Leo yelled. “I come in peace!”
The girls moved faster, holding on to each other’s arms for balance.
FOR A MINUTE, it seemed to Nora and Louisa that Melody had arranged Leo’s nearly mystical appearance, had planted him there to say: See? See what trouble lurks in the park? See how lucky you are that I’m your mother? They were always asking about Melody’s siblings, the siblings who lived in the city and seemed so interesting and exotic, especially their uncle Leo whose picture would sometimes be in the Sunday Styles section with Victoria, their glamorous aunt. (Louisa had tried calling her Aunt Victoria once at a rare family gathering and couldn’t tell whether the woman wanted to laugh or spit at her.) Melody looked pained when the girls would point out the photos, her face clouding with a mix of disapproval and disappointment. Her expression made the girls feel so bad they stopped mentioning the pictures, hiding them instead in a Tupperware container in their shared closet. Sometimes they’d ask their father about Leo who would only say, “He’s always been perfectly nice to me. Not much of a family man.”
And here he was. Leo. Flailing about like an upended turtle. (“He wasn’t flailing,” Nora said, dismissing Louisa’s attempts to describe the odd moment while they were heading home on the train later. “He was trying to get up. It was icy.” But Louisa was firm, Melody-like; newly out of rehab, she insisted, Leo should not have been in the park. He was supposed to be meeting his siblings for lunch!) At the top of the path they stopped and hid behind a tree trunk to spy on Leo.
“It’s totally him,” Louisa said.
“Should we say something?” Nora asked.
Louisa hesitated. She wanted to approach Leo, too, but thought they shouldn’t. “He’ll tell Mom,” she said. Nora nodded, mouth drawn tight, disappointed. They both held still, barely breathing, and watched Leo for a few minutes. He stood and brushed off his pants. He sat on a large boulder. “What is he doing?” Nora whispered as Leo stared up at the sky. She wished they were a normal family. She wished she could run down the path, waving, and he’d smile and laugh and they could spend the day together. Instead, here they were, cowering behind a tree. They didn’t have all the details of his trip to rehab, but they knew there was some kind of accident and that it was bad and involved drugs. “Who does blow anymore?” Louisa had heard her mother say to their father one night last summer.
“He might be buying drugs,” Louisa said, looking at Nora, worried. “Why else would he be all the way up here right before lunch?”
LEO SIGHED AND HOISTED HIMSELF UP, brushing twigs and dirt off his pants. He sat on a nearby rock, assessing the damage to his scraped palms. Something nagged at him, something about the girls. He’d really spooked them. He assumed his fall was inelegant, but couldn’t imagine that he looked dangerous. Why had they been so spooked? Kids probably weren’t allowed anywhere in the park without a parent these days—not even teens, not even boys. Those girls were probably already looking for a cop.
Dammit, Leo thought. What if they were looking for a cop? What if they thought he was drunk or worse and gave his description to the police who were patrolling for him right now? He couldn’t be caught with drugs. His lawyer had been crystal clear: Keep your nose clean until the divorce decree comes down. No travel. No suspicious spending. No trouble. Leo stood and headed toward the sound of traffic. At the top of the path, he turned a corner and finally knew exactly where he was. Central Park West was straight ahead. He could hail a taxi and go directly to Grand Central and not be late for lunch. If he made a right, he’d be at Strawberry Fields within two or three minutes.
He hesitated. Above him, an ear-splitting screech. He looked up to see three enormous crows, perched on one of the few trees that had already dropped its leaves. They were all squawking at once, as if they were arguing about his next move. Directly beneath, in the midst of the stark and barren branches and at the base of a forked limb, a mud-brown leafy mass. A nest. Jesus.
Leo checked the time and started walking.
Nobody remembered who started calling their eventual inheritance “The Nest,” but the name stuck. Melody was just sixteen when Leonard Plumb Sr. decided to establish a trust for his children. “Nothing significant,” he would tell them repeatedly, “a modest nest egg, conservatively invested, dispersed in time for you to enjoy but not exploit.” The funds, Leonard Sr. explained, would not be available until Melody, the youngest, turned forty.
Jack was the first to argue vociferously against this distribution, wanting to know why they all couldn’t have their share sooner and pointing out that Melody would get the money earlier in her life than everyone else and what was fair about that? But Leonard had given the distribution of funds, how much and when, a great deal of thought. Leonard was—and this was quite literally how he thought of himself, several times a day—a self-made man. It was the organizing principle of his life, that money and its concurrent rewards should flow from work, effort, commitment, and routine. At one time, the Plumbs of Eastern Long Island had family money and a decent amount of real estate. Decades of behavioral blunders and ill-conceived marriages and businesses run amok had left next to nothing by the time Leonard was in high school. He’d wangled himself an engineering scholarship to Cornell and then a job with Dow Chemical during a time he referred to, reverently, as the Dawn of the Absorbency Revolution.
Leonard had lucked onto a team working with a new substance: synthetic polymers that could absorb three hundred times more liquid than conventional organic absorbents like paper and cotton. As his colleagues set to work identifying potential uses for the new superabsorbers—agriculture, industrial processing, architecture, military applications—Leonard seized on something else: consumer products.
According to Leonard’s oft-repeated legend, the business he and his two partners started, advising larger corporations on how to use the new absorbers, was nearly solely responsible for daintier feminine hygiene products (which he never failed to mention in mixed company, mortifying his children), better disposable diapers (his proudest accomplishment, he’d spent a small fortune on a diaper service when the first three were babies), and the quilted square of revolting plastic that still sits beneath every piece of slaughtered meat or poultry in the supermarket (he was not above rooting through the garbage at a dinner party and hoisting the discarded square triumphantly, saying “Mine!”). Leonard built a thriving business based on absorbency and it was the thing he was proudest of, the fact of his life that lent a sweet gleam to all his accomplishments.
He was not a materialistic man. The exterior of his roomy Tudor house was scrupulously maintained, the interior one tick short of slovenly. He was loath to spend money on anything he thought he could fix himself, and he believed he could fix everything. The contents of the Plumb house existed in varying states of disrepair, waiting for Leonard’s attention and marked with his handwritten notes: a hair dryer that could only be held with a mittened pot holder because the cracked handle overheated so quickly (“Use with Care!”), outlets that delivered tiny electric shocks (“Use Upper, Not Lower!”), leaky coffeemakers (“Use Sparingly!”), bikes with no brakes (“Use with Caution!”), and countless defunct blenders, tape recorders, televisions, stereo components (“DO NOT USE!”).
(Years later, unconsciously at first and then deliberately because it made them laugh and was a neat, private shorthand, Bea and Leo would borrow Leonard’s note vernacular for editing manuscripts—use more, use sparingly, DO NOT USE!)
Leonard was a careful, conservative investor in blue chip stocks. He was happy to set aside some funds to provide a modest safety net for his children’s future, but he also wanted
