Читать книгу Twelve Rooms with a View - Theresa Rebeck - Страница 7

I can’t say that I was sorry to see them go when they finally left.

The first thing I did was take my boots off. Alison would have thrown a fit if she saw me do it. She had already managed to moan about how dirty the place was and who knows what was lurking in that crummy shag rug, like I think she thought there might be bed bugs or worms or slime from distant centuries just oozing through it all, waiting for some idiot’s bare foot to come in contact so it could spread fungal disaster into your system. She really has that kind of imagination; sometimes talking to her is like talking to someone who writes horror films for a living. But I didn’t care; my toes were so hot and tired by that point and I just felt like being flat on my feet before I started checking the place out. As it turns out the carpet was kind of dry and it seemed clean enough, just a little scratchy. It really was a pretty hideous color but I think that honestly is the worst that could be said about it.

By then the sun actually had gone away, as predicted, so I didn’t have a lot of light to explore the place with. I decided to just head back to the boring little area where Mom and Bill had more or less camped out, and then I slipped out of the one dark blue skirt I had brought for the funeral, pulled on the jeans I had stashed in my backpack, and took a look around. Lucy had already cased the refrigerator so I knew there were fish sticks. A little more casual probing in the cabinets yielded something like sixteen packets of ramen noodles; and then I noticed that on the teeny tiny counter there was half a bottle of wine, open and useless, next to three empties. The search continued, and sure enough, when I poked around the laundry room—which was right behind that little kitchenette—there was a pile of clothes on the floor which really looked like nothing until you nudged it with your foot and found that it was stacked on top of two mostly full cases of red wine. So I was feeling so good about that, I just kept looking, and wouldn’t you know, I hit the mother lode: Up in the freezer of that little refrigerator, back behind the ice cube machine, there was a huge bottle of vodka, with hardly a dent in it.

Knowing my mother I also knew that would not be the only bottle out there. She liked to have it in reach, so I was pretty sure I’d find something squirreled away in several other thinly disguised hiding places. By the looks of the two cases of pricey red wine, Bill was also a bit of a drinker himself, so for a second I did think, well, at least she finally hooked up with someone who could pay for the good stuff, as opposed to the truly undrinkable crap she was surviving on the rest of her life. Seriously, I felt a little better about their utterly inexplicable marriage when I saw all the bottles. Which I’m not saying drinking yourself into an early grave is a good thing? But on the other hand, I honestly don’t see much point in judging the dead.

Anyway, in the door of the refrigerator I also found a half a jar of ruby red grapefruit juice, which meant I could have an actual cocktail instead of trying to down the vodka straight or over melted ice. So I made myself a drink, put the water on to boil for the noodles and turned the television on for company. They only had basic cable so I found one of those stations that runs endless documentaries all the time and started to look around.

The bedroom was not really a bedroom, even though there was a bed in there. There were huge pocket doors which were clearly meant to shut the room off, but they had been left open for so long they were stuck on their rails. Another set of enormous pocket doors made up the entire wall on the other side of the room, but they were stuck closed and the bed was shoved up against them. Then there was a little cove that had been built into one wall, with fancy plasterwork up the sides and a crown at the top. That had a little dresser in it. Other than that there were no closets—just clothes everywhere on the floor—which in addition to the huge pocket doors made it clear that this room was not in fact ever meant to be a bedroom, and was more likely intended as a dining area. Daniel had said that there were two dining rooms but I don’t think there were two, I think this bedroom was really the dining room, and the room behind it with the television was supposed to be the original kitchen, and the servants would cook back there and then come in with the food, through the pocket doors, which presumably opened and closed at some previous point in history. Well, honestly, I had no idea what was supposed to be what in this crazy apartment in the other century when it was built. But that’s what I thought.

I also thought, I wonder where Mom’s perfume is? Because back in that sort of freaky half-bedroom-half-dining room you smelled it everywhere; it was in all the clothes and the blankets and the sheets, along with the red wine and the cigarettes and dirty laundry and mothballs. I kind of had it in my head that I might find that little black bottle and snag it before Lucy turned it into some big issue for no reason whatsoever. Seriously, you just never knew when she was going to get all twitchy and start making lists and arguing about everything, and Alison sometimes goes along with that shit just because in general it’s not really worth arguing with Lucy. Then the next thing you know, Lucy’s telling everybody that we have to put everything smaller than a paperback into a box and sell it all together because that’s the only way to be fair, and then she’s handing it over to some thrift store for ten dollars or something, not even enough to buy a pizza. It made no sense to me to let Lucy try something like that, so I started looking. I was pretty sure if I found that little bottle first I could stick it in my backpack and no one would ever know.

The first place I checked was the dresser in the alcove. It seemed to me that that was probably the only place where Mom might have put anything of value to her; the rest of the room really was nothing but piles of clothes, a chair, a couple of books on the floor, and the unmade bed. Besides, the dresser really did look like she might have been using it as a vanity; there was an old gilt mirror glued to the wall above it, with the feet of half a cherub hanging down from the top. The top of the dresser had a few things on it—a hairbrush, a comb, a couple of empty glasses with some dry little well of alcohol stuck to the bottom. Then there was a completely tarnished little round silver boxlike thing, with curlicues and a big French fleur-de-lis right on top that when you opened it there were a whole bunch of keys and an old wedding ring and three little bitty medals inside. One of them said CHEMISTRY on it. In addition to the round silver box there were a couple of really old photographs in really old frames of no one I knew, and then there were a couple photographs unframed, behind them, with the edges curling toward the middle. One of them was of me, when I was about fifteen and going on the first of many disastrous dates with Ed Featherstone. He was a mighty jerk, but at fifteen who knew? But seriously it is a bit of a shock to see yourself seventeen years ago, with your arms around someone who is now seventeen years older and who made a fortune on Wall Street back when everyone was doing that, got out while the getting was good and now owns lots of property in Connecticut. Whatever. I set aside the can of keys, which I thought might be useful for future exploration, and then I looked in the drawers.

The top drawer had her underwear in it, lots of sad bras and panties, several old pairs of neutral-colored support hose, and a quart bottle of good vodka. Then in the other drawer, just beneath it, was Bill’s underwear, gigantic pairs of white and light blue cotton briefs. I so did not want to go pawing through that stuff—I mean, really, I wanted to find that little bottle of perfume because I wanted to have it and honestly I didn’t think anyone else would want it, but I was quickly losing my nerve. I had never even met this nutty alcoholic; who knew what lurked in his underwear? Rather than just give up, I pulled the drawer all the way out of the dresser and upended it. There was nothing in there except all those huge pairs of underwear, and a wallet.

A wallet; there was a wallet, and the guy who owned it was dead, and everything he owned got left to my mom, who left everything she owned to me and my sisters. I figured that gave me some rights, so I sat on the floor and looked through it, and lo and behold there were three receipts from a liquor store, a couple more pictures of people I didn’t know, and a lot of money. A serious wad of money, the bills smooth and neatly pressed together, like they give it to you at the bank, if you are the sort of person that a bank will actually give money to. So I thought, Oh thank God, and I took it out to count it and those crispy new bills were all fifties and hundreds; Bill had seven hundred dollars in that wallet, which would I think be a significant windfall to pretty much anybody, but was a virtual miracle to a person of my limited means. I pocketed the cash.

When I leaned over to sort of half-scoop the now empty wallet and all that underwear back into the drawer I also happened to notice the no-man’s-land under the bed, which was crowded with boxes. These turned out to be really hard to get to, because they all were just a little bit too big for the space which meant they were really squashed in there. They also each weighed a ton, as I discovered, since they were full of used paperbacks, most of them mysteries. After about twenty minutes of dragging those boxes out of there I was ready to completely give up, until I got to the very last box, which was up by the headboard on the far side of the bed. That one was not full of books. It was full of junk, a crummy handbag, a little red change purse, two pairs of reading glasses, and an old cedar jewelry box filled with fake pearls and junky necklaces, another quart-sized bottle of vodka, nearly empty, and a tiny bottle of French perfume.

It looked just the way I remembered it, pitch black, and shaped like a heart. The ghost of the word Joy ran across one side, in elegant gold letters. And then of course, as much as I wanted it, it suddenly just seemed unbearably awful to me. That perfume started with her at the beginning of her past, when she thought that lots of glamorous things were in store for her. I know that’s why she was so careful with it; she was waiting for her life to be as exciting as that bottle of perfume, and the closest she ever got was a couple of cocktail parties with my father, who hardly ever had a job, and whose temper was the bane of her existence. I tipped the bottle to one side, trying to figure out how much perfume was still in there, after thirty-seven years. It was impossible to say.

It was not, of course, until this very moment that it occurred to me that I had left a pan full of water boiling this whole time on the stove top. Which I have done several times in the past, in different apartments, to more or less disastrous results, so I jolted myself out of this mournful and useless reverie and ran back to that lousy kitchenette, where I put more water on to boil, then made another cocktail, cooked up some noodles, had another drink, watched the end of a documentary about Egypt, and had a good cry. Then I thought about just passing out on that couch in front of the television set, which seemed like a really poor idea, because that is the sort of thing that leads one to think one might actually be an alcoholic like one’s mother which was a thought I didn’t particularly want to entertain that night. So then I stood up, definitely wobbly, but didn’t judge myself because Mom was dead and I was feeling hideous, and then I thought about climbing into her bed, and that was just not an option, so then I wandered back through that maze of rooms until I found the one with the stars and planets on the ceiling and the little beds on the floor, and one of those beds was made up with a couple of pillows and a kind of a kid’s coverlet that was dark blue with rocket ships all over it. And then I slid off my jeans and got under that cover and I cried a little more, and then I went to sleep.

“Who the fuck are you?”

That’s the next thing I remember. Two guys standing in the doorway, staring at me. One of them had flipped on the overhead light, so I could see there were two of them, two fucking huge guys, staring at me sleeping in that little bed on the floor of that little room.

“What?” I said, blinking. “What?”

“Answer the fucking question. Who the fuck are you, and what the fuck are you doing here?” The first guy, the one standing inside the room with his hand on the light switch, was drunk. You could tell that right away.

“What time is it?” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. And I really wanted to know what time it was. I was completely confused.

“Who gives a fuck what time it is? Who the fuck are you?” the first guy said again.

“Shit,” I said. Which, it may not have been the brightest thing to say? But this guy was scaring me.

“Answer the fucking question. And get out of that bed. Get up. Get up!” Now he was barking orders and it was totally freaking me out. I was still blinking and trying to wake up and figure out what time it was and how much of a hangover I had, and this huge guy was reaching over to grab me. Honestly, I remember thinking, what a fucking drag. I’m in a total mess again and this time it isn’t even my fault; me staying here was Lucy’s dumb idea, I was just doing what Lucy wanted, and here I am now in a total fucking mess. I squeezed myself back against the wall, ducked my head down and threw my arm across my face because it was taking me so long to wake up and I was scared. Oh what a drag, I thought, what a complete hideous drag.

“Stop it, Pete. You’re scaring her,” said the other guy.

“Good. I want to scare her. Breaking and entering is a fucking crime, she should be scared,” said Pete, still coming at me, like he was going to drag me out of that bed.

“I didn’t break and enter, excuse me, excuse me but do you think I could put my pants on?” I yelled. “Get away from me, JESUS BACK OFF YOU JERK.” I smacked Pete’s hand away before he could touch me, and surprisingly he actually did back off. Feeling suddenly cocky I continued yelling. “Turn around, would you please TURN AROUND?”

Okay, why this worked I have no idea, but it did; both of these guys did as they were told. I mean I was freaked out because seriously these were two huge guys, both of them maybe six two or six four and I’m a little bit of a peewee so I totally did not expect them to do as I said. But they did so I grabbed my jeans off the floor and slid them on fast. Being half naked was not going to be an advantage in whatever this situation turned out to be, that much was certain.

“Who the fuck are you guys?” I said, trying to sound angry and sure of myself. I was totally scared out of my mind so I had to keep the upper hand as long as I could.

“We’re the ones asking questions here,” Pete started. “I hope you’re dressed because that’s as much privacy as you’re going to get.” He turned around just as I finished zipping up my pants, and when I looked up I noticed that he was taking a hit off a beer bottle. No question: they both were tanked. This was a very bad situation. “So what’s your name?” he demanded.

“I don’t have to tell you my name. You tell me your name,” I said.

“You’re sleeping in my fucking bed, so yeah, you do have to tell me your name,” Pete countered.

“Forget it. Let’s just call the police,” said the other guy.

“I am the police,” Pete told him, annoyed. “You can’t call the police when the police are already here.”

“Well, who cares who she is?” asked the other guy. “Just get her out of here.” He looked back toward the back of the apartment, like he knew what was back there and it made him sad. Pete looked like he wanted to argue about this, but then all of a sudden he was too tired to do it, so he looked back at me and reached out again, like he was going to grab me. I backed up. He didn’t get mad this time, though, he just moved his hand, like that little gesture that means, Come on, let’s go.

And that’s what he said. “Come on, let’s go. I don’t know how you got here and I don’t care. Count yourself lucky. Just get lost.” He wasn’t even looking at me by now, he was half following the other guy, who had already headed down the hall. He took a hit off his beer, looking totally wiped and also like all he really cared about was finishing the one beer and finding another. Now that he wasn’t screaming at me I could see that he was not bad looking; he needed a shave, and he was a little paunchy around the middle, but he had great eyes, dark brown, kind of shrewd and sad, which made his whole face look like a worried kid, even while he was being mean. Under the circumstances obviously I wasn’t falling for it, plus, I truly didn’t get what was supposedly going on here. These guys had barged in and woken me up maybe a minute ago. And now what, I was supposed to leave? Who the fuck did they think they were? I mean obviously I was grateful in the moment that they didn’t turn out to be rapists, but after the initial terror some sense of reality was setting in. What the hell?

“I’m not going anywhere,” I told Pete. “This is my apartment. I live here. And and and I think it’s a good idea to call the cops because you’re the ones who what the fuck are you doing here? Who the fuck are you?”

“You live here?” he said. “You live here?”

“Yes,” I said. “This is my apartment. I own it.”

“You own it?” he replied, taking a step back and calling down the hall. “Hey Doug! Get back here! This chick says she owns this place!” He turned and looked back at me, angry again, but in a calmer, nastier way. He also seemed to find my claim, that I owned the apartment, sort of quietly hilarious. He took a step back into that teeny bedroom. “Maybe you should tell me your name after all, sweetheart.”

“I don’t, I don’t—you tell me your name,” I insisted. I shoved my hands into the back pockets of my jeans and felt the hard edge of those bills I had stashed there. I was glad I had taken the precaution of pocketing that stuff right when I found it; it was starting to look like I might need it sooner rather than later. “I mean this is like my house and you’re like, you’re like…”

“Your house?” said Pete, half laughing. “Your house. That would make you—what was your name again?”

“Tina Finn?” I said. Okay I shouldn’t have caved like that, making my name a question at the last minute, but it just wasn’t so easy, keeping up the act that I was on top of this situation.

“Tina Finn,” he said, smiling now. “Tina Finn. One of the daughters of Olivia Finn. Would I be too far off the mark, assuming that?”

“Yeah, actually, she was my mom, and she just died two days ago, and and and—”

“Yesterday was the funeral.”

“Yes, yesterday was the funeral.”

“Yesterday was the funeral, and you still managed to slime your way into our apartment the same night. How very resourceful of you.” This was a creepy guy, smart and wily and drunk and way too fucking good looking. He was the kind of guy who knew he could get away with complete shit, and say and do completely shitty things because he was both great looking and smart. I wanted to get away from this guy as fast as I could, but I couldn’t give any more ground, none at all. If I did, there was no question I was going to be kicked out of there, and where was I supposed to go?

“Okay, you got my name, how about you give up yours?” I said. “Somebody Drinan, yeah? Pete, that’s your first name? So that makes you Pete Drinan. Bill was your dad?”

“Give the little lady a prize,” he smirked.

“Well, listen, Pete Drinan,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere tonight. Now that you know who I am, maybe you should just piss off.”

“Maybe you should stop thinking you have any rights here.”

“Maybe you should stop thinking I don’t.”

“And what gives you rights again? Your mother conned my father into marrying her, which gave her rights for a while, I guess, but you, I’m guessing not so much.”

“He left her this place. That doesn’t give me no rights,” I said.

“Really,” he said back, like what I said just meant nothing. He took another hit off that beer.

“Yeah, really,” I said. “He left it to her, and she left it to us.”

None of this seemed surprising to old Pete Drinan, but it didn’t seem like he was totally familiar with the story either. He made that little wave with his hand again, like, Let’s go.

“I’m not leaving,” I said. “I don’t have to leave.”

“Well, that’s debatable, but I’m not asking you to leave. Hey Doug!” he yelled, heading down the hallway toward the back of the apartment. “Listen to this!” Then he yelled back to me again, without even turning around. “Come on, Tina Finn, I think it would be really great for you to explain this situation to my big brother. Come on.”

What a jerk, I thought, and boy does he know how to order people around. I followed him back to television land, to see what fresh hell this great-looking asshole was about to cook up for me.

His older brother was sitting on that sad little couch, in front of the television set, sort of slumped over, looking at the empty bowl of noodles and the half-empty glass of vodka and grapefruit juice. He glanced up when I entered, and I got a better look at him this time; he had the same pair of tired, smart brown eyes as his little brother, but they didn’t scare me as much for some reason. It might have been the rest of his face; his mouth was thinner, and kind of kept in one line, like it was so used to being disappointed all the time it didn’t even bother, anymore, to find another shape. His hair was thinning, too; I could see the beginnings of a bald spot dead center on the top of his head, and he had one of those hairlines that has crept so far up the dude just looks startled all the time. So somehow Doug Drinan managed to look shrewd, old, startled and disappointed. It happens to some people, I guess.

“There’s hardly any furniture left,” he observed, kind of to no one. “I wonder what he did with it all. You think he sold it? He must’ve sold it, but why?” It sounded like what it was: a very good question. Pete was on his own track, though. He turned to me and tipped his head, like I was some kind of circus animal he could order around with these little gestures.

“Tell my brother your name,” he said, all arrogant and smug.

“Why don’t you do it for me, you seem to think it’s so funny,” I countered. He really was the kind of guy, instead of doing the simplest thing he asked, you’d really rather just irritate the shit out of him.

He grinned. “Oh, no, I don’t think it’s funny at all. Tina Finn. Her name is Tina Finn, and she has just shared with me a few truly remarkable facts,” he said. Then before Pete could get around to narrating these fascinating facts, he glanced into the next room, the bedroom, which was as I had left it: an unmade bed, piles of clothes on the floor, underwear and books and empty boxes everywhere. The place looked absolutely ransacked because in fact I had ransacked it. “What the fuck?” He looked back at me, all angry again. “What the fuck. You went through his stuff. You went through my father’s shit?”

I blushed like a teenager. “I didn’t, I was just—um…”

“You were just what?” he asked, tossing underwear at me. “You were just casually going through my father’s underwear drawer?”

“I’m sorry, I was looking—my mom had this old bottle of perfume and I was—”

“You were looking for a bottle of perfume in my father’s underwear drawer and what you found was—his wallet.” He unearthed it, looked through it swiftly. “And, oh look, there’s nothing in there now, is there?” He closed the wallet and tossed it to the other guy, who was still sitting on the couch.

“I didn’t take anything from your dad’s wallet,” I said.

“That’s a lie,” he noted, correctly.

“It’s not a lie,” I said, continuing to lie. “Yeah, I found it in there, but I mean there was nothing in it.” It was, as I said, already clear that this guy was one hell of a bully but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t get around to actually frisking me so there was no way to prove that I had the cash, which by the way I was not about to give up. “I was looking—”

“You were looking and looking and you also found—the vodka!” he exclaimed, picking up the bottle off the coffee table, where I left it.

“Knock it off, Pete.” The other Drinan stood, shaking his head, like he was used to this nonsense from crazy Pete but not in the mood. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said to me. “You must still be in shock.”

“Oh,” I said, surprised. Doug Drinan expressing sorrow for my loss was frankly the most consideration I had gotten out of anyone, all day. “Thanks. I mean, thanks.” I said.

“It was sudden, yes? I mean, she wasn’t sick,” he said.

“No, they, they said it was a heart attack. I don’t know.”

“That makes it hard.”

“Don’t make friends with her; she’s not staying,” Pete advised his sad big brother. He had pulled the cork out of the vodka bottle and started pouring it into a dusty glass which he seemed to have located in one of those cabinets.

“You’re going to regret that in the morning,” said Doug.

“I’m going to regret everything in the morning. I regret everything now,” Pete informed him. “But since you’re so interested in making friends with our little intruder, maybe you should hear what she has to say about the apartment, and why she’s here.” He took a hit off that straight vodka. For a second I was hardly listening, I was sort of suddenly desperate for a drink myself and wondering if there was any way to make one without losing anymore ground. Doug looked at me with a puzzled weariness, like he was sincerely curious what I might say in response to Pete’s nasty prodding, but also like he didn’t believe, really, that anything horrible was going to come out of my mouth. Seriously, he was just such a tired and sad person. It was like he’d already been through so much bad luck that he didn’t think anything, really, could get any worse.

“I…”

“According to Tina Finn, who claims she is not a thief, evidence on hand notwithstanding, Dad left the apartment to her mother, you remember the oh so lovely Olivia—”

“Jesus, Pete.” Doug looked away, disgusted and embarrassed. “Knock it off, would you?” He stood and grabbed the bottle of vodka, heading for the kitchenette and the little freezer full of ice cubes. The drinking was apparently going to continue with both these fellows.

“I’m just getting to the good part. Dad left the apartment to Olivia—”

Doug turned at this, confused and concerned, and about to interrupt, but Pete had more up his sleeve.

“And Olivia left it to her daughters.”

This stopped Doug in his tracks. He turned and looked back at me, sceptical but wary. The whole idea was clearly so ridiculous that he couldn’t take it in.

“She didn’t actually leave it to us,” I said, embarrassed as hell. “I mean, she did leave it to us. She didn’t make a will and there’s this, you know, she died intestate. And that means—”

“I know what ’intestate’ means,” said Doug, going for the ice. “This would explain what you’re doing here.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Is your mother even in the ground yet?” he asked, a sort of edgy tone underlining the question. No more friendly expressions, so sorry for your loss, now I had to tough it out with both of them. To hell with it. If they were both drinking, then so was I.

“The funeral was yesterday morning,” I said, grabbing my half-empty glass of vodka and grapefruit juice and following him into the kitchen, defiant. “So we went from the cemetery to the lawyer’s and then we came here.”

“Very efficient.” Doug nodded. He dumped some ice in my glass and handed me the vodka bottle.

“Well, we didn’t, it’s not like, I mean I had no idea about any of any, you know, they didn’t even tell me until after, I was standing there at the graveside, you know, honestly, when they told me about it.”

“’They’ being…”

“Me and my sisters.”

“Right, there are several of you,” Doug reminded himself. “Four of you?”

“Three. Me and Alison and Lucy. And Daniel, he’s Alison’s husband. But no kids. None of us managed to, I guess.”

“Fascinating,” Doug nodded. “And someone told you…”

“This lawyer, he said he was my mom’s lawyer.”

“That idiot Long,” stated Pete. He was lying on the couch now, spread out the whole length of it, so now there was nowhere else for anyone to sit in this dreary little room. He had the little jewelry box on his lap, the one that had Mom’s perfume bottle in it. In fact he was actually looking at the perfume bottle. “And he said you inherited our apartment. You inherit all my mom’s stuff, too?

“That was my mom’s,” I said. I wanted him to give it back.

“That was not your mother’s,” Doug informed me, cold. He was just considering me now, like he was trying to decide what to do with me, like maybe he was thinking he could just lock me in a closet and leave me there. I started to wonder if maybe he was not the nice brother at all; maybe he was just a little less sparky than the other guy.

“Yeah it was too,” I said. “She had it her whole life. So I just, that’s why I was looking through their stuff, I knew it was in there and I wanted to have it.” I set my drink down and walked over to the couch, reached out my hand to take it from asshole Pete. He closed his fingers over it and dropped it back into the jewelry box and shut it.

“Everything’s up for grabs though, isn’t it? Isn’t that what Long told you?”

“No, that’s not what he told me. What he told me was everything was ours.”

“Everything of ours is yours, that’s what he told you?”

“He told me, he told everybody—”

“Oh, look at this!” Pete found the little tarnished silver box, with all the keys in it; he had been lying on it, on the couch. “You take a fancy to this too?”

“I wasn’t stealing anything!” I said.

“Except our home,” said Doug. He leaned up against the wall, looked out the window.

“Oh look, my mom’s wedding ring,” Pete observed, picking it out of that silver box. “Glad to know you weren’t stealing that.”

“Look, you guys are mad. Okay, I get it,” I said.

“Like her mother, a regular rocket scientist,” Pete murmured.

“My point being I’m not the one who fucked up this situation. That would be your dad, right? Didn’t he tell you he was leaving the apartment to my mom? Didn’t he even tell you that?”

“Who are you again?” said Pete, really pissed now. “Have we met? Do I know you? Then what the fuck are you doing here in my apartment? I grew up here, with my family, and my mother. My father was happily married to my mother for twenty years, not two years, twenty years. This is our apartment! What the fuck are you doing here, sleeping in my bed? What the fuck gives you rights?”

“Well, apparently some document that your father signed gives me rights.”

“He was a fucking drunk!”

“Yes, that’s real news. I was here for fifteen minutes I figured that out.”

“Because booze was the first thing you went looking for.”

“No—”

“Just like your mother.”

“Go tell the judge. Go tell Stuart Long. What are you yelling at me for? You think I’m making this up? You think I wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t given me the keys?” I snapped back at him. “Go yell at your father. Oh, sorry. Guess you missed that chance.”

That shut old Pete up. He glanced at Doug, who looked at him for a second then looked out the window. It was pretty fast but there was no question.

“Holy shit, he did tell you, didn’t he?” I said. “You knew. That he was leaving her the apartment. He told you. That’s why you’re so mad. Because you knew.” They both looked at me real surprised for a second, like it hadn’t occurred to either of them that I might actually put that together.

“You don’t know anything,” said Pete, deflated as hell all of a sudden.

“Well, I don’t know a ton, but I’m learning as we go,” I retorted. “What’d you do, piss him off? That’s just a wild guess.”

“Don’t push your luck,” he said, but he was tired now.

“I don’t think we should be talking about this,” Doug observed, instantaneously cool as a cat. Seriously, these two were a mixed set, they were like salt and pepper shakers. They maybe fit together? But they were not alike. Both of them knocked back their vodka at the same time, but I could see it wasn’t going to bring either of them any peace. Oh well, like vodka brings anybody peace, ever.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Doug.

“What, we’re just going to let her stay?” Pete asked, offended by my very existence now.

“Unless you want to take her home with you, I don’t know what to do with her,” Doug said, shrugging.

“You know, you guys don’t actually get to decide what to do with me,” I said, all snarky and defiant again.

“Don’t count on that,” said Doug, rapidly moving into first place in the asshole competition that we all had going on by this point. “And don’t get too comfortable.” He set his empty drink down on the kitchen counter and headed for the black hallway. Pete slammed back the rest of his drink, and picked up the jewelry box as he stood.

“Listen,” I said.

“What?” He looked at me. There would be no listening tonight.

“Nothing,” I said.

He nodded and turned, following his brother down the hallway, taking my mother’s little black bottle of perfume with him as he went.