Courtney had always known how to make a room choose her. She did it with perfume and posture and a particular laugh she deployed with precision, the kind that made people feel specifically selected when she turned it in their direction. She could walk into a gathering of strangers and within twenty minutes have redistributed the social gravity of the room so that it revolved around her without anyone quite noticing the shift had happened.
My mother Patricia taught her that. She taught her before either of us was old enough to understand what we were being taught, which is the most effective time to teach a person anything. In our house, manners were not expressions of consideration.
They were tools. They had linen napkins folded around the handles so the edges were not visible, but they were tools nonetheless, and they were wielded with the practiced ease of people who had been using them for generations. I was the older daughter, the practical one, the one who learned contracts because someone had to read what Patricia only smiled through.
When I was twelve and my mother signed the caterer’s agreement for Courtney’s birthday party without reading the cancellation clause, I read it for her and found the term that would have cost us three times the deposit if the weather had turned. Patricia thanked me in the distracted way she thanked contractors and electricians, which was to say she acknowledged that something useful had been done without quite acknowledging that I was the person who had done it. Courtney was the sparkling one.
She remembered birthdays and wrote thank-you notes in a hand that suggested private school and genuine feeling, and she could make a stranger believe she had been waiting all week for the specific pleasure of their company. People loved her for it. I spent most of my twenties mistaking that charm for warmth, which is an understandable error to make once and a significant error to keep making.
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