Rough Trade

of a particularly complex transaction, a high-profile deal for difficult clients, and I had no business being out of the office, much less Chicago. As it was, the fear that something would happen while I was away—something that would expose my absence and provide ammunition for my critics—was already making my nerves sing like a high-voltage wire.
    As we waited to begin, there was no small talk and the atmosphere in the room was almost unbearably strained. I found myself wishing for a cup of coffee, not just for the caffeine, but to have something to occupy my hands. Unfortunately, Beau wasn’t the domestic type and the last of the Mrs. Rendells had been handed her divorce papers nearly a decade ago. I briefly considered getting up and making some myself—at least it would have gotten me out of the room for a while—but Beau was definitely of the generation that equated domesticity with weakness. So I kept my seat.
    When the doorbell rang, Jeff got up to answer it, leaving Harald Feiss and me to glare at each other. Feiss was a contemporary of Beau’s, thrice divorced, who still fancied himself something of a swinger. I found I disliked him less for his hair plugs than for the preening air of self-importance that hung about him like the scent of stale gin.
    Beau ignored us both. He was busy meticulously diagramming plays on the yellow pad in front of him. While the trend in the NFL was to give increasing autonomy to the head coach, this concept was nowhere in evidence in Milwaukee. Beau Rendell was a football man, an owner from the old school, and when it came to the Monarchs, he was the one who called the shots... at least for ten more days.
     
    Katharine Anne Prescott Millholland—I was named for an heiress, an eccentric spinster, a lumber magnate, and an opium baron. In my family they never let you forget who you are—or where you come from. The fact is that in the ever-dwindling universe that is Chicago society, my family still sits at the top. My mother, Astrid E. Millholland, is arguably one of the most socially prominent women in the country. Indeed, when someone once asked her what the E in her name stood for, she replied, “Establishment.” Her middle name is really Eunice, but you get the picture.
    Chrissy Rendell, on the other hand, was hardly to the fund-raiser born, which is one of the reasons ours has always been such an unlikely friendship. Her father was an orthodontist, a man who, my mother never tired of pointing out, made his living putting his hands in other people’s mouths. Chrissy’s mother was a socially ambitious woman, as anxious to find a way into the suffocating confines of North Shore society as I was to find a way out. She was relentless in her efforts to push the two of us together, though I’m sure that Chrissy had little interest in befriending a sharp-tongued and sullen thing like me, even if I was a Millholland. Even then she was already everything I would never be—lighthearted, beautiful, and every bit as at ease in the world as she was in her own skin. But we did have one thing in common—our mothers—overbearing women who imposed their rigid expectations for us with the same zealous discipline with which they conducted their own lives.
    I have no doubt that by high school Chrissy’s mother had come to regret her efforts to bring us together. I know that my mother spared no breath in putting the blame for our transgressions squarely on Chrissy’s shoulders—not that either of us cared. We were much too busy running wild. By graduation Chrissy had a collection of little black dresses roughly the size of postage stamps and a well-developed preference for commodities traders over high school boys. I, on the other hand, shook up the North Shore by dating Stephen Azorini, whose father was suspected (correctly) of having ties to organized crime.
    Of course, we’ve both straightened out since then, a fact that neither of us seems able to quite get over. Chrissy is not just married, but a mother now, her party-girl days behind her. I have a corner office and a reputation as a corporate gunslinger to uphold. But it is less the idea of how far we’ve come that is disconcerting, but rather, as the years have passed, how much higher the stakes have grown.
    I got married the summer after law school, but I was a widow before my first anniversary. My husband, Russell, was diagnosed with brain cancer three weeks after our honeymoon. Chrissy’s daughter, born last year