retirement account had taken a terrible hit in 2008. They’d rented the same apartment on West Street since they’d been together. Jack’s small antique shop in the West Village had never been hugely profitable, but in recent years he felt lucky to break even. Walker was an attorney, a solo practitioner, and had always been the wage earner in their partnership. Their one solid investment was a modest but cherished summer place on the North Fork that Jack had been borrowing against, secretly. He’d been counting on The Nest, not only to pay off the home equity line of credit but because it was the one thing he had to offer Walker as a contribution to their future. He didn’t believe for a second that Leo was broke. And he didn’t care. He just wanted what he was owed.
Jack and Leo were brothers but they weren’t friends. They rarely spoke. Walker would sometimes push (“you don’t give up on family”), but Jack had worked hard to distance himself from the Plumbs, especially Leo. In Leo’s company, Jack felt like a lesser version of his older brother. Not as intelligent, interesting, or successful, an identity that had attached to him in high school and had never completely gone away. At the beginning of ninth grade, some of Leo’s friends had christened Jack Leo Lite and the denigrating name stuck, even after Leo graduated. His first month at college, Jack had run into someone from his hometown who had reflexively greeted him by saying, “Hey, Lite. What’s up?” Jack had nearly slugged him.
The door to the bar opened and a group of tourists barged in, bringing in a gust of air too cold for October. One woman was showing everyone her soaking wet shoe, a cheap ballet flat in a tacky shade of red. “It’s completely ruined,” she was saying to her companions.
“Silver linings,” Jack said to Walker, nodding to indicate the shoe.
“You probably shouldn’t be late.” Walker lifted his wrist, presenting the watch that had been a wedding gift from Jack, a rare Cartier tank from the ’40s in perfect condition. It had cost a small fortune; Walker had no idea. Just another thing to resent about Leo’s fuckup, how now Jack couldn’t help but mentally affix a huge neon price sticker to everything they owned, regretting briefly every single purchase of the last year, years, including all the not-insignificant expenses surrounding their otherwise idyllic wedding.
“I love this watch,” Walker said, and the tenderness in his voice made Jack want to fling his glass against the opposite brick wall. He could almost feel the sweet relief that would flood in as the leaded crystal smashed into a million tiny pieces. Instead, he stood and placed the glass back on the table, hard.
“Don’t let them rile you,” Walker said, placing a reassuring hand on Jack’s arm. “Just listen to what Leo has to say and then we’ll talk.”
“Will do.” Jack buttoned his coat and headed down the stairs and out the door onto Vanderbilt Avenue. He needed a little fresh air before lunch; maybe he’d take a walk around the block. As he muscled his way through the sluggish weekend crowds, he heard someone calling his name. He turned and it took him a minute to recognize the woman in the beret, grinning madly above a pink-and-orange hand-knit scarf, waving and calling after him. He stood and watched her approach and in spite of himself, he smiled. Beatrice.
BEATRICE PLUMB WAS A REGULAR AT MURPHY’S, one of the commuter pubs that lined the short stretch of Forty-Third Street perpendicular to Grand Central Station. Bea was friendly with the owner, Garrie, an old friend of Tuck’s from Ireland. Tuck approved of how Garrie pulled a pint and of how when the bar was quiet, Garrie would sing in his light and reedy tenor—not the usual touristy fare, “Danny Boy” or “Wild Rover,” but from his repertoire of Irish rebel songs—“Come Out Ye Black and Tans” or “The Ballad of Ballinamore.” Garrie had been one of the first to show up at Bea’s door after Tuck died. He’d taken a fifth of Jameson’s from his coat pocket and poured them each a glass. “To Tuck,” he’d said solemnly. “May the road rise up to meet him.” Sometimes, in the right light, Bea thought Garrie was handsome. Sometimes, she thought he had a little crush on her, but she didn’t want to find out—he felt too close to Tuck.
“You’re on the early side today,” Garrie said when she arrived a little before noon.
“Family lunch. I’ll take that coffee with a splash.” Garrie uncorked the Jameson’s and poured a generous amount into the mug before adding coffee. The sun was bright and low enough in the cloudless sky that it briefly blinded Bea as she sat in her favorite spot, next to the small front window. She stood and moved the rickety barstool into the shade and away from the door. It felt more like January than October. The room smelled like furnace and dirty mop and beer. “Aroma of the gods,” Tuck would say. He loved nothing more than a dimly lit bar on a sunny afternoon. The jukebox started up and Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby were singing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Bea and Garrie exchanged a smirk. People were so reassuringly unimaginative.
Bea was eager to see Leo but also nervous. He hadn’t taken any of her calls at rehab. He was probably mad at all of them. She wondered how he would look. The last time she’d seen him, the night in the hospital, they’d been stitching up his lacerated chin and he’d looked wan and petrified. For months before the accident he’d looked terrible: bloated and tired and dangerously bored.
Bea worried today’s lunch was going to be confrontational. Jack and Melody were becoming increasingly unhinged about the situation with The Nest and she assumed they were both coming prepared to stake out their respective plots of neediness. What Bea needed from Leo was not her primary concern. Today, she wanted to keep her ordinarily disagreeable siblings somewhat agreeable, if only for one afternoon, just long enough to get Leo to—well, she didn’t know what exactly. Put some kind of plan in place that would placate Jack and Melody for a bit and give Leo enough breathing room so that he wouldn’t completely shut them down—or flee.
She could feel the whiskey loosening her limbs, taking the edge off her nerves. She lifted her bag from the back of the barstool. Just feeling the heft of it gave her a little thrill. Bea was a writer. (Used to be a writer? Was a writer who—until very recently—had stopped writing? She never knew how to think about herself.) Sometimes, not often anymore, but occasionally at the literary magazine where she worked, someone would recognize her name. Beatrice Plumb? The writer? the conversation would optimistically begin. She knew the sequence by now, the happy glimmer of recognition and then the confused brow, the person trying to summon a recent memory of her work, anything other than her early long-ago stories. After a decade of practice, she knew how to head off the inevitable. She was armed with a fistful of diversionary dead-end replies about her long-awaited novel: a well-worn self-deprecating joke about writing too slowly, how if she amortized her advance over the years, it became an hourly wage best counted in half-pennies; a feigned superstition over talking about unfinished work; amused exasperation at her ongoing perfectionism.
From her oversized canvas bag she pulled out a deep brown leather satchel, one Leo had spotted while roaming around the Portobello Road Market in London years ago when she was in college and had starting writing in earnest. He gave it to her for her birthday. From the early 1900s, it was the size of a large notebook and looked like a miniature briefcase with its small handle and leather straps, like something someone might have carried around Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century. She’d loved it and had thought of it as her lucky bag until it seemed all the luck she’d once enjoyed vanished. Weeks ago, she’d found the satchel on an upper shelf of a closet and took it to a local shoe repair to have one of the straps mended. They’d cleaned and polished the leather and the case looked almost new, with just the right patina of age and use, as if it had housed years of successful manuscripts. She undid the straps and opened the flap, taking out the stack of pages covered with her loopy handwriting. Bea had written more in the past few months than she had in the past few years.
And what she was writing was really good.
And she felt horrible.
YEARS
