That Summer by Jennifer Weiner (free e reader txt) 📗

Bryn Mawr mom might have worn for drinks, but it suited the other Diana. Daisy guessed that she was about fifty, but a well-maintained fifty, a groomed and fit and hydrated fifty. She looked healthy and attractive, and didn’t seem like she was trying desperately to look young. Daisy imagined private Pilates classes and a lap pool; regular blowouts, facials and waxings and a personal shopper to find those suits and silk blouses. When the other Diana traveled, it was probably first-class, and when she stayed in a hotel, it was probably five stars. It made Daisy insignificant and ordinary, with a handful of wholly unremarkable achievements: she’d married a man, produced a single child, and started a very small business, and how hard was any of that?

A waiter approached and bent over them solicitously. “Ladies, welcome to the King Cole.” He handed them both menus, refilled Diana’s water glass and gave Daisy one of her own, and set a silver dish of warmed, spiced cashews, and another one of chicharróns, in front of them.

“Mmm,” said Diana, biting into a nut. “Delicious.”

“Nuts are always better when you heat them up,” said Daisy. “I tell that to all my clients. Five minutes in the toaster oven and they’re a hundred times more impressive.” She realized that she was showing off a bit. It felt good, though, to have someone look at her like she was the expert, like she had wisdom to impart. Normally, she only experienced that kind of regard from a distance when she was with Hal, watching as people pumped him for legal advice or asked if he knew any secrets for getting into Dartmouth.

“I want to hear everything. But first…” Diana opened the menu. “I’m getting a Bloody Mary. They say they invented them here, you know.”

“Sounds perfect,” said Daisy. She had planned on ordering her usual glass of white wine, but a Bloody Mary sounded like exactly the thing.

“And is it okay if we get some snacks?” Diana made a funny, self-deprecating face again, and Daisy felt gladdened to know that Diana was an eater. “I had one of those working lunches, where they bring in platters of pastrami and corned beef sandwiches for the guys, and there’s always that one salad in a plastic clamshell, and it’s always the saddest salad in the world. And I have to eat it, because I’m a girl.”

“Can’t you eat the corned beef?” asked Daisy.

“The one time I attempted a sandwich at a business meeting, I ended up with mustard all over my blouse. A Shout wipe can only do so much.”

That made Daisy feel a little bit better, even though she suspected that Diana was probably lying, or that if the event she’d described had happened, it had occurred only once, years ago, and Diana had related the anecdote for the sole purpose of putting Daisy at ease. Daisy felt grateful for the effort, even though she couldn’t imagine this elegant, composed, confident woman with mustard on her blouse or dog crap on her shoes or walking into a PTA meeting with the back of her skirt tucked into her tights, which had happened to Daisy just three weeks ago.

They agreed to share the cheese plate and the calamari. When the drinks arrived, Diana lifted her tall glass of horseradish-flecked tomato juice and vodka. “To Dianas,” she said.

“To new friends.” Daisy clinked Diana’s glass with her own, and gave her drink a stir with the celery stalk, before taking a sip, relishing the heat of the spices, the slower burn of the booze. “It’s such a weird coincidence. And honestly, nobody’s called me Diana in years. My husband renamed me.”

The other woman tilted her head. And you let him? Daisy imagined her thinking, but what she said was, “Daisy’s a lovely name.”

Daisy thought her name was sweet more than lovely, and she wasn’t sure how the notion of a man renaming an adult woman was resonating with her new friend. “So what are you doing for work, right now?” she asked Diana. “I know you’re a consultant, but…”

“I know, I know,” Diana said, with a good-natured shake of her head. “A word that means nothing. In my case, businesses—mostly pharmaceutical firms these days—bring me in to spend a few months looking around, to find the deadwood and the soft spots. And then do the cutting.” She shrugged, smoothing a glossy lock of hair. “I’m the angel of death, more or less. I bring the axe down, and I leave while the blood’s still on the floor.”

“That must be hard,” Daisy ventured. She could picture it: this assured, competent woman inviting underlings into her office, saying, Close the door and have a seat, then telling them that they were no longer needed. “Do people ever—you know—react badly?”

Diana’s lips turned up slightly. “Some of them cry. Some of them call me names. I’ve had a trash can thrown at me.”

“You must be good at talking people through it.”

Diana shrugged. “Actually, I’ve just got good reflexes.” She mimed ducking out of the way of a projectile, making Daisy laugh.

The waiter arrived and set down the plates with a flourish, arranging them just so, handing around cheese knives and small plates. Diana spread warm goat cheese on a round of baguette, gold cuff flashing in the candlelight, and took a bite with evident enjoyment. Daisy got another whiff of Diana’s perfume, and could see that her eyes were hazel. They seemed to glow, cat-like, in the candlelight. Or maybe that was just the effects of the Bloody Mary, which, somehow, was already half-empty.

“Yum,” Diana said after her first bite of bread and cheese. Daisy nibbled a calamari ring, watching Diana eat. She wondered if, in another life, she herself could have been a businesswoman, in black suits, causing waiters to scurry and hustle to make her happy, and not the kind of woman who’d gotten married before she turned twenty-one, who’d dropped out of college and had spent her life cooking and