Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney - The Nest

Melody had been scared to show up at school the next day, worried about what her friends would say about her weepy, inebriated, odd mother. But all they talked about was the extremely cool birthday party where Leo Plumb, a high school senior, had sung and danced with them and taught them how to gamble.

“Hey, Betty!” the three girls would say — with affection, not mockery — when they saw Melody in the hall. She’d never been happier than those weeks and months at the end of sixth grade.

So Melody had been stunned — and thrilled — when Jack and Walker offered to host a fortieth birthday dinner in her honor. Every year she told Walt that all she wanted was a quiet birthday celebration at home with her family and she was always, always disappointed when he believed her.

“I really think Leo is going to come through tonight,” she said, flipping down the sun visor and applying lipstick in the tiny mirror. “I think he’s going to surprise everyone with good news.”

“That certainly would be a surprise.”

“I don’t know why, but something about birthdays brings out the best in Leo. Really.”

“If you say so.”

“I do!” Melody turned the radio up and hummed along with a song she sort of knew. Leo’s e-mail had been vague, true, but it was also encouraging. She’d nearly memorized the long paragraph, something about an exciting project for Nathan that was coming together “very quickly,” how he’d left town to meet with some investors and would be out of touch but back with a progress report in time for her birthday dinner. “I’m very optimistic,” he’d written.

Walter raised his voice a little to be heard above the radio. “What I really think,” he said, “is the sooner everyone lets go of Leo as their personal savior, the better off everyone will be. Including you. Including us.”

Melody turned the radio volume higher. She didn’t want him to ruin her hopeful mood. He’d never believed in The Nest and sometimes she thought he was almost enjoying being right. She believed Leo was going to come through tonight. On her birthday! She’d spent the entire day as if she were preparing for a date. Bought a new dress (on the secret card, that’s how sure she felt), got her nails done, had dug out the pretty dangly (faux) diamond earrings Walt had bought for her after the girls were born. She checked herself in the mirror again. Maybe the earrings were too much. She shouldn’t have used so much hair stuff. She started playing with her bangs. Melody always felt wrong around her siblings, just a little off. She could see them assessing her clothing, judging Walt. (How dare they! They wouldn’t know a kind, good, capable person if — well, if their sister married one.) She shook her head. Tonight was going to be different. It was.

Walter gripped the steering wheel a little harder, biting back his words, dreading the ride home when Melody would be a basket case. He’d give her a day or two to recover from whatever went down with ( without) Leo tonight and then the house was going back on the market. He felt sorry thinking about what were surely the difficult weeks ahead, but he was also eager to get the necessary changes under way. They would get through it. Melody would rise to the occasion. She always did. He’d always been able to count on her.

LOUISA WAITED IMPATIENTLYat the front door of the SAT offices on West Sixty-Eighth Street, eyeing the threatening clouds that were moving in swiftly ahead of a cold front bringing weather that was more typical for this time of year. It was going to rain and Louisa wanted to get to Jack’s house before it started. She knew Nora was upstairs saying good-bye to Simone for the week. She stood in the foyer of the building that smelled like bleach and rancid mop and tried not to think about what her sister was doing with Simone that very minute.

THREE FLOORS DIRECTLY ABOVE LOUISA,Nora was wishing she could skip her mother’s birthday dinner and spend the rest of the night in the bathroom stall with Simone who was kneeling on the closed toilet lid so none of the other girls in the bathroom knew they were both in there. Simone had a finger over Nora’s lips and Nora lifted the hem of Simone’s skirt and found skin where she expected to find underwear.

“Oh,” Nora said, and Simone mouthed, Shhh, as they gripped each other and swayed to a tinny bossa nova beat that rose from someone’s open window up through the back alley and into the tiny stall.

It was so simple, but ever since Simone’s easy incantation— you don’t have to be anyone’s mirror —Nora had felt released, giddy. She loved her family — her father, her sister, her mother; they were so dear to her and she would never hurt them or intentionally disappoint them — but Simone was right. Nora had to stop worrying about what everyone else needed and think about herself. And what she needed was to come clean to Louisa because she hated having a secret from her sister. It made her feel like she was doing something wrong. And she wasn’t.

When Nora met Louisa at the front door, she’d run so fast down three flights of stairs that she was dizzy, dry mouthed. When Louisa saw her flushed face, swollen lips, she frowned. They both swallowed hard. “We’re going to be late,” Louisa said, pushing through the swinging doors and stepping out into the rain. “Mom is going to freak.”

WALKER HAD CANCELEDhis Saturday afternoon clients and left work early to cook. He was standing in his and Jack’s tiny but artfully designed kitchen, ebulliently pounding chicken breasts between two slices of parchment paper. He’d planned a spring-themed dinner and even though it wasn’t quite spring, the universe had cooperated; it was a beautiful evening, temperate enough to open the windows in the living room and enjoy the faint earthy scent of the softening ground.

Walker couldn’t remember the last time they’d entertained Jack’s family. It had been years. Melody’s birthday dinner had been Walker’s idea. He’d been itching to get them all together in one room and try to make a tiny inroad into facilitating some kind of agreement about the infernal sum of money they still insisted on calling The Nest, which drove Walker mad. Aside from being infantile, he couldn’t fathom how a group of adults could use that term in apparent earnestness and never even casually contemplate the twisted metaphor of the thing, and how it related to their dysfunctional behavior as individuals and a group. Just one of many things about the Plumb family he’d stopped trying to understand.

But Walker did understand conflict resolution, and as an attorney who had to mediate many a divorce, many a broken business partnership, he also understood how money — and the entitlement that often accompanied just the idea of money — could warp relationships and memories and decisions. He’d seen it happening with Jack and his family for years, and enough was enough.

He thought Jack was probably right; Leo probably had money somewhere, but chasing Leo was a loser’s game. Leo, Walker thought, was a loser. They all mythologized him like he was some kind of brilliant withholding god who just needed the right sacrifice to let loose his abundant blessings. As far as Walker could tell, Leo was just someone who’d been relatively bold at the right time and had lucked out very young. SpeakEasyMedia was a formula that made him wealthy. He wasn’t even rich by New York standards and what had he done since then? Nothing. Blown his wad. Become a leech.

But since Leo’s accident Walker had observed an interesting dynamic: The siblings were communicating again, and although the conversations usually began with Leo and the money, something else had started to happen. They were making casual forays into one another’s lives. He’d heard Jack and Melody on the phone countless times talking about things other than Leo, other than The Nest. Bea had always been the most amiable and accessible of the bunch; he thought she would welcome some kind of coming together. If Leo could just agree to something tonight, anything, some kind of payment plan, installments, just throw everyone a bone so they could stop gnawing the worn and brittle cartilage of The Nest — maybe they could move on, try to forge relationships with one another that weren’t about that blasted inheritance.