Twelve Rooms with a View. Theresa Rebeck

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СКАЧАТЬ know, how can you know something like that? She never said anything at all about Bill, or how it was going with him, even though Lucy made a couple of stabs at it.

      “So are we ever going to meet our so-called stepfather?” she asked, sipping her cappuccino. Since nobody had wine with dinner Daniel and Alison had relented and let people order cappuccino and biscotti after the expensive spaghetti was cleared away.

      “You’re all grown, you don’t need a stepfather,” Mom said, laughing a little and looking at the last traces of her second drink.

      “Wait a minute. You guys haven’t met him yet?” I asked. This fact somehow had gotten by me. I assumed the reason I hadn’t met Bill was that I was out of town too much. The fact that Lucy and Alison, who lived so close by in Brooklyn and Queens, hadn’t met Bill did actually catch me off guard.

      “He’s so private, I told you, sweetheart. That’s just the way he is. Some day we’ll make it work out,” she said, patting my hand.

      “You live like right around the corner from here, right? Lucy noted. “Let’s do it now. He’s home, right?”

      “I don’t think he’d like that.”

      “We won’t stay. We just want to come by and see where you live!” she persisted.

      “I’ll tell him. Maybe we can work something out for next month.”

      “Is it a dump? Are you living in some sort of crazy dump?”

      “No, not at all. He’s just private, you know that.”

      “He’s crazy, is what it sounds like.”

      It was pretty uncomfortable, frankly; the fact that Lucy was putting it out there to Mom in front of me and Daniel and Alison made the situation really sound as creepy and weird as you kind of worried it might be. Mom just shrugged a little bit and looked down and then she sighed, like this was all too much.

      Lucy took offence. “It’s a fair question, Mom,” she pointed out, kind of edgy. “You’ve been married to this guy for six months. Why can’t we meet him?”

      “He doesn’t want to, is why,” Mom said. And she wasn’t apologetic about that at all.

      “But he’s nice to you, right?” I said.

      “You don’t have to worry about me, sweetheart, I’m fine!” she said, and she smiled at me and squeezed my hand. Which okay is maybe why it finally occurred to me after she was dead that maybe what she meant was worry about yourself you dingbat; you’ve just agreed to go to Delaware with another loser.

      It also occurred to me that maybe she was ashamed of us, that’s why she didn’t want Bill to meet us. A year and a half later, sitting there on the floor of that ridiculous little television room, eating Chinese food out of cartons, and trying to figure out how to screw over the two guys who grew up there, and whose Dad had died just three weeks before our Mom died, it certainly did occur to me that maybe we weren’t acting so well.

      “Are you crying?” Alison asked me, suddenly.

      “It’s this Kung Pao chicken. I bit into one of the peppers, I said. “I wonder if there’s any Kleenex around here.” I stood up and looked around, confused. Lucy held up a wad of those lousy paper napkins that they dump in the carry-out bag, and breezed on with her clever plan. “I’ll have the Sotheby’s guy call Long in the morning. Eventually he’s going to have to transfer the files anyway, and they’ll have a better sense of how soon that needs to happen. Surely they know how to work this so we can start to proceed with the sale even though the property’s still in probate,” she told us, licking her fingers like a cat. “There’s no question they’ll fight it, but we could get at least a little bit of a jump on those Drinans. Potentially we could leave them in the dust.”

      “They’re already in the dust. Their father just died,” I reminded her.

      “Their father, who disinherited them,” she retorted.

      “Precisely,” I said. “Precisely.”

      “You’re not going to get all moralistic about this,” Lucy said, looking up from her docs finally. “Oh, no no. This is not a situation of our making.”

      “You’re sitting here—plotting!” I said.

      “Plotting to make you rich. Oh, a couple million dollars, that would suck. You might have to give up cleaning houses.”

      “I wasn’t cleaning houses,” I told her, suddenly feeling peevish as hell. “I was managing properties.”

      “Well, my way you can own the properties you manage, how’s that for a thought,” she said, starting to close up the Chinese food cartons. “And you can go back to college and finish your oh-so-useful degree in pottery, and you can start your own little pottery shop and throw clay around for the rest of your life and never worry ever ever ever about whether or not you make one red cent off any of it. That’s what can happen to your life, Tina, if you just sit still and let me make you rich.”

      “That was mean,” I said.

      “What?” she said, looking at me like I was nuts. “That was mean?”

      “Yeah, mean. You’re being mean to me again, Lucy.”

      “We’re all tired. It’s been a long couple of days,” Daniel chimed in, soothing. He was being Mr Good Brother-in-law now, asking quietly supportive questions and making sure Lucy knew that We Were In This Together. “Lucy’s worked hard to protect us all, and I for one appreciate it.” He smiled at her, oh so appreciative. I wanted to smack them both. Instead, I smiled wanly and nodded my sheepish little head.

      “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m still shook up about Mom.”

      “We all are,” Alison said, like she thought maybe I was being a bit too morally superior about this after all.

      “I know I know, I mean, what I mean is I didn’t get much sleep last night.” I nodded, fully in retreat mode because what other option did I have? I rubbed my little eyes for effect. “I think I’d better go lie down.”

      “Be my guest,” Lucy shrugged, continuing to clean. Which was her way of letting me know that this wasn’t my apartment, it was her apartment, and I wasn’t calling the shots. As if I ever called the shots with this crew. In any event, I went and hid in the bedroom with the futons on the floor, and I stared at the stars on the ceiling and waited for my so-called family to leave. Which they did not do for what seemed forever, or at least long enough for me to start worrying that maybe they were out there plotting about what they were going to do to cut me out of my share of the loot once we got our hands on it. And once it occurred to me that that was probably what they were doing, I got myself worked into a complete paranoid frenzy, and I almost went back out there to just hang out and make sure they knew that they weren’t pulling any fast ones on me, and I was a full member of this little tribe of pirates, and there would be no sneaking around and cheating anybody out of anything. Then I thought that I probably shouldn’t be so confrontational, that that would make them think I was paranoid and weak, and that the smartest move actually would be sneaking through the pink room and into the empty room next to the television room, where I could hide behind the door and find out about their diabolical maneuverings with a clever bit of eavesdropping.

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