from work, effort, commitment, and routine. At one time, the Plumbs of Eastern Long Island had family money and a decent amount of real estate. Decades of behavioral blunders and ill-conceived marriages and businesses run amok had left next to nothing by the time Leonard was in high school. He’d wangled himself an engineering scholarship to Cornell and then a job with Dow Chemical during a time he referred to, reverently, as the Dawn of the Absorbency Revolution.
Leonard had lucked onto a team working with a new substance: synthetic polymers that could absorb three hundred times more liquid than conventional organic absorbents like paper and cotton. As his colleagues set to work identifying potential uses for the new superabsorbers—agriculture, industrial processing, architecture, military applications—Leonard seized on something else: consumer products.
According to Leonard’s oft-repeated legend, the business he and his two partners started, advising larger corporations on how to use the new absorbers, was nearly solely responsible for daintier feminine hygiene products (which he never failed to mention in mixed company, mortifying his children), better disposable diapers (his proudest accomplishment, he’d spent a small fortune on a diaper service when the first three were babies), and the quilted square of revolting plastic that still sits beneath every piece of slaughtered meat or poultry in the supermarket (he was not above rooting through the garbage at a dinner party and hoisting the discarded square triumphantly, saying “Mine!”). Leonard built a thriving business based on absorbency and it was the thing he was proudest of, the fact of his life that lent a sweet gleam to all his accomplishments.
He was not a materialistic man. The exterior of his roomy Tudor house was scrupulously maintained, the interior one tick short of slovenly. He was loath to spend money on anything he thought he could fix himself, and he believed he could fix everything. The contents of the Plumb house existed in varying states of disrepair, waiting for Leonard’s attention and marked with his handwritten notes: a hair dryer that could only be held with a mittened pot holder because the cracked handle overheated so quickly (“Use with Care!”), outlets that delivered tiny electric shocks (“Use Upper, Not Lower!”), leaky coffeemakers (“Use Sparingly!”), bikes with no brakes (“Use with Caution!”), and countless defunct blenders, tape recorders, televisions, stereo components (“DO NOT USE!”).
(Years later, unconsciously at first and then deliberately because it made them laugh and was a neat, private shorthand, Bea and Leo would borrow Leonard’s note vernacular for editing manuscripts—use more, use sparingly, DO NOT USE!)
Leonard was a careful, conservative investor in blue chip stocks. He was happy to set aside some funds to provide a modest safety net for his children’s future, but he also wanted them to be financially independent and to value hard work. He’d grown up around trust fund kids—knew many of them still—and he’d seen the damage an influx of early money caused: abundance proffered too soon led to lassitude and indolence, a wandering dissatisfaction. The trust he established was meant to be a soupçon, a little something to sit atop their own, inevitable financial achievements—they were his children, after all—and pad their retirement a bit, maybe help fund a college tuition or two. Nothing so vast as to be truly significant.
Keeping the money tied up until Melody was forty appealed to Leonard for many reasons. He was realistic about the maturity—emotional and otherwise—of his four children: not commendable. He suspected if they didn’t get the money all at once, it would become a source of conflict between those who had it and those who didn’t; they wouldn’t be kind to one another. And if anyone was going to need the money earlier in life, Leonard imagined it would be Melody. She wasn’t the brightest of the four (that would be Bea), or the most charming (Leo), or the most resourceful (Jack).
On the long list of things Leonard didn’t believe in, near the top was paying strangers to manage his money. So one summer evening he enlisted his second cousin George Plumb, who was an attorney, to meet for dinner and hammer out the details of his estate.
It never occurred to Leonard that evening, as he and George leisurely made their way through two Gibson martinis, a superior Pommard, twenty-eight ounces of rib eye with creamed spinach, cigars and brandy, that in less than two years he would be felled by a massive coronary behind the wheel of his scrupulously maintained fifteen-year-old BMW sedan while driving home from work one late night. He never imagined that the bull market of the aughts, riding on mortgage-backed securities, would balloon the trust far beyond his intention, nor could he have foreseen how the staid but eerily prescient George would providentially transfer The Nest to the safer havens of bonds right before the market’s decline in 2008, protecting the capital that the Plumb siblings had watched, during the decade before Melody’s fortieth birthday, inflate to numbers beyond their wildest dreams. He never imagined that as the fund grew so, too, would his children’s tolerance for risk, for doing the one thing Leonard had repeatedly warned them not to do, ever, in any avenue of life, from the time they were old enough to understand: count the chickens before they hatched.
The only person who could access the funds early was Francie and in spite of her casual allegiance to Leonard while he was alive (or maybe because of it, she married her second husband practically within minutes of shedding her widow’s weeds), she abided by Leonard’s wishes to the letter. Her interest in her children, anemic when she was actually responsible for them, dwindled to the occasional holiday brunch or birthday phone call. Leo was the only one who had never petitioned Francie for a loan using The Nest as collateral. Jack and Melody and Bea had all asked at one time that she consider an earlier dispersal, but she stubbornly refused.
Until Leo’s accident.
The day Leo was released from rehab, a few days before the family lunch at the Oyster Bar, he went straight to his Tribeca apartment hoping to broker some civil temporary living arrangement with his about-to-be ex-wife, Victoria. That she had other plans became clear when his key no longer fit in the lock of the front door.
“Don’t bother fighting this one,” George told him over the phone. “Just find a hotel. Remember my advice. Lie low.”
Leo didn’t want to confess to George that Bea had taken his wallet the night of the accident. He’d arrived at rehab with nothing more than his house keys, his iPhone (which was immediately confiscated and returned to him the day he was released), and sixty dollars in his pocket (ditto). Standing at the Franklin Street subway station, paging through the contacts on his phone, he realized with deflating clarity how few people in Manhattan would be happy to lend him their sofa. How many friendships he’d let wane and diminish over the past few years while he and Victoria indulged each other’s miseries and spent money as if it were somehow magically regenerating. How few people would be sorry to hear he’d had some trouble and would hope for his recovery or return. He’d lived in New York for more than twenty years and had never not had a place to go home to.
The small piece of paper with a cell-phone number on it, pressed on him by his rehab roommate “just in case,” felt like a squirming minnow in his back pocket. He took the paper out, punched the numbers into his phone, and left a message before he had time to think about it, which was exactly the opposite of what he’d been incessantly lectured to do during his stay in Bridges, the recovery center where his family had dumped him for twelve endless weeks. He’d hated every minute of it. Individual therapy hadn’t been half bad; he’d vented practically nonstop about Victoria and had almost exhausted his bitterness over her avarice. He almost felt like getting rid of her was worth the enormous price tag. Almost. But he should have negotiated something about the apartment for the next week or two.
The wool jacket he was wearing was not nearly warm enough. The day was unusually cold for October. He was vaguely aware of an ominous weather report. The New York Post headline at the subway newsstand screamed SNOWTOBER! As Leo stood waiting for a return call on his phone, he watched two panhandlers at the subway entrance compete for change. On one side, an elderly homeless guy was holding a knit cap in his hand and exuberantly addressing passersby with a hearty Hello! Stay dry! Cold one today! And