A Starfish Side Story: Day Off (Donna and Tali)

Toward the end of Starfish the chapter, “Evaluation” ends with this:

Tali looked at the window. Her thumb and index finger spread beneath her clavicle, feeling for an invisible dark pearl necklace.

“Donna’s boys,” she said. “The older one wants to study marine biology.”

No one needed to ask how she knew that.

This is Donna’s side story.

---

The Saturday morning Tali arrived, Donna was already on her second coffee, standing at the kitchen counter with a highlighter in her hand and a stack of mail that needed sorting. She had the radio on — not streaming, actual radio, a jazz station out of DC that she’d been listening to since law school. She didn’t turn it down when she heard the knock.

“It’s open,” she called.

Tali came in carrying a bakery bag and a bottle of white wine. Nine-thirty in the morning.

“It’s not open until noon,” Donna said.

“The wine or the conversation?”

“Both.” Donna took the bag. Inside, two almond croissants, still warm. She approved. “Put the wine in the fridge.”

The townhome was narrow and well-organized — bookshelves built into the hallway alcove, a gallery of the boys’ school photos climbing the stairwell, a Moroccan runner in the entry that Donna had bought years ago at Eastern Market for forty dollars and was still the best thing she owned. The kitchen was Ikea, updated with hardware she’d replaced herself on a Sunday afternoon. It looked better than it had any right to.

Tali stood at the shelf beside the refrigerator while she put the wine away. Framed photos, a half-burned pillar candle, a small trophy — some kind of cup with a figure at the top.

“Speech and debate,” Donna said, without looking up from the mail. “Steven. Regional qualifier. He’s already thinking about the state tournament in March.”

“How old?”

“Sixteen. Seventeen in April.”

Tali set the trophy back. “And the older one?”

“Jake.” Donna capped the highlighter. “Junior at College Park. Marine biology. He’s out at a field station on the Eastern Shore for the weekend, which is why this —“ she gestured at the kitchen, the wine in the refrigerator, the general quiet of the house — “is possible.”

She poured the second cup of coffee and handed it across. Tali accepted it with both hands.

They sat at the kitchen table. The radio moved into something slower, a piano and brushed drums. Outside the window, the neighbor’s maple was nearly bare, a few leaves still releasing their grip in the wind.

“How’s the week?” Tali asked.

“The week was fine.” Donna wrapped both hands around her mug. “Thursday was better than fine. Blue Oxford — the one I told you about, the hospitality guy with three LLCs and a wife who doesn’t know about two of them — he left a very generous review of the evening.”

Tali smiled at this. Not at the money, Donna noted. At the word review. Shop talk had its own meaning. Tali understood.

“How was China?”

“Transformative,” answered Tali. “They like their rituals.”

“And did you?”

Tali smiled and looked at a small stack of folders sitting on the kitchen table

“I thought you were done” Tali said.

“With the practice?” Donna had come to think of that phrase the way she thought of a drawer she no longer opened — still there, contents unchanged, simply not consulted. She handled four remaining clients on a referral basis only. Old cases, people she’d guided through the worst seasons of their financial lives. She wasn’t abandoning them. She was finishing.

“Almost,” she said. “By spring I think we’re done.”

Tali nodded. She didn’t push. One of the things Donna had noticed about her early on — before she understood the full shape of where Tali had come from — was how precisely she calibrated her questions. Not caution. More like a professional courtesy. She asked for the information she needed and left the rest alone.

“Do you miss it?” Tali asked.

Donna considered this honestly. There was a version of herself that had spent eleven years across the desk from people whose lives had come undone — medical debt, second mortgages, the slow collapse of a household that looked fine from the outside until it didn’t. She’d been good at it. She knew she’d been good at it

But there was a weight to competence in a room full of wreckage, and she’d been carrying it a long time before she understood how the weight had made everything heavier. Grocery shopping. School projects. In-law dinners. Owen on top of her, not seeing the difference between obligation and interest.

“I miss some of the clients,” she said. “Not the work. It’s exhausting watching the toll of bad decisions.”

Tali turned her coffee cup slightly on the table. “That’s an important distinction. I’ve seen my fair share of those with the wealthy. Stupidity with safety nets.”

“It reminds me how much happier I am now since I switched careers, but it took me a while to understand it.” Donna got up and retrieved the croissants, set them on a cutting board, tore one in half and handed the other to Tali. “You want to know what I didn’t expect?”

“Yes.”

“That I’d actually be proud of it.” She said this without performance, the way she’d say she was proud of Steven at the regional tournament, or proud of Jake for the field station placement. The same register. “Not in spite of what it is. Because of what it is. Because I’m good at it and I chose it and it has given my boys a life I couldn’t have given them otherwise. That took me —“ she thought about it — “maybe eight months to stop apologizing for. Even internally.”

Tali was quiet for a moment. “What broke it open?”

The question was precise in a way that made Donna look at her. Not the soft why of someone looking for a story. Another Tali calibration.

“A regular,” Donna said. “Architect. He comes in once a month, same reservation, always requests me now. We’ve spent maybe twelve hours together total. He’s building a community land trust project in Southeast — affordable housing. He’s genuinely passionate about it and genuinely good at it. We talk for as long as we talk, and then what happens happens, and then he leaves.” She pulled off a piece of croissant. “I realized I was looking forward to it. And then I stopped explaining to myself why that was complicated. And I love the purity of it. One moment’s a moment. The next moment has nothing to do with it.”

“How about you, Tal? When did you know?

“Much quicker for me,” Tali said thoughtfully. “I woke up one morning and realized that I had spent my entire life hanging above some dark chasm on a rope. I felt how tired my arms were and simply let go.”

“And then?”

“I couldn’t fucking believe it. I was only one inch above the ground. And when my feet touched. Amy was there. Elaine, too. And then you.”

Donna smiled a put her hand on Tali’s.

“Elaine said that’s how it happened for her, too,” said Tali. “Once she stopped arguing with herself, the world became easier to live in.”

“You had a life before,” Donna said. Not a question.

“Everyone has a life before. Mine was full of money and full of bullshit.”

“I mean — you came from somewhere more honest than I did.” Tali said it neutrally, like reading a fact off a page.

Donna looked at her. No hierarchy in it, no competition. Just the observation.

“I had a 401K and a husband who thought a boat was a retirement plan,” Donna said. “That’s not running room. That’s a treadmill with better TV.”

Tali made a sound that was almost a laugh.

“Did you know I was a belly dancer?” Donna said. Then, correcting herself: “I was. In my twenties. Moroccan restaurant on U Street, Wednesday through Saturday nights. My belt would fill with tens and twenties. My parents couldn’t help with law school and that covered most of the tuition.” She touched the runner in the hallway with her foot, just barely. “I loved it. And then I met Owen and got serious and put all of it away like it was something I’d outgrown. At least that’s what I told myself” A beat. “It wasn’t until I switched careers that I realized how much I’d given up.”

The radio moved into something brighter. Outside, two kids on bikes cut through the parking lot, one standing on the pedals.

“The divorce was right,” Donna said. It came out more plainly than she’d intended, but she didn’t walk it back. “He’s not a bad person. He’s just — he values things. The truck. The ATVs. He needed the double income so he’d look good at man lodge. By their forties they stop measuring their dicks and comparing wheelbases and suspension lifts. I started to get a sense of it right after Steven was born and it just kept accumulating.” She shook her head slightly. “The boys were never going to be the center for him the way they are for me. That’s not a criticism. It’s just physics. Talk about bad decisions, I stuck it out for seven more years thinking that numb was normal.”

Tali was watching her. The morning light through the kitchen window caught the side of her face.

“You don’t sound angry,” Tali said.

“I was. For about a year.” Donna considered the timeline. “Now I mostly feel like — I got back to myself faster than I would have otherwise. Which sounds strange given what it cost to get there.” She folded her hands around the mug. “But I think it’s true.”

“He didn’t like your job?”

“Not the job. The success. For a while he focused on the money. But after a while I got bigger and he got small. He never understood that the market repriced me.”

They sat with that for a moment. The jazz moved through a quiet passage, something almost tentative, and then found its footing again.

“Noon?” Tali said.

Donna looked at the clock on the microwave. 11:42.

“Close enough,” she said, and got up for the wine.

+

They were on the small back patio by early afternoon — two chairs, a potted rosemary bush that had survived three winters by sheer stubbornness, the sound of a leaf blower a few streets over. The wine was cold. The sun was doing better than average for mid-autumn.

Tali had her legs pulled up in the chair, her glass balanced on her knee. She looked, Donna thought, like someone who had settled. Not into the chair. Into herself. Like a liquid finding its level.

“Investment banker?” Tali asked.

“Two of them. And an estate attorney who’s been managing a growing account for me since last spring.” Donna swirled her glass. “My private board of directors. By the time this ride is over — whenever that is — I’ll have something to stand on.

“For the last three years Rolex Ray’s put me into several lucrative deals. Sort of puts a different spin on the term insider trading.”

“More like inside me trading,” Tali laughed.

“A win-win. RR’s shown me the projections. In a few years when gravity calls, I can cash out. Maybe a B&B. Mountains or coast, I haven’t decided. Somewhere Steven can come for long weekends once he’s in college.” She said this lightly, but she’d thought about it enough that the shape of it was clear. “Something small. Something mine.”

“Do you ever think about Tal? About aging out?”

Tali look at her and lightly shook her head. “It’s nothing I ever think about.”

Tali looked out at the yard — a strip of grass, a privacy fence, a bird feeder that needed refilling. “So why did you do it?” she asked.

“I love my boys. When things started to fall apart, it was a practical decision.” Donna set her glass on the arm of the chair. “I had a client — early on, before I understood what I was actually managing — a couple with a son who had a traumatic brain injury. Uninsured accident, medical bills that ate everything. House, savings, the works. They were both so ashamed.” She paused. “And I sat across from them thinking: there is nothing wrong with you. You got unlucky and the system is not built for getting unlucky. That’s all this is. Buck up. You’ll get through it.

Christ, and then it happened to me. Steven. The cancer, the bills, the shitty insurance that Owen’s shitty company had.” She picked up the glass again. “I think about them when I have the bad weeks. Where I’m tired, or a client is a problem, or I miss the boys in a way that’s just —“ her hand moved slightly — “sits on my chest.”

Tali was still.

“On those weeks,” Donna said, “I run the math. Not the money math. The other math. Four years in. Jake is thriving. Steven is in full remission. I sleep without that particular dread I used to wake up with at three in the morning.” She looked at Tali. “That math.”

Tali nodded, once. “Do the boys know?”

“Invention comes with the job. The clients see what they expect to see, the same with the boys. I think it helps that they’re men.They just think I’m the hot mom at the PTA functions.” Donna chuckled and drained the last swallow of the wine glass. “A daughter might pick up on it.”

Donna let the silence run. A car passed on the street. The leaf blower died.

“Sometimes others make the choice for us,” Donna said. “And sometimes we choose.”

She said it the way you say something you’ve already finished thinking about. Not a conclusion. A coordinate.

Tali smiled into her glass. The afternoon light caught the wine — straw-colored, holding the sun for a second before it moved on. She didn’t say anything. But something across her face arranged and rearranged itself, and then was still.

Donna didn’t push. She picked up her glass and turned her face to the warmth.

They stayed out until the light shifted west and the temperature dropped a single decisive degree, the way it does in November.

“Stay put,” Donna lightly pressed on Tali’s shoulder. “I’ve got blankets. Jake’s got youth choir at the church. Hope you like lasagne, bag salad, with Olive Garden dressing.”

When Donna returned with stadium blankets and a couple of glasses with cubes and a bottle of Bulleit rye.

She poured generously past taste to truth.

“I’ve got to pee. When I get back I want to hear about those Chinese rituals.”

Tali took a strong sip, closed her eyes and heard a neighbor’s car pull up a door close, a young child shout out in excitement. The simplicity of the day rolled through her like a giant exhale. This was the best world. The best friend. And the joy of a quiet mind that no longer had to argue with itself.