“They had a mini-crisis with Preston this morning. He’s been hospitalized again. They didn’t get here until two o’clock.”
Preston, their thirty-six-year-old son, lived with them. He had been through rehab twice, but he still enjoyed washing down illegally obtained prescription medications with tequila.
“I told them to take the day off, no problem,” Nicky said, “but you know how they are.”
“Responsible as hell.”
She smiled. “Not much call for their type in the modern world. I told them you expected to be late, but they insisted on staying to serve dinner and do the initial cleanup.”
“Has Minette eaten?”
“Not without Daddy. No way. We’re all night owls here, and she might be the most nocturnal of us all.”
“The Cakebread’s nice.”
“Bliss.” She sipped her wine.
On her driver’s license, her eyes were said to be blue, but they were purple. Sometimes they were as bright and deep as an effulgent twilight sky. At the moment, they were iris petals in soft shadow.
She said, “Preston worries me, you know.”
“Doesn’t worry me. He’s a self-centered creep. He’ll overdose or he won’t. What worries me is the toll he’s taking on his parents.”
“No, I mean … Walter and Imogene are such nice people. They love him. They raised him well, did all the right things. Yet he became what he is. You never know.”
“Zach, Naomi, Minnie – they’re going to turn out fine. They’re good kids.”
“They’re good kids,” Nicolette agreed. “And Preston was a good kid once. You never know. You can only hope.”
John thought of Billy Lucas, the clean-cut honor student and book lover. The rancid puddle of milk and blood. The blood-glazed collage of unpaid bills. The throttled grandmother, the sister’s crimson bed.
“They’ll be fine. They’re great.” He changed the subject. “By the way, something happened today that made me wonder about those snapshots we took at Minnie’s birthday party. Did you email them to your folks?”
“Sure. I told you.”
“I guess I forgot. To anyone else?”
“Just Stephanie. Sometimes Minnie reminds me of her when she was a little girl.”
Stephanie was Nicky’s younger sister, now thirty-two and the sous-chef at an acclaimed restaurant in Boston.
“Would Stephanie or your folks have forwarded the pictures to anyone else?”
Nicky shrugged, then looked puzzled. “Why? Suddenly this seems like a gentle grilling.”
He didn’t want to alarm her. Not yet. Not until and if he could logically explain the reason he was worried.
“At work, I ran into someone who mentioned Minnie in the bunny ears at her birthday party. Someone emailed him the photo. He didn’t remember who.”
“Well, she’s supercute in those ears, and you know how people swap things that tickle them. The photo’s probably up on any number of websites. Cute Kids dot com, Bunny Ears dot com—”
“Predatory Pedophiles dot com.”
Getting to her feet, she said, “Sometimes you’re all cop when half cop would be tough enough.”
“You’re right. The problem is you never know when it’s going to turn out to be a half-cop or an all-cop day.”
She rang her glass against his, a single clear note. “You can’t go through life always in high gear.”
“You know what I’m like. I don’t downshift well.”
“Let’s go have dinner. Later I’ll shift your gears for you.”
She carried her wineglass on high, as if it were a torch with which she revealed the way.
Carrying his glass and the bottle, he followed, inexpressibly grateful for his life with her – and more aware than usual that what is woven will inevitably unweave, the wound will unwind, the raveled will unravel. The thing most worth praying for was that the moment of the un would come only when you were old and tired and filled to the brim with this life. Too often, that was not the timetable that Destiny had in mind.
Before dinner, John visited Walter and Imogene Nash in the kitchen, though not to commiserate with them about Preston’s latest fall. They were too self-reliant and possessed too much self-respect to want to be seen as victims, and they were too considerate to want others to shoulder any smallest part of their burden.
Walter toiled as a navy cook for twenty-four years, most of it at a harbor base rather than aboard ship, and Imogene worked as a dental hygienist. When he grew tired of measuring ingredients in hundred-pound and five-gallon increments, when she wearied of staring into gaping mouths, they retired from their professions and, at fifty, went to a school to learn estate management.
In ultrawealthy Montecito, California, they ran a twelve-acre property on which stood a forty-thousand-square-foot main house, a five-thousand-square-foot guest house, horse stables, two swimming pools, and vast rose gardens. Walter and Imogene thrived, managing a staff of twenty, until drunken Preston, then thirty and intending to reunite with his parents for the purpose of negotiating a guilt stipend, had slammed back into their lives by crashing his rental car into the gatehouse, collapsing half the structure, narrowly missing the security guard, and cursing out the owner, who helped extract him from his vehicle before it might burst into flames.
Preston in tow, the Nashes left California and returned to their roots, hoping that by dedicating a year to their son’s rehabilitation, they could restore him to a life of sobriety and self-sufficiency. Instead, he became the thing that lived in their basement apartment, sullen and reclusive, occupying himself with video games, smut, and drug-induced stupors. For weeks and even months at a time, Preston remained as elusive as the Phantom of the Opera – until one too many chemical cocktails gave him the screaming whimwhams so bad that he saw evil clowns climbing out of his toilet, or the equivalent.
Even in his silent and reclusive periods, Preston took a toll from his parents. Expectation of his next collapse was almost as emotionally draining as the event itself.
Estate managers usually were required to live on site, but no employer wanted the Nashes to bring along their pale and stubbled basement dweller. Instead of managing a major property and its staff, they were reduced to cleaning house and cooking for the Calvinos, a position they’d held for more than four years. Overqualified, they never acted as though the job might be beneath them; they worked hard and were cheerful, perhaps because work provided escape from worry.
When John entered the kitchen, Walter was plating salads at the center island. Five eight, trim, with steel-rod posture, he might have passed for a jockey if he had been a few inches shorter and ten pounds lighter. His small, strong hands and his economy of movement suggested he would be able to control half a ton of horseflesh with the subtlest pressure of a knee or the slightest tug of the reins.
“There’s no need to serve us dinner when we haven’t any guests,” John said. “You’ve had a long day.”
“You’ve had a long day, as well, Mr. C,” Walter said. “Besides, there’s nothing like some extra work to ensure against a sleepless night.”
“Well, don’t think you’re staying all the way through cleanup. The terrible trio can help Nicky and me. We’re nearly three-quarters through the year, and they haven’t yet broken twenty dishes. We don’t want to deny them every chance to exceed their personal best score.”