She sank into the chair in this elegant, graceful way that was fucking mesmerizing…like watching a ballerina lace up her slippers or a geisha pour tea. She had on that igniting shade of lipstick again, bright red, and was in a pair of high-waisted shorts and a blouse that tied at the neck, looking more ready for a Saturday yachting trip than a meeting in my dingy office. But her hair was still wet and her cheeks still had that post-run flush, and I felt a small swell of possessive pride that I got to see this polished women slightly unraveled, which was a bad impulse. I pushed it down.
“Thanks for meeting with me,” she said, crossing her legs as she set down her purse. Which was not a purse but a sleek laptop bag, filled with strata of brightly colored folders. “I’ve been thinking a lot about seeking something like this out, but I’ve never been religious before, and part of me still kind of balks at the idea…”
“Don’t think of it as being religious,” I advised. “I’m not here to convert you. Why don’t we just talk? And maybe there will be some activities or groups here that match what you need.”
“And if there’s not? Will you refer me to the Methodists?”
“I would never,” I said with mock gravity. “I always refer to the Lutherans first.”
That earned me another smile.
“So how did you end up in Kansas City?”
She hesitated. “It’s a long story.”
I leaned back in the chair, making a show of settling in. “I’ve got the time.”
“It’s boring,” she warned.
“My day is a praxis of liturgical laws that date from the Middle Ages. I can handle boring. Promise.”
“Okay, well, I’m not sure where to start, so I guess I should start at the beginning?” Her gaze slid over to the wall of books as she worried her lower lip with her teeth, as if she were trying to decide what the beginning really was. “I’m not your typical runaway,” she said after a minute. “I didn’t sneak out of a window when I was sixteen or steal my father’s car and drive to the nearest ocean. I was dutiful and obedient and my father’s favorite child right up until I walked across the stage at Dartmouth and officially received my MBA. I looked at my parents, and I finally really realized what they saw when they looked at me—another asset, another folder in the portfolio.
“There she is, our youngest, I could picture them saying to the family next to them. Graduated magna cum laude, you know, and only the best schools growing up. Spent the last three summers volunteering in Haiti. She was a shoo-in for dance at Juilliard, but of course she chose to pursue business instead, our level-headed girl.”
“You volunteered in Haiti?” I interrupted.
She nodded. “At a charity called Maison de Naissance. It’s a place for rural Haitian mothers to get free prenatal care, as well as a place for them to give birth. It’s the only place besides the summer house in Marseille that my boarding school French has come in remotely useful.”
Dartmouth. Marseille. Boarding school. I had sensed that Poppy was polished, had guessed from her mention of Newport that she had known privilege and wealth at some point in her life, but I could see now exactly how much privilege, how much wealth. I studied her face. There was a thriving confidence there, an old-fashioned bent toward etiquette and politeness, but there was also no pretentiousness, no elitism.
“Did you like working there?”
Her face lit up. “I did! It’s a beautiful place, filled with beautiful people. I got to help deliver seven babies my last summer there. Two of them were twins…they were so tiny, and the midwife told me later that if the mom hadn’t come to MN, she and the babies almost certainly would have died. The mother even let me help her pick out names for her sons.” Her expression turned almost shy, and I realized that this was the first time she’d gotten to share this pure form of joy with anyone. “I miss it there.”
I grinned at her. I couldn’t help it, I just rarely saw anyone so excited by the experience of helping people in need.
“My family’s idea of charity is hosting a political fundraiser,” she said, matching my grin with a wry one of her own. “Or donating enough to a pet cause so that they can take a picture with a giant check. And then they’ll step over homeless people in the city. It’s embarrassing.”
“It’s common.”
She shook her head vehemently. “It shouldn’t be. I, at least, refuse to live like that.”
Good for her. I refused as well, but I also had grown up in a household of religion, of volunteering. It had been easy for me; I didn’t think this conviction had come easily to her. I wanted to stop her right then, hear more about her time in Haiti, introduce her to all the ways she could help people here at St. Margaret’s. We needed people like her, people who cared, people who could volunteer and give their time and talents—not just their treasure. In fact, I almost blurted all this out. I almost fell to my knees and begged her to help us with the food pantry or the pancake breakfast that was so chronically short-staffed, because we needed her help, and (if I was being honest) I wanted her at everything, I wanted to see her everywhere.
But maybe that wasn’t the best way to feel. I steered us back to her earlier and safer topic of conversation. “So you were at your graduation…”
“Graduation. Right. And I realized, looking at my parents, that I was everything they had wanted. That they had groomed me for. I was the whole package, the manicured, sleekly highlighted, expensively dressed package.”
She was all those things. She was indeed the perfect package on the surface…but below it, I sensed she was so much more. Messy and passionate and raw and creative—a cyclone forced into an eggshell. Small wonder the shell had broken.
“I adorned the life that already had too many cars, too many rooms, too many luncheons and fundraiser galas. A life already filled with two other children who’d also graduated from Dartmouth and then proceeded to marry fellow rich people and have little rich babies. I was destined to work someplace with a glassed-in lobby and drive a Mercedes S-Class, at least until I got married, and then I would gradually scale back my work and scale up my involvement with charity, until, of course, I had the little rich babies to round out the family portraits.” She looked down at her hands. “This probably sounds ridiculous. Like a modern Edith Wharton novel or something.”
“It doesn’t sound ridiculous at all,” I assured her. “I know exactly the kind of people you’re talking about.” And I really did—I wasn’t just saying that. I’d grown up in a fairly nice neighborhood and—on a much smaller scale—the same attitudes had been at work. The families with their nice houses and their two point five children who were on the honor roll and also played varsity lacrosse, the families that made sure everyone else knew exactly how successful and delightfully American their healthy Midwestern offspring were.
“I rejected that entire reality,” she confessed. “The Wharton life. I didn’t want to do it. I couldn’t do it.”
Of course, she couldn’t. She was so far above that life. Could she see that about herself? Could she sense it, even if she couldn’t see it? Because I barely knew her, and even I knew that she was the kind of woman who couldn’t live without meaning, powerful and real meaning, in her life. And she wouldn’t have found it on the other side of that Dartmouth stage.
“I was heartbroken over Sterling, yes,” she continued, still examining her hands, “but I was also heartbroken over my life…and it hadn’t even happened yet. I took the fake diploma they give you before they send you the real one, walked off that stage and then right off campus, not staying for the requisite hat-throwing or the pictures or the too-expensive dinner that my parents would insist on. And then I went to my apartment, left a definitive voicemail on my father’s phone, stuffed my things into my car and left. There would be no more internships for me. No more $10,000-a-plate fundraisers. No more dates with men who weren’t Sterling. I left that life behind—along with all of Daddy’s credit cards. I refused to touch my trust fund. I would stand on my own two feet or not at all.”
