“More often, people stay exactly the same.”
“I still don’t understand why he didn’t fight Victoria on the apartment and everything else,” Melody said. “Why he didn’t try harder to recover something.”
“You don’t?” Bea had a flash of that night in the ER, Leo’s face, his sutured chin, the whispers and moans on the other side of the curtain, the sobbing parents in the hallway, the mother quietly keening and fingering a rosary. “I do,” she said. “You would, too, if you’d been there.”
Melody became very invested in fishing a wedge of lemon from her soft drink and not thinking about the waitress. They’d been out of town the weekend of the wedding and had missed the entire mess. Jack had missed it, too; he never attended family functions. Melody needed to keep her energy focused on where it mattered: her daughters, her husband, her home.
“Oh, please,” Jack said. “That’s hardly the whole story. Something else is going on.” He was creating tiny origami-like folds on one corner of the paper placemat. “This is Leo we’re talking about. He’s got money hidden away somewhere. I know it.”
“What do you mean you know it?” Melody said. “You have proof?”
“No, but it’s the only thing that makes sense. I know it in my bones. Think about it. Since when has Leo been afraid of a fight?”
“Bea? What do you think?” Melody said.
“I don’t know,” Bea said, but the same thought had occurred to her. “How would that even work?”
“Oh, there are ways,” Jack said. “It’s surprisingly easy.”
The waiter was circling them now, annoyed. They’d decimated countless packs of oyster crackers, and empty cellophane wrappers and crumbs littered the space in front of them. Bea started gathering the crumbs into a small pile and brushing them onto a bread and butter plate.
“He’s not coming,” Jack said.
Bea checked her phone. “He’s just on Leo time.”
Then, as if on cue, Bea saw Melody sit up a little straighter and raise her left hand and nervously fluff her too-blonde bangs. A tentative smile lifted the lower half of her face. Jack straightened, too. His jaw slid forward the way it did when he was feeling defensive, but then he stood and gave a beckoning wave and before Bea could turn around, she felt a hand on her shoulder, its familiar heft and quiet preferential squeeze, and her heart did a tiny two-step, a little jig of relief, and she turned and looked up and there he was: Leo.
The day Leo landed on Stephanie’s stoop, she immediately put him to work moving firewood from the half cord piled in her backyard to a smaller area on the deck off her kitchen and under a plastic tarp, in case the storm turned out to be as nasty as the weather report was predicting. As Leo stacked wood, his phone buzzed. It was his slip of paper calling back and, lo and behold, the voice on the other end was an old, familiar dealer, Rico. They exchanged quick pleasantries and hurriedly arranged to meet at their usual spot—in Rico’s car parked off Central Park West, near Strawberry Fields, three days hence, immediately before the family lunch. Nothing major, a little weed to relax; maybe some Vicodin. Maybe he wouldn’t even go. Maybe he’d try to stay clearheaded for a few more weeks, see what that was like. Leo liked options. Stephanie stuck her head out the door and asked him to bring some wood into the living room. As he moved through the parlor floor, he admired what she’d done to the house, how she’d preserved everything old but also made it feel modern, entirely her own.
Stephanie’d had the foresight to buy at the end of Giuliani’s reign as mayor, only weeks after 9/11 during what would turn out to be the tiniest of real-estate dips. When she moved to the block on the wrong side of Flatbush Avenue, the non–Park Slope side, everyone—including Leo—thought she was crazy. One of the houses on the corner was occupied by a thriving drug business. Her house had ugly metal gates on the front and back windows. The door off the kitchen, leading to an unused and rotting deck, had been cemented shut with concrete blocks. But the day she looked at the building, she noticed city workers planting cherry trees along her side of the street, which she knew signaled an active neighborhood association. There was a decent garden floor rental beneath the owner’s triplex. And then there was the sheer size of the place—she could fit three of her Upper West Side studios into the first floor. As she wandered the neighborhood that day, she counted three couples with strollers. Her agency was thriving, and she’d always lived frugally, saving as much as she could. She offered the asking price.
“When did you get such good taste,” Leo asked her. “Where’s all that crap from IKEA I had to help you put together.”
“You aren’t the only one who grew up and started making money, Leo. I haven’t had that IKEA furniture for years.” She walked into the living room from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishtowel, happy to admire her house along with him. She loved her house; it was her baby.
“Italianate, right?” Leo said, examining the ornate marble mantelpiece. The center medallion of the mantel was a carving of a young girl. Marble curls of hair fell around her face, her nose was long and straight, her gaze direct, her lips full. He ran his thumb over the mouth, feeling the hard edge of a tiny chip at the center of the lower lip; the imperfection made the young woman’s mouth both damaged and oddly alluring.
“Isn’t she perfect?” Stephanie said. “Most mantels I’ve seen have carved fruit or flowers. I’ve never seen another face. I like to imagine she meant something to the person who built this house. Maybe she was a daughter, a wife.”
“She reminds me of someone.”
“Me, too. I can’t ever think of who.”
“She has nice tits.”
“Don’t be gross.” Stephanie knew Leo was provoking her.
“Sorry.” He moved over to the fire and threw more wood onto the flames, watching it flare as he agitated the embers with an iron poker. “She has a lovely décolletage. Better?”
“Stop staring at defenseless Lillian’s breasts.”
“Please don’t tell me you’ve given her a name,” Leo said, shaking his head. “Please tell me someone else named her Lillian.”
“I named her Lillian. Sometimes we chat. Don’t touch her breasts.”
“Truly, I’m not that hard up.” He sat on one of the sofas flanking the hearth, scanning the room for signs of a male presence. “No more Cravat?”
Stephanie couldn’t help smiling a little. Cravat was Leo’s nickname for one of her post-Leo boyfriends, a guy who’d lived with her once and briefly and had made the unfortunate choice one evening of wearing a velvet jacket and a silk cravat to a book party. “He hasn’t lived here in years.”
“Not enough room for all his smoking jackets?”
She shook her head. “Do I really still have to defend one bad wardrobe choice from years ago?”
“I also recall a summertime straw fedora.”
