the creative one, and you’re the dullard. People get very attached to these designations. She wouldn’t want you to be capable of doing anything brave or strange.”
He turned to her from the sink. “Would you?”
“Maybe,” she considered. “But not without me.”
“Be honest,” he said. “Without – this. Would you seriously have considered dropping everything and coming along?”
“According to you, you never would have gone.”
“Moot point.” He went back to scrubbing the blackened crust from the lasagna pan.
“It isn’t moot,” she said, “whether you love me.”
He stopped. He rinsed his hands, and dried them on a towel. He knelt by her chair, and took her face in both hands. “Gnu. In the next few months, you will discover,” he promised, “how much I love you.” He kissed her, and let his lips linger until he could feel her spirit still.
He returned to the task at hand. It took a minute for the water to make it to the sink again. When it first became apparent that they had moved into their Elmsford rental “temporarily” in the adult sense of the word – i.e., as a synonym for forever – he had consoled himself by constructing a fountain at the kitchen sink. It was a whimsical contraption, with a culinary theme: the water ran from the faucet up a rubber hose that ended in a turkey baster, whose jet spray spun a round metal whisk, then cascaded down a chipped delft teacup, a bent soup ladle, an old-fashioned glass lemon juicer, a cow-shaped coffee creamer, and a wooden-handled ice-cream scoop he’d picked up at a stoop sale that must have been a hundred years old, finally landing in a tin funnel that directed the water back into the sink. Pleasingly, the water maintained roughly the same flow and pressure provided without the journey he imposed upon it, even if the hot water did drop a few degrees along the way. The mechanism was a kooky, childlike affair reminiscent of the game of Mouse Trap he’d grown up playing with Beryl. Yet his fondness for this homemade toy had taken a blow when he and Glynis came back from Puerto Escondido several years ago. In their parents’ absence, the kids had disconnected the hose. Presumably they dispensed with the nonsense over the kitchen sink whenever they had the house to themselves, and reconnected the hose when their father was due back; for the first time they’d forgotten. He didn’t tell the kids they’d hurt his feelings. Naturally he would have liked them to cherish the product of his playful side. But he couldn’t force his children to treasure in their father what he treasured about himself.
“I wonder, did you put it all together, that business about Berlin?” Glynis asked, once he had resumed battle with the pan. “While you were busy buying her a new apartment, she was planning to move all her stuff into your father’s house. Meantime, you were supposed to put him in an assisted-living facility so she could live there without the bother of his company.”
“Losing the rent-stabilized place – she’s not thinking straight, and she’s panicking.”
“You’re too kind.”
“Lucky for you.”
“God, the indignation! As if rent stabilization were a human right. And what was all that about how hard she works and how it’s ‘not her fault’ she makes no money? She made her choices. It’s called making your bed. So you lie in it.”
“We’re better off than she is,” he said, adding, “monetarily anyway. She’s jealous.”
“But she holds you in contempt.”
“It makes her feel better. Let her.”
“I mean, the nerve! A hundred grand! Which would just be the beginning, since she wouldn’t have made the mortgage payments, either. I warned you a long time ago that if you kept giving in on the smaller amounts, it would only get worse.”
“I didn’t mind helping her out now and again.” A doubt crossed his mind over whether in different circumstances he might have been amenable to his sister’s proposition after all.
“Did you get a load of that ‘millions and millions’ crack? Where’d she get that idea?”
“Beryl’s like a lot of people who’ve always been hard up. They think there are people like them, and then everyone else is unimaginably wealthy. Some money is the same as infinite money. She doesn’t have kids, and she doesn’t know what things cost. Zach’s tuition. Car insurance in New York. Taxes—”
“You can bet she doesn’t pay any. And it’s people like your sister who think people like us should pay even more.”
“Well, I hate to sound like Jackson. But Beryl is completely unaware that her life is subsidized. That her trash is collected, that she can go for a walk in a park, that emergency rooms really will treat her without insurance if she’s bleeding – it’s all paid for by someone else. I’m dead certain that thought never enters her head.”
“To the contrary,” Glynis agreed. “She doesn’t feel like a beneficiary, but like a victim. She has a chip on her shoulder the size of a redwood.”
That the same might be said of Glynis Shep kept to himself.
“My favorite part of the evening wasn’t even your announcement,” she continued. “It was the crocodile tears afterward. All that histrionic solicitation and despair. So fake! Just like all that overdone fawning over the fish slice. She’s a terrible actress. She was mostly aggrieved that from now on she can’t put her hand in your cookie jar.”
“Well, I guess the expectation is that in the face of serious illness, all the – friction – between people, like you and Beryl—”
“Friction?” Glynis laughed, and the sound was wonderful. “She detests me!”
“Okay, but even that – it’s supposed to go away. She can’t feel that way about you anymore, and then she still does and it’s awkward.”
“There’s something delicious about it. I can’t explain it, but I loved watching her so obviously play pretend. I get the feeling there are just a few bits and pieces of this mesothelioma thing that I’m going to enjoy.”
As he lovingly dried the fish slice, the fact that Glynis roused herself to get up and wrap her arms around him from behind was strangely moving. She was so depleted that small gestures of affection must have cost her an extraordinary outlay of energy.
“Oh, and did you notice?” Glynis mumbled into his shirt, laughing again. “She still remembered to take the chocolates.”
The timing of the Before Picture dinner up at Shep’s was even worse than Jackson had foreseen. The night before, the Saran Wrap that Flicka wrapped around her eyes to seal in the Vaseline had come off while she slept – he should never have bought that off-brand surgical tape – so that morning her eyes had been flaming. While he was out for a few hours, she apparently got – well, “irritable” was an understatement.
For while Carol was always urging him to avoid subjecting Flicka to “stress,” by far and away the biggest source of stress for their elder daughter was the very condition that made her so sensitive to it. She didn’t mind her father’s
