The Shanté Hour

The curse of the rumor-mill

Shanté’s SoHo apartment was bigger than any three-person family would ever need, especially for New York City. In the suburbs, maybe it made sense to have five rooms and aspire to fill them with kids and dogs. But not in Manhattan. Chase set down his empty glass of juice and leaned over the granite countertop, giving Shanté a brief, smiling kiss before picking his bag off the counter stool to leave. 

“Good luck with the job searching, Shantie,” he said. Sometimes she wished he were not always so optimistic. Shanté smiled back and waved, but as soon as the door shut, she put her pen down on her notebook and stared out of the massive window. 

It would be their twentieth anniversary soon and Shanté still felt like she was playing a character. Her phone dinged. Ruby had texted that their friend group would be meeting over brunch because Carly wanted to. She really need not have bothered; the women ended up brunching every day in the Upper East Side because Carly wanted avocado toast again. 

Sometimes, Shanté missed the first year of her marriage with Chase. They had been so young then, and Shanté had not yet met her current friends. Life was easier at Harvard in many ways. Shanté and Chase would study together, go on walks through the quad at night, and talk about their shared future. Of course, when it came to reminiscing about the past, Shanté had her story straight: she had come from money. A private school in California, a childhood condo in Los Angeles, and two lawyer parents. Top of her class at an institution by the called Los Angeles College Preparatory High, which she found on Google. 

Now, in her current life, she had all the things she would not have thought to invent during her youth: the condo, the straight-A student daughter, the attractive husband, and rich friends who went on international vacations together for Instagram posts. 

She looked at the job listings on her laptop. Soon, Chase would start wondering why she had not secured anything. She was overqualified and well-connected. And then he would find out the truth: she had not been trying.