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“You’re supposed to wait for the little white man to appear,” Winston protested.
“The world is bored with waiting for little white men,” Bea replied. “The age of the little white man is over. Come on, we’re going to be late.”
Somewhere around here was Ben’s restaurant, where they were to meet with Allie and her people. Chasity was already nearly a block away. She’d zipped across in her wheelchair, glanced back over her shoulder, and kept rolling. Cath moved into the street against the flashing orange. “It’s been years since I could do proper jaywalking. Nev won’t let me.”
“I would, if you could be trusted to check in the direction the traffic was actually coming from.”
Cath stuck out her tongue, then grabbed Bea’s hand and began skipping down the street, singing the song from Alice in Wonderland about being late. Winston hung back with Nev, not wanting to impinge on Beatrice’s time with a woman she’d adored since their first meeting, when Bea was only a teenager.
“When you were her age,” he said to Nev, “you’d just started work at the bank. You tried to convince me we should knock down all the office walls and have open, glass-walled cubicles, like a Silicon Valley startup.”
“I still think that would’ve livened things up around the place.” Nev waggled his eyebrows.
“It’s a bank. It’s not meant to be lively.”
“You’d know best.”
Winston glanced at his brother, afraid, suddenly, he’d stepped into an old argument, but Nev was smiling.
“Relax. It’s all right,” he said. And then, after a pause, “We’re all right. You and me. You don’t have to dance around, worried we’ll fall apart.”
“I was criminally shite to you.”
“You were. But you’ve repented and changed.” Bea and Cath’s skipping had turned manic, and they’d begun to giggle like children. “I’m glad I came to New York,” Nev said, watching them. “It’s good to see you.” Winston swallowed over a lump in his throat. “But I have to tell you, pleasant reunion aside, you’re driving me completely mad.”
Winston’s surprise brought him to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk. “What? How?”
Nev reached out and slapped him squarely between the shoulder blades. “When you were your daughter’s age, you brought Rosemary home to visit. Mum loathed her. I loathed her, too, because you barely glanced at me the whole holiday, and I’d been so looking forward to skulking around with you.”
“I remember.”
Nev shoved his hands into his pockets. Kicked a pebble. Then said, slowly, “It was hard, over the years, watching all the life leach out of Rosemary.”
Winston had to clear his throat again. “I didn’t give her enough room.”
“You were at university, looking for a wife, and you picked the most interesting girl in the twenty-five-foot radius around you and checked her off your list. Wife. Done.” Winston wanted to protest, but it wasn’t an entirely inaccurate portrayal. “It was the same thing you tried to make me do,” Nev continued, “and it would be easier to hate you for it if it weren’t the same thing half the men in England do when they hit twenty-five or thirty years old. Find a wife, lock her down, move along. And then you wankers are all so gobsmacked to discover the divorce statistics apply to you, because it turns out you can’t pick the most interesting woman you know and check her off a list and expect happy-ever-after to take care of itself.”
“We were young.” But the response sounded feeble to him.
Neville kicked a fast-food wrapper toward the curb with his toe. “You’re old now, but you’re still just as stupid.”
Winston couldn’t think of a response beyond his blind desire to bludgeon his brother with a blunt object. He took a deep breath. Tried another tack. “Perhaps you should explain what you mean instead of lobbing vague accusations and insulting me.”
“What I mean is you’re one lucky bastard. You’re rich, you’re powerful, you live in the best city in America, you have a daughter who’s healthy and brilliant and turns up regularly for tea, and you walked into a bar a few days ago and met a really great woman. You didn’t have to go on eHarmony or whatever the fuck and shop yourself around town for a date. You met a woman at a bar, who you look at exactly the same way you used to look at Rosemary, and what pisses me off is that what you have to say to me is not, ‘Look, little brother, at how incredibly well my life is going for me even though I was a wanker and fucked up and probably don’t deserve all this good fortune,’ it’s that you’re thinking about moving back to London.”
“I don’t—”
“Just shut up a minute. You have an opportunity in New York. You have a kid who you love, and who loves you, and a chance to be here for her. You met a woman, here for the week, and you desperately don’t want to ruin it with her. You’re supposed to pay attention to that.”
“I may have already ruined it.”
“What did you do?”
“I pushed her when she wasn’t in a place to be pushed.”
“She took off?”
Winston nodded. His apartment felt emptier, utterly without personality. It seemed wrong that he should miss her so much after such a short acquaintance.
