a glance behind her.

She took the stairs two at a time, and by the time she got her key in the lock, she was out of breath. “Caroline?” she called out as she pushed the door open.

A strange man jumped up from the couch.

A strange, gorgeous man. Tall with dark hair and blazing green eyes and a hipster beard (moderate length, as far as those things went), he looked like a young David Gandy.

“Jo,” he said.

“Who the fuck are you, and why are you in my apartment?”

She already knew the answer to both questions, but that did not make it okay. And she wanted to hear him say it.

“I'm Drew Finley. Caroline's … friend.”

“Where's Caroline?”

“She's not here. She thought it would be easier if I picked up her things.”

Jo felt like she might vomit. “Get out,” she said.

Drew Finley was clearly not used to being unwelcome. Drew Finley had probably never been rejected in his entire life. And surely, Drew Finley had never come home to find the person who was trying to steal away the love of his life standing in his living room.

“I'm really sorry,” he said. And he did look apologetic. He looked like he would hug her if she'd let him. In some perverse way, she wanted him to. What was so great about being in the arms of Drew Finley? What the fuck, Caroline?

“Well, I'm sorry for
you.
Because Caroline is clearly just having a first-year post-college crisis. Maybe it's the stress of law school. I don't know, and I don't care. The point is, this is going to pass. We are in love, and we have a history, and a future—and you don't factor into any of that.”

Jo marched to the front door and opened it, making a sweeping gesture with her arm.
Get the fuck out.

“I've asked her to marry me,” said Drew. “And she's said yes.”

*   *   *

Meryl's mother was still screaming when she walked into the apartment.

It was a sound she would never forget, as if, God forbid, her mother were being stabbed to death. And apparently, her mother had been going at it for forty-five straight minutes.

Oona was in the hallway, talking to the superintendent and her mother's neighbor from across the hall. Meryl pushed her way past them, into the bedroom, where her mother stared straight ahead, wide eyed, rocking back and forth as she emitted her endless, bloodcurdling screams.

“Mother! Mother, what is it? What's wrong?”