Page 29 of Gifted & Talented

“And people are wearing it, you know, out and stuff. I actually saw that some party girls in Manhattan were wearing it, so it’s, like, sexy, I think.”

“Do you see it out in the clubs?” asked Arthur, forgetting for a moment that he’d been trying to accomplish something. What it was, he couldn’t recall.

“The clubs?” echoed Eilidh, bewildered.

“The clubs. The bars. You know, wherever young people go to meet people.”

“How oldareyou?” asked Eilidh.

“I just mean, you know, nightlife—”

“I don’t have ‘nightlife,’” said Eilidh with apparent disgust, having put the phrase in air quotes. “I’m twenty-six, not twenty-one. I occasionally go on dates, but mostly I go to work and I go to yoga and I go to my physical therapist and I go to lunch with—”

Eilidh stopped abruptly. “I mean, I have friends,” she said, or rather mumbled. “But I’m not, like, up in the club.”

“Well, it’s nice to have friends,” said Arthur, who didn’t technically have any. Briefly, Lou hovered in the periphery of his mind’s eye.

The silence between the two younger Wrens was suddenly very uncomfortable.

Then there was an onslaught of blinding headlights from behind them on the road, startling both Eilidh and Arthur as another vehicle pulled into the carport beside Gillian’s rental car.

“Is that Death?” asked Arthur, blinking away the headlight flash, and Eilidh shook her head with a frown, opening her mouth to answer when a man, maybemid- orlate thirties, stepped out from the car’s driver’s side.

Before Arthur could place him, though, he was distracted by the passenger door, which opened and shut to reveal Yves disembarking with a Styrofoam container in hand.

“Yves?” asked Arthur in disbelief. Not that he had ever really doubted that Yves would be able to find him. Yves had a way of doing that, a sort of power of magical thinking that Arthur had considered easily put down to luck until he realized just how routine it was for Yves to “hope for the best” and wind up wherever he needed to go, whenever he wanted to be there.

“Arthur!” exclaimed Yves happily, as if they had been parted for weeks instead of hours. “I have pancakes!” he added, before wandering into the patch of garden to smell the roses.

Oh yes, Arthur realized belatedly, he wasalsoon drugs.

“Oh good, you’re here,” announced Gillian, who had breezed back down the stairwell from the door, first waving to Yves—who, it seemed, had found a ladybug—before offering the older man a smile as if they knew each other.

The older man was the person she looked happier to see, which was interesting. Maybe, Arthur mused in his head, this was Gillian’s boyfriend? It was reasonable that she would have one, and if she did, it would likely be someone like this, who was slight in an elegant way (unlike Arthur, who—with some effort—was still built like a person who’d played baseball from the tender age of four). The man had a silver tinge to his hair, making him seem like someone who enjoyed quiet evenings playing chess and drinking scotch—both of which were among Gillian’s favorite things, alongside the blood sports and gin.

Good god, Arthur thought with a discombobulating tilt from his inner ear, a mix of preexisting intoxication and a sharp, acid-based revulsion. This was Gillian’s boyfriend.

So many things struck him at once. Relief was present somewhere. Good! So then when Arthur finally managed the balls to tell her about Riot, at least Gillian would not be alone. She had found someone obviously good and stable, and adult. Yes, this was a man, Arthur thought with a heavy sadness, suddenly feeble and shrunken, like a child who could not yet reach the shelf. This was the sort of man his father had wanted him to be. This man looked like a politician, actually—unlike Arthur, who by comparison looked like the overgrown frat boy theNew York Posthad accused him of being some days ago, leading to a trending cartoon of a beer-helmeted Arthur wolfishly greeting some fellow kids.

This man looked like a father! By god,that was it,thought Arthur, who was really in it now. Gillian would marry this man and have an entire fleet of tactical children. She would start an empire. She would go forth and take France.

Well, at least Arthur would have Riot, not to mention Philippa and Yves, and surely some fraction of the internet still found him handsome, if disastrously ineffective. He’d once reached the final round of a March Madness–style bracket before losing to the Canadian prime minister, which counted for something, he was pretty sure. He managed to relax a bit as Gillian said obligingly, “Cass, you remember Arthur.”

“Wrenfare Christmas party, wasn’t it?” asked the man, who was apparently called Cass, before stepping forward to shake Arthur’s hand. Arthur took a bit of pride in the fact that at least Arthur was a man’s name. An elderly man, infirm, but still.

“Right, yes,” lied Arthur, fighting the urge to check his social feeds and hungering vaguely for more drugs. “Wonderful to see you again.”

“We were hoping you were the deli guy,” said Eilidh when it was her turn to be greeted. She, unlike Arthur, appeared to be familiar with Cass, which Arthur found somewhat less comforting. Couldn’t Gillian have chosen someone who was not an apparent household face for his entire family? At leasthe’dhad the decency to choose lovers outside their immediate circle.

“Oh, sincerest apologies for showing up empty-handed. There is no bereavement to my knowledge that a matzo ball soup cannot ease,” said Cass, and Arthur’s heart sank even deeper into his kidneys at the thought that yes, Gillian had clearly found her perfect match. Had Arthur been left in charge of food, he would have gotten one of those giant, cheese-smothered wet burritos to share and they’d all sit around moaning in varying statesof digestive unease (Arthur was sensitive to dairy). Now they would have antioxidants. Whatever the fuck those were!

“I’m terribly sorry for your loss,” Cass continued, a sentiment he expressed to both Eilidh and Arthur. It was a perfunctory offering that Arthur could take or leave, but that Eilidh seemed to appreciate. She tilted her chin gratefully in the way she had always done as a child. At the age of three or four, it had been a party trick, Eilidh’s head tilt.Cute baby!people would coo. They loved it, Arthur recalled, the way she could look so demure and doll-like. Her earliest performance art.

“There’s a photographer in those roses,” said Yves, tromping back through the garden to join their strange little circle of cordial small talk.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Gillian, who vigorously repeated the ascent up to the house, leaving Cass to turn his mechanized look of apparent sympathy back to Eilidh and Arthur.

“Is Meredith not here yet?” he asked them.

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