project but—I just can’t.” Stephanie stood and started picking up their empty bowls of ice cream, the tranquil mood broken. “This is one of many reasons I’m happy to be part of a bigger operation,” she said. “I can’t stand feeling responsible for the formerly talented. It’s too upsetting. I can pass her off to someone else who won’t have any qualms about shutting her down.”
Thinking about Bea being shut down by some unnamed assistant made Leo feel unexpectedly wistful. He wasn’t surprised when her first stories ended up being some anomaly of youth and fearlessness (thanks to him), but she had to be at the end of her rope by now. And she’d been Stephanie’s first notable client, the person who’d made editors and other new writers take a very young Stephanie very seriously. He didn’t like to think of Bea stuck working with Paul Underwood at some obscure literary journal, living in that apartment uptown by herself. It was hard to think about all his siblings for different reasons, so he didn’t. Right now, it felt like there was nowhere for his thoughts to alight that wasn’t rife with land mines of regret or anger or guilt.
“You’re right,” Stephanie said, standing and staring at the mantel. “She does look like Bea. Shit.”
“Don’t go,” Leo said.
“I’m just going to the kitchen.”
“Stay here,” he said. He didn’t like the sound of his voice, how it wavered a little. He really didn’t like the sudden, rapid acceleration of his heartbeat, which prior to this moment he’d associated with a certain class of stimulants, not a living room in Brooklyn in front of the fire with Stephanie.
“I’ll be right back,” Stephanie said. Leo seemed to go slightly pale and for a moment he looked lost, almost frightened, which briefly alarmed her. “Leo?”
“I’m fine.” He shook his head a little and stood. “Is that your old turntable?”
“Yes,” she said. “Put something on. I’m just going to rinse these.”
In the kitchen Stephanie could hear Leo flipping through her record albums. He yelled to her from the living room. “Your taste in music still totally sucks.”
“Like everyone else in America, my music is on my computer. That’s the old stuff. I just brought the turntable up from the basement a few months ago.”
Leo was reciting from the album covers: “Cyndi Lauper, Pat Benatar, Huey Lewis, Paula Abdul? This is like a bad MTV segment of ‘Where Are They Now?’”
“More like, guess who joined the Columbia House Record Club when she was eighteen.”
Leo flinched a little hearing Columbia Records. He shook it off. “Ah, here we go,” he said.
Stephanie heard the turntable start to spin and the familiar scratch, scratch of the needle hitting the album grooves. Then the weirdly dissonant first notes of a piano and the slurry, graveled voice of Tom Waits filled the house.
The piano has been drinking
My necktie is asleep
Stephanie hadn’t heard that song in years. Probably not since she and Leo were together. The album was probably Leo’s. He would wake her up on his hungover mornings (many mornings; most mornings) singing that song. He would pull her sleeping self into his arms, his semierection pressing into her back. She would half-heartedly try to burrow farther down into the bed, clinging to sleep and the reassuring feel of Leo’s limbs holding her close.
“You stink,” she would groan, feigning more irritation than she felt, not even really minding his funky breath. “You smell like my uncle Howie after a night at the bar.”
He would sing into her ear, his voice pockmarked from whiskey:
The piano has been drinking
Not me, not me, not me
AT THE SINK, she started to rewash the roasting pan that Leo had left with a film of grease on the counter and tried to reconcile the Leo in her living room with the Leo she’d last seen almost two years ago, out one night with Victoria; they’d both seemed hammered. This Leo was slimmer and in spite of what she’d heard—and occasionally witnessed—about his recent years of late nights and marital troubles and general rabble-rousing, he somehow looked younger. He was quieter, more subdued. Still funny. Still quick. Still beautiful.
She shook her head. She was not, absolutely was not, going to get swept into Leo’s orbit again. In fact, she’d better set down some hard and fast rules about how long he could stay. And she needed to run upstairs and make up the pullout sofa in her office.
Then, Leo was behind her. A hand on her shoulder. “Want to dance?” he said.
She laughed at him. “No,” she said. “I most definitely do not want to dance with you. Also? You are terrible at washing dishes. Look at this.”
“I’m serious,” he said. He lifted her hands out of the soapy water in the sink.
“Leo”—she held herself rigid—“I was clear.” Her posture was combative, but he could hear something new in her voice, a fleeting hesitancy.
He inched closer. “You said no fucking. I respect the no-fucking rule.” Leo was entirely focused on her. His desire was physical, yes (it had been twelve weeks, not counting a couple of breezy flings with the rehab physician’s assistant in the weight room), but he also remembered how much he’d loved this part, getting past her prickly exterior, cracking her wide open like unhinging an oyster. He hadn’t thought about it in a long time, how satisfying it was to watch her steely carriage collapse a little, hear her breath catch. How good it felt to win. Fuck the firefighter.
She sighed and looked past him, out the rear windows, into the Brooklyn night and the snowflakes ecstatically spinning in the beam of the floodlight on her back deck. Her hands were wet and cold and the warmth of Leo’s fingers around her wrists was disorienting.
Leo couldn’t read her expression. Resigned? Hopeful? Defeated? He didn’t see desire yet, but he remembered how to summon it. “Steph?” he said. She smiled a little, but the smile was sad.
“I swear, Leo,” she said quietly, nearly pleading. “I’m happy.”
He was close enough now to lower his face to her neck and breathe in her skin, which smelled as it always had, faintly of chlorine, making him feel as if he could swim into her, assured and buoyant. They stood like that for a minute. He could feel his racing pulse gradually slow and align with the reliable rhythm of her constant heart. He pulled back a little to look at her. He ran his thumb along her lower lip, the same way he had with the marble carving earlier, only this time the lip yielded.
And then, from the backyard, an enormous crash splitting the outdoor quiet like a clap of thunder. Then flickering lights. Then darkness.
When Leo arrived at the Oyster Bar, he worked some magic with the surly maître d’. Within minutes the Plumbs were seated and had unconsciously arranged themselves around the red-checkered tablecloth according to birth order: Leo, Jack, Bea, Melody. They shed coats and hats and made a little too much of ordering “just water and coffee.” Leo apologized for running late and explained how he was staying with a friend in Brooklyn (Stephanie! Bea realized), and he’d taken the wrong train and had to retrace his steps. Obligatory chatter about how Brooklyn had become so crowded and expensive and why was the subway so unreliable on the weekends anyway and, well, the weather certainly didn’t help, snow in October! Then they all fell uncomfortably silent—except Leo, who seemed utterly calm while appraising his brother and sisters, who all looked back at him, ill at ease.
The three of them wondered how he did it, how he always managed to be unruffled while putting everyone else on edge, how even in this moment,