Энн Пэтчетт - The Dutch House

But did “back in the house” mean being there without Andrea and the girls? What would happen to them exactly? My imagination had yet to work out that part of the equation.

I had a late practice, so Maeve was already home from work when I got to the apartment. She said she was planning to make scrambled eggs and toast for dinner. Neither of us knew how to cook.

I dropped my book bag in the living room. “Well?”

“It’s so much worse than anything I imagined.” There was a lightness in her tone that made me think she was joking. “Do you want a beer?”

I nodded. The invitation that hadn’t been extended before. “I’d take a beer.”

“Get two.” She leaned over to light her cigarette off the stove’s gas flame.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that.” What I meant to say was, You are my sister, my only relation. Do not put your face in the fucking fire.

She straightened up and exhaled a long plume of smoke across the kitchen. “I’ve got it down now. I burned off my eyelashes at a party in the Village a couple of years ago. You only have to do that once.”

“Terrific.” I took out two bottles of beer, found the opener, and handed one to her.

She took a swig, then cleared her throat to begin. “So, to the best of my understanding, what we own in the world is pretty much what you see around you.”

“Which is nothing.”

“Exactly.”

I hadn’t considered the possibility of nothing before and a flush of adrenaline shot through me, preparing me for fight or flight. “How?”

“Lawyer Gooch, and he was lovely, by the way, could not have been nicer, Lawyer Gooch said the general rule of thumb is shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, but we made it in two, or I guess technically we made it one.”

“Which means what?”

“It means that traditionally the first generation makes the money, the second generation spends the money, and the third generation has to go to work again. But in our case, our father made a fortune and then he blew it. He completed the entire cycle in his own lifetime. He was poor, then rich, and now we’re poor.”

“Dad didn’t have money?”

She shook her head, glad to explain. “He had tons of money, just not tons of acumen. His young wife told him she believed that marriage was a partnership. Remember those words, Danny: Marriage is a partnership . She had him put her name on everything.”

“He put her name on all the buildings?” That didn’t seem possible. There were a lot of buildings, and he bought them and sold them all the time.

She shook her head and took another drink. “That would be for amateurs. Conroy Real Estate and Construction is a limited liability corporation, which means that everything in the company is gathered together under one roof. When he sold a building, the cash stayed in the LLC, and then he used it to buy another building. Andrea had him put her name on the company, which means she has joint ownership with right of survivorship.”

“That’s legal?”

“All assets are passed by operation of the law to his wife because of joint titling. Are you following this? I know it took me a minute.”

“I’m following.” I wasn’t sure that was true.

“Smart boy. The same goes for the house. The house and all its contents.”

“And Lawyer Gooch did this?” I knew Lawyer Gooch. He came to my basketball games sometimes and sat in the bleachers with our father. Two of his sons had gone to Bishop McDevitt.

“Oh, no.” She shook her head. She liked Lawyer Gooch. “Andrea came with her own lawyer. Someone in Philadelphia. Big firm. Lawyer Gooch said he talked to Dad about it many times, and you know what Dad said? He said, ‘Andrea’s a good mother. She’ll look after the children.’ Like, he married her because he thought she was good with children.”

“What about the will?” Maybe Maeve was right about the second generation because even I knew enough to ask about a will.

She shook her head. “No will.”

I sat down in a kitchen chair and took a long drink. I looked up at my sister. “Why aren’t we screaming?”

“We’re still in shock.”

“There has to be a way out of this.”

Maeve nodded. “I think so, too. I know I’m going to try. But Lawyer Gooch told me not to get my hopes up. Dad knew what he was doing. He was competent. She didn’t make him sign the papers.”

“Of course she made him!”

“I mean she didn’t hold a gun to his head. Think about it: Mommy leaves him, then this slinky chinchilla comes along and tells him she’s never going to leave him. She wants to be part of everything he does, what’s mine is yours. She’ll look after all of it and he’ll never have to worry.”

“Well, that much is true. He doesn’t have to worry.”

“The wife of four years gets it all. She even owns my car. Lawyer Gooch told me that. She owns my car but she told him I could keep it. I’m definitely going to sell it before she changes her mind. I think I’m going to get a Volkswagen. What do you think?”

“Why not?”

Maeve nodded. “You’re smart,” she said, “and I’m pretty smart, and I used to think Dad was smart, but the three of us together couldn’t hold a candle to Andrea Smith Conroy. Lawyer Gooch wants you and me to come in together. He said there are still a few things left to go over. He said he’d keep working on our behalf, free of charge.”

“It would have been better if he’d worked on our behalf while Dad was still alive.”

“Apparently he tried. He said Dad didn’t think he was old enough for a will.” Maeve thought about this for a minute. “I bet Andrea has a will.”

I drained my beer while Maeve leaned against the stove and smoked. We were delinquents in our own small way. “Two dead husbands,” I said, though Andrea must have been, what then? Thirty-four? Thirty-five? Ancient by the standards of a teenaged boy. “Did you ever wonder what happened to Mr. Smith?” I asked.

“Never once.”

I shook my head. “Me neither. That’s strange, isn’t it? That we never thought about Mr. Smith, how he died?”

“What makes you think he’s dead? I always thought he put her out on the curb with the kids, and Dad must have driven by at just the wrong moment, offered them a ride.”

“I feel bad for Norma and Bright over there by themselves.”

“May they rot in hell.” Maeve stubbed her cigarette out on a saucer. “All three of them.”

“You don’t mean that,” I said. “Not the girls.”

My sister reared back with such ferocity that for a split second I thought she meant to hit me. “She stole from us. Do you not understand that? They’re sleeping in our beds and eating off our plates and we will never, never get any of it back.”

I nodded. What I wanted to say, what I did not say, was that I’d been thinking the same thing about our father. We would never get him back.

Maeve and I set up housekeeping together. We found a secondhand dresser at the Goodwill and stuck it in the corner of the bedroom so I could put my clothes away. I still didn’t like taking the bedroom, but every night, Maeve went to the couch with her stack of blankets. I wanted to ask her about finding a bigger place, but seeing as how it was all on her—our food and our shelter—I thought better of it.

When everything was all set up, we called Sandy and Jocelyn to come and see what we’d accomplished. Maeve brought home a white box of cookies from the bakery. She arranged the cookies on a plate and threw out the box, as if we were going to fool them. I straightened up the cushions on the couch, she put away the glasses that where in the drainboard. When the bell finally rang we threw open the door and the four of us exploded with joy. What a reunion! You would have thought it had been years since we’d seen one another.