Page 19 - Vol. VI #1

of alcohol. He was entirely sober. He’d lost his contact lenses sometime during the night and now wore his round, wire-framed glasses, which made him seem younger, uncertain, highlighting the boyish curve of his cheeks, his button nose. His wife and son were not with him and he made no mention of them; neither Alice nor Lily asked where they were or even thought to.
was a limited edition by George Seewell, a British sculptor from, I don’t know, the twenties or some- thing. It was worth, like, $10,000, only Grandpa made me give it back.”
“I still don’t know why you guys want it,” said Lily. “Personally, I don’t care. You guys decide who gets it between the two of you.” She and Kelly had arrived at the condo hours ago and had already emptied half the kitchen.
“Jesus,” said Roger. “You bought it fair and square. He should’ve put it into a good mutual fund for you. You and Kelly could’ve bought a house by now.”
“She suspected that she was
the only truly happy one at the table. “
“Halloween, right?” Roger asked. “He was a pi- rate or something.”
“She gave me a hundred dollars. I bought a Christie Brinkley Hot Rollers Salon Set. The point is that it came true. Like for you, too, Alice. You did marry well.”
“Eric? He took off fourteen years ago, right after that horrible party.”
“I always thought you were married to your job,” said Lily. “I never think about Eric.”
“You know those fortunes were bullshit,” said Alice. Someone—Lily, probably—had opened the heavy drapes and now the sunlight re- vealed galaxies of dust, smears across the doors of the china cabinet, the rubble of the coffee table. The place was filthy but up until then, it had been a subterfuge filth. Now it was an open, obvious filth.
“Married to my job,” said Alice. “That turned out about as well as Eric, that bum.” Eric Brendle had appeared in the Spinlux mailroom as a temp, short and taut, smoky-eyed, sugar-lipped. He dazzled Alice with handcut pasta, his fluent Ital- ian and Russian, his conviction that great things were materializing. The grandfather’s prediction that she’d marry well but never know it had both comforted and angered her from the first day, and somehow Eric Brendle fit the framework perfectly. Still, she’d always resented being made to feel like she was too ungrateful or maybe too dumb to notice when someone was treating her well. It had hovered over her for her entire life, her grandfather’s predictions, his words uttered with ironbound certainty.
“Not bullshit!” Lily knelt on the carpet on the other side of the coffee table, so that she was fac- ing Roger and Alice. “Don’t you guys know? About me, I mean? Grandpa said I’d discover a great fortune before I was twenty. You know about the garage sale, right?”
“I got an idea,” said Roger. “Lily thinks of a num- ber and then we each pull a card out of the deck. Card that comes closest gets the deck.”
Roger sighed and rubbed his face. “God, you don’t mean that dumb, ugly-ass garden elf you bought for a buck off that psycho neighbor?”
“What about face cards?” said Alice.
“No, listen. The Antiques Roadshow guy said it
“Jacks, queens, kings, in that order. Aces high. Agreed?” He walked around the room, looking at
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