Our Little Racket

In the waning light of the predinner hour, Mina Dawes sat across the table from Isabel, desperate to keep their conversation aloft. During the silences her gaze wandered out over Isabel’s pool, its surface entirely untroubled beneath the late-afternoon sun.

 

- Angelica Baker

A pitcher of lemonade sat between them. Isabel’s girl had brought it out within moments of Mina’s arrival, placing it on an engraved tray that sat on the glass-topped table. Basil leaves floated just beneath the ice cubes, which was a classic Isabel touch. Every accent astonishingly simple: fluted calla lilies or random groupings of branches and vines thrown together in tall glass bottles, say, rather than the eruption and ostentation of actual centerpieces. Basil in the goddamn lemonade, Mina thought. She’d have to tell Tom tonight. He didn’t like to be reminded of how much time she spent with Isabel, but he could usually be appeased with one of these finicky little details. That is, if he came home. He’d been on the couch in his office every night for the past week.

“It’s always so lovely out here this time of day,” Mina tried. Isabel nodded behind her sunglasses. Mina sighed and looked off toward the guesthouse, the thick tree line at the back of the property.

When Bob and Isabel had settled in Greenwich for good, knocking down the old gray-roofed colonial and its accompanying stone wall, building up the property so that it loomed above the road below, everyone assumed their plan was a compound. Why else tear down that charming, quaint little slice of Connecticut history unless to replace it with something splashy? A palace for Bob? He’d just been named CEO; he was getting written up in all the city papers.