Commonwealth

6

Leo Posen had taken a house in Amagansett for the summer. There was no view of the ocean, a person would have to write an entirely different kind of book in order to afford an ocean view, but it was a beautiful house with wide halls and sunny rooms, a porch swing the size of a daybed, a kitchen with an enormous table that looked like it had been pegged together by Pilgrims to celebrate a later, more prosperous Thanksgiving. The house belonged to an actress who was shooting a movie in Poland for the summer, and summer was the only time she used it. The real estate broker had made it clear that this property was never rented, but the actress was a great admirer of Leo’s. In fact, she was hoping for a part in the movie of Commonwealth. She wanted to play the doctor who was having the affair, and hoped that Leo, surrounded by her pretty things, her pictures, would think of her.

In the spirit of full disclosure, Leo told the broker there was no movie deal.

The broker was stopped by this. Even she, who knew next to nothing about the movie business, knew that the rights should have been snapped up before publication. For the briefest instant she wondered if the option for Commonwealth was something she herself could acquire. “Don’t worry about that,” the broker said. “When they do make the movie she’s still going to want the part.”

Leo had rented the house in hopes that he would spend the summer working on a new novel, the one his literary agent had sold to his publisher without so much as an outline while Commonwealth was ringing the slot machines. He had also rented the house in hopes of pleasing Franny. He’d told her she wouldn’t have to do anything but lie on the big down sofa in the front room and read all day, or she could ride her bike to the beach and read. “Sand, waves, beach roses,” he said, picking up a strand of her fascinating hair and letting it fall between his fingers. At night after dinner they would sit together on the porch and he would read her everything he’d written that day. “That doesn’t sound like such a bad vacation.”

But it was a bad vacation. The problem, they realized much too late, was the glorious house itself, which sat atop a hill to catch the afternoon breeze while a great hedge surrounded the property for privacy. The fruit trees scattered over the wide lawn had been late to bloom because of the long, hard winter, so that even now in early June the cherry trees were weighted with dark pink blossoms. The jumbled flower beds that spoke of glorious disarray were tended by a gardener who came on Wednesdays, the same day a Peruvian man with a skimmer net came to remove the cherry blossoms from the swimming pool. There were five bedrooms with variations on the sloping-ceiling-dormer-window theme: window seats, puffy comforters, hand-braided rugs over floors of quarter-sawn oak. Leo Posen had told the broker that he was looking for something considerably smaller but she dismissed the idea. “Smaller will still be more expensive because of the deal you’re getting,” she told him. “You cannot imagine what this house would cost you if you were renting at fair market value. If you don’t want to use the extra rooms I suggest you close the doors.”

That might have solved the problem were it not for the fact that nature abhors an empty bedroom in summer in Amagansett, especially when those rooms are owned by an actress and rented by a novelist. People wanted to visit. Eric, his editor, who should have been the one to hire a sentry to patrol the property line with a gun, was the first to call and say how nice it would be to get together outside of the city and talk over Leo’s ideas for the new book. Eric could come out Thursday, beating the rush, but Marisol, his wife, had an opening she needed to go to that night. He supposed that Marisol would have to brave the Jitney on Friday.

Marisol? Leo stumbled for an instant but then agreed pleasantly to everything — yes, yes, a great time would be had by all. He hung up the phone and looked at the yellow legal pad in front of him, then he looked out the window. It was raining, and for a while he sat and admired the cherry trees, wondering if anyone had ever made a legal pad out of a cherry tree. Then he went downstairs to see if Franny thought they should drive into town for lunch.

“It’s good that Eric’s coming,” Leo said to Franny. The rain was light and they sat outside under an awning at the café where they’d had lunch three days in a row. It was extremely pleasant. “I can ask him about finding you a job. You’re a terrific editor, you know, better than he’ll ever be, not that I’d mention that.”

Franny shook her head. “Don’t ask him.”

The waitress came by and Leo touched the rim of his empty wineglass. It was after two o’clock, a very late lunch. “If I don’t ask him he’ll figure it out himself. I might just mention that you’re looking for something. Or maybe I’ll mention it to Marisol.”

“Eric knows me,” she said. “If he wants to hire me he knows where I am.” Of course, Eric had probably noticed that Leo and Franny didn’t live in New York, and in fact didn’t live anywhere for more than four months at a time, which would make taking on a regular job difficult. Anyway, Franny wasn’t sure she wanted to be an editor.

“Eric knows you from dinner parties. He hasn’t gotten to spend any real time with you. That’s why this is going to work out so well.”

When Eric came on Thursday afternoon he said he’d rather stay in for dinner. He’d been out every night that week, and anyway it would be so much easier to talk at the house. Eric was in every sense a wiry man, a runner with a small frame who must have once been told that blue complemented his eyes. Franny had never seen Eric in anything other than blue. He looked up the staircase, touching the banister with affection.

Leo looked at Franny. “That would be all right, wouldn’t it?”

She should have seen it right then but she didn’t. She was thinking in terms of one dinner, one night. Franny went into the kitchen and called Jerrell at the Palmer House to ask him how to cook steaks. He would just be at the beginning of his shift now. He would be chopping parsley.

“Little House,” he said. “Get the fuck back here. You know can’t nobody else fill my cup.”

She laughed. “I’m going to give up my summer to go get your lemonade at the bar? Be a friend and help me here.”

Jerrell was standing in the manager’s office and the manager was staring at him. The cooks never got calls. He told her to rub a little bit of Old Bay on the meat and let it sit. “I mean a little bit. That shit is not for steaks.” Then he walked her through the basics of asparagus and baked potatoes. “You buy the salad and a cake. Somebody out there’s got money. Don’t you go doing everything yourself.”

Franny went to the grocery store, the butcher’s, the bakery. She went to the liquor store and picked out the wines, stocked up on scotch and gin. When she got back to the house she unloaded the car. Leo and Eric had begged off the trip to town, saying they were going to talk about the novel first, get business out of the way. She could hear them laughing out on the screened porch on the side of the house where Leo had decided it would be all right to smoke. Great, raucous laughter. Franny carried out two glasses of ice and a bottle of Macallan to be friendly. She was wearing her beach clothes: cut-off shorts and flip-flops, a plain white T-shirt. She was twenty-nine years old. They were playing house. She was playing hostess.

“Eric, will you look at this girl?” Leo said from his chair, putting his arm around her hips and pulling her towards him. “Is she a dream?”

“A dream,” Eric said, and then asked Franny if he could have a tall glass of Pellegrino or Perrier with ice.

Franny nodded, glad that she’d thought to buy seltzer. She went back to the kitchen. They were talking about Chekhov, not the novel. Eric was wondering whether there was a market for a new translation, a series of ten volumes, all of it. She wondered which of the stories had struck them as funny.

As a feminist, Franny had to ask herself why it was she’d made dinner for Leo and Eric on Thursday night without ever expecting that they would offer to help her, but that when Marisol came out from the city the next day in her embroidered linen tunic and red linen scarf, and sat down on the screened-in porch and said what she could really use was a glass of white wine, a nice chablis if they had it, Franny felt a little ping, like someone had just shot her in the neck with a rubber band. She had asked Marisol what she could get for her, and Marisol, digging in her purse to find her own cigarettes, so thrilled to see that someone else was smoking, had answered. What was the problem with that?

“This place is gorgeous!” Marisol said, smiling as she took the glass from Franny’s hand. “But then I’ve never known anyone as lucky as Leo.”

For much the same reason as the night before, it was decided that they wouldn’t go out for dinner that night either. Marisol gestured in the direction of the cherry trees. “Leave this place and go into town? Have dinner with all those people from the Jitney? Not on your life.” Marisol managed an art gallery in SoHo. The thought of staying in the actress’s house, listening to the actress’s crickets, was enchanting.

Franny kept her face neutral but Leo was able to catch just a flicker of the problem. He clapped his hands in a single burst of good cheer. “We can do the exact same thing we did last night. Last night’s dinner was perfect. We’ll have it again. That shouldn’t be any problem, do you think?” he said to Franny.

“Marisol doesn’t eat meat,” Eric said, using his nicest smile. Eric and Marisol were more or less Leo’s age, in the general camp of just past sixty. They had a son who was completing his residency in dermatology at Johns Hopkins and a daughter who was home with a baby.

“Fish,” Marisol said, holding up her hand in a Girl Scout pledge. “I’m really a vegetarian but I’ll eat fish socially.”

They looked at Franny, all innocence and expectation, the three of them nestled into the soft ivory cushions that covered the wicker chairs. She couldn’t call Jerrell again. He’d just tell her she was a fucking idiot. For fish she’d have to call her mother. “Anything else?” Franny asked.

Eric nodded. “Something crunchy? Some nuts or little crackers, maybe a mix?”

“Bar snacks,” Franny said, and went to the kitchen to find her keys.

This was not the way things went between Leo and Franny. Their relationship, which had been going on five years, was built on admiration and mutual disbelief. After all this time he could not believe that she was with him: not only was she young (not just younger but categorically young) and more beautiful than he had any right to deserve at this point, but she was the cable on which he had pulled himself hand over hand back into his work: she was the electricity, the spark. Franny Keating was life. For her part, Franny could say the name Leon Posen, like she was saying Anton Chekhov, and find him there in the bed beside her. It did not cease to be astonishing with time. And more than that, he had found her life meaningful when she could make no sense of it at all.

Which was not to say they were without problems: there was the future, always unknowable but, realistically speaking, doomed at some point by the thirty-two-year spread in their ages, and the past, because Leo was still technically married. His wife in Los Angeles was holding out for a cut of future royalties, a touchingly optimistic demand considering how long it had been since he’d published a book. Leo flatly refused to give up any piece of work he had not yet written. Then he had published a best seller that came with a sizable advance which had already earned out, prize money, and extensive foreign sales. As they entered into the new phase of royalty checks, his wife confirmed her belief to her lawyer that she had been right to dig in her heels.

Leo should have been rich at this point but he had to keep accepting prestigious visiting-author positions at various well-heeled institutions just to make ends meet, and these positions made it nearly impossible for him to work on his new book. Yes, there was a tremendous amount of money but it flowed from a single river and into countless tributaries. He already had one ex-wife, truly divorced and behind him, to whom he paid a significant alimony, as well as payments to the wife who should have been his second ex-wife. She cost him a fortune. His daughter from the first marriage always needed money because she needed so much more than money but money was the easiest way for her to express those needs, and then there were two sons from the second marriage who refused to speak to him at all — one a sophomore at Kenyon and the other a junior at Harvard-Westlake in Los Angeles. Their tuition, along with their every wish, was Leo’s command.

Franny knew it was past time for her to figure out her life but Leo clung to her like a child to a blanket, and honestly, it was a wonderful thing to be needed by the person she most admired, to be told she was indispensable. It was infinitely preferable to applying to graduate schools when she didn’t know what she wanted to study, and so she tended to go with him, showing up in pretty dresses to faculty dinners at Stanford or Yale. Sometimes she would go back and work at the Palmer House for a couple of months, living in the apartment they kept on North Lake Shore Drive. Leo made the payments on her loans so she was safe, but she missed making money of her own. Anyway, it was good to see her friends. The Palmer House would always take her in.

“This is madness,” he would say to her over the phone, too many drinks past the point at which he should have been calling. “I’m here by myself so that you can be a waitress? Go to the airport, please, tonight, first thing in the morning, just get on a plane. I’ll send you a ticket.” It was something of a joke between them, him sending her a ticket, though in this case he wasn’t joking.

“You’re going to be fine.” Franny made a point not to say anything that mattered in conversations like these. Tomorrow he wouldn’t remember a word of it. “And this is good for me. I need to work every now and then.”

“You have worked! You have consistently inspired me when the entire world failed at the job. I’ll give you a salary. I’ll write you a check. It’s your fucking book, Franny. It’s you.”

Of course, when he was writing the book he said that wasn’t the case. He said that what she had told him was nothing but the jumping-off point for his imagination. It wasn’t her family. No one would see them there.

But there they were.

Other than the difference in their ages, and the fact he had an estranged wife, and had written a novel about her family which in its final form made her want to retch even though she had found it nothing less than thrilling when he was working on it, Franny and Leo were great. And it wasn’t as if she begrudged him the novel, it was a brilliant novel, it was the brilliant work of Leon Posen which she had brought down on herself.

But as long as anyone was making a list, there was one other problem that deserved mention, even if Franny refused to acknowledge it as a problem: Franny didn’t drink. Leo felt her abstinence as a judgment no matter how lightly she passed it off. He noticed it when they were with friends, and he noticed it when she went around to the driver’s side of the car after lunch in town because he’d had three lousy glasses of pinot gris. He noticed it when he was alone, when she was on the other side of the country. What she had told him was that she had been in an accident a long time ago, that she had caused the accident because she’d been drinking, and so she stopped drinking. He brought this up again on several occasions but he always felt like he was talking to the part of her that had gone to law school. Franny, he believed, was missing out on a great opportunity by not going back to finish her education.

He would begin: “Did you kill anyone in this car accident?”

“I did not.”

“Injure anyone? Run over a dog?”

“Nope.”

“Were you hurt?”

She gave him a deep sigh and closed the book she was reading, The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth. He had recommended it to her. “Could you give me a pass on this?”

“Are you an alcoholic?”

Franny shrugged. “Not that I know of. Probably not.”

“Then why won’t you just have a drink, keep me company. You could have a drink in the house. I’m not going to ask you to drive the car.”

She leaned over and kissed him then, as kissing was her best means of ending arguments. “Put your big brain to it,” she said kindly. “You can think of something better to fight about.”

Franny went into the kitchen and called her mother in Virginia. “Fish for dinner,” she said, “four people, something I can’t screw up.”

“Can’t you go out?” her mother asked.

“It’s not looking that way. It turns out this house is the Hotel California. People walk in the door and they don’t want to leave again. I’d probably feel the same way if I wasn’t the one doing the cooking.”

“You, cooking,” her mother said.

“I know.”

“Have you looked in her closet?”

Franny laughed out loud. Her mother could go right to the heart of the matter. “Etro bikinis, a fleet of little silk slip dresses, lots of long cashmere sweaters, featherweight, shoes like you have never seen shoes. She must be the size of an eyedropper. You can’t believe how tiny everything is.”

“What size are the shoes?”

“Sevens.” Franny had tried to push her foot into a sandal, Cinderella’s ungainly stepsister.

“If I came up I could help you cook,” her mother said.

Franny smiled, sighed. Her mother had tiny feet. “No more company. Company’s the problem right now.”

“I’m not company. I’m your mother.” She said it lightly.

For a minute Franny thought how nice it would be, her mother on the other end of the sofa reading books. For the most part Franny went home alone to Virginia, or her mother came to visit when Franny was in Chicago working at the bar. The few times Leo and her mother had been together they were cool and polite. Her mother was younger than Leo. She had read Commonwealth, and while she was glad she got to be a doctor, she would have been gladder still to have been left out altogether. Beverly didn’t believe that Leo Posen had her daughter’s best interest at heart. She had told him that once when she and Leo were drinking. Franny’s mother was not what they needed to complete their summer vacation.

“Please,” Franny said. “Just help me with the fish.”

Her mother put the phone down so she could go and get her recipe for seafood chowder. “If you follow my instructions as you have never followed my instructions even once in your life you will be a tremendous success.”

And oh, but her mother was right. They raved and praised. Eric and Marisol said they couldn’t have had a better meal in Manhattan. Franny’s mother had worked everything out, the salad with nectarines, which brand of cheese biscuits to buy, Franny was as impressed as her guests. But Leo again had failed to go to the grocery store with her, and none of them came into the kitchen to ask if they could chop the bell peppers, and when she came out to the porch to tell them dinner was ready, Eric, in the middle of another funny Chekhov story, had held up his hand so that she would know to wait until he was finished, but it took him nearly fifteen minutes to finish, and Franny could not help but think of the shrimp that were only supposed to simmer three minutes. By the end of the meal the guests were tremendously grateful, really, they couldn’t have been nicer, and Eric made a show of rolling up the sleeves of his blue linen shirt before he picked up the plates and put them in the sink, but that was it.

Leo’s agent, Astrid, called the house on Saturday morning. Her secretary had called Eric’s office the day before on a matter having nothing to do with Leo and was told in the course of the conversation that Eric was at Leo’s place in Amagansett. Astrid had a house in Sag Harbor. She came out every Thursday night in the summer and went back Monday mornings. Did they really think they weren’t going to see her? Astrid said they were coming to Amagansett that afternoon. “They” included one of her authors, a young man of exceeding promise who was spending two weeks at her place while he nailed down a few last revisions.

“I’ll give you the address,” Leo said with some resignation.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Everyone knows the house.”

“Astrid?” Eric’s face arranged into an expression of mild despair. He was working the crossword puzzle from the Saturday paper. He hadn’t shaved and didn’t want to shave.

“She didn’t ask,” Leo said, though Leo liked Astrid. The very fact that Eric didn’t like her was proof that she was doing her job.

“There goes lunch,” Eric said.

Marisol came down the stairs in a red swimsuit and a wide-brimmed hat. “I’m going to the pool,” she said.

“Astrid’s coming,” Eric said.

Marisol stopped and put on her sunglasses. “Well, she lives in Sag Harbor. It’s not like she’s going to stay over.”

Franny drove to Bridgehampton and bought lunch at a ridiculously expensive gourmet shop that sold prepared foods, put the food in the car, and then, struck by the clear and sudden understanding that no one would be leaving, walked straight back in and bought dinner. Leo had given her his credit card. The total for the two meals came to an unspeakable fortune. By the time she got back to the house Astrid was there with a pale young writer named Jonas who had shiny black hair and yellow linen pants. He ate twice as much as the rest of them put together. Franny realized sadly there would be no leftovers for tomorrow’s lunch.

“Why reprint Chekhov?” the young writer said to Eric, taking both the herbed chicken breast and the lemon-poached salmon to his plate. “Why not have the courage to publish some young Russian writers instead?”

“Maybe because I don’t work at a publishing house in Russia.” Eric poured himself a glass of wine and then topped off Marisol’s glass. “Oh, and I don’t speak Russian.”

“Jonas speaks Russian,” Astrid said, the proud mother.

“Konechno,” Jonas said.

Astrid nodded. “He’s very involved with the refuseniks.”

“There are no refuseniks,” Leo said. “They opened up the gate and let them out in the seventies.”

“The refuseniks were my field of study,” Jonas said. “And believe me, there are still plenty of oppressed Jews in Russia.”

“So shouldn’t I be publishing some young Russian writing about the refuseniks instead of an American who’s studied them? Wouldn’t that show more courage?”

“You don’t publish me.”

Eric smiled at so pleasing a thought. “Let’s call it a draw, shall we? Chekhov is my field of study, the refuseniks are yours. We’re both old news.”

“Is that couscous?” Marisol asked Franny, pointing at the salad with the cucumbers and tomatoes.

“Israeli,” Franny said, passing the dish. “It’s just bigger.”

Franny’s premonition in the gourmet shop proved to be correct. Come dinner, Leo and the guests were still lounging on various sofas throughout the house. Jonas appeared to be working on a manuscript, or at least he had a stack of paper in his lap, a pencil between his teeth. It was odd to think he’d brought a manuscript to lunch. Eric came in from the pool and allowed that while the idea of more food had seemed impossible just two short hours ago, he thought he might be getting hungry again. At the very least he needed a drink.

Leo looked up and smiled. “Now there’s a thought.”

After a very long evening, in which Franny didn’t have to cook but did need to heat and plate and serve, after the consumption of an extraordinary amount of wine and then the raiding of the actress’s Calvados and Sauternes for after-dinner drinks (“Franny, make a note of what we’re stealing,” Leo said, rifling through the rack in the pantry. “I want to remember to replace it.”) when everyone had wandered back out to the side porch to smoke, Franny was left with a dining room that looked like Bacchus had thrown a bash. She drew in her breath and began to stack plates.

The tall young novelist followed her to the kitchen. For a minute she thought he was interested in helping before realizing that he was in fact just interested. He was wearing glasses now, though she didn’t remember him wearing them earlier when he was reading.

“My contract is with Knopf,” he told her, picking up a wineglass and holding it in a dish towel. “Entre nous, I was hoping for FSG. Ever since I was in college I’ve wanted to be published by FSG, but”—he shrugged at Franny and leaned against the sink—“you know.”

“They didn’t want the book?” she asked.

Jonas looked hurt. “Money,” he said. “Everyone knows FSG never has real money.”

Franny was rinsing the plates when Leo came in. “There you are!” he called to the young novelist. His arms were wide open and he was holding a highball glass in one hand. “I’ve been wanting to show you a tree.” He could bellow sometimes when he was drinking, and Franny wondered, with all the windows open, if the neighbors could hear him.

“A tree?” Jonas said. His glasses were lightly steamed from his proximity to the sink.

Leo put his arm around the young man’s shoulder and led him away. “Come and see it. There’s a beautiful night sky.”

“Really, Leo?” Franny called after them. “A tree? That’s the best you can come up with?”

Astrid didn’t spend the night but somehow the young writer did. Jonas said he was prone to car sickness if he’d been drinking and certainly he’d been drinking. He looked around the house and declared the entire situation straight-up Fitzgerald, so much so that sleeping over would have to be part of it. Astrid, who would have stayed herself had an invitation been extended, volunteered to drive back for him tomorrow around lunch.

When the last of the actress’s Danish china had been returned to the glass-fronted cabinets and the zinc countertops had been wiped down and the trash taken out, Franny stopped to survey her good work. The houseguests had provided her with three days’ hard labor, but it was a kind of labor she was used to. Not the cooking maybe, but the refilling of glasses and the emptying of ashtrays, the straightening and fetching, the quiet audience to conversation. Tomorrow was Sunday and on Sunday it would be over. Franny felt proud of herself: she’d been a good sport. Leo would be grateful for all the many kindnesses she’d shown his friends.

After a hungover breakfast in which everyone who requested eggs requested them cooked a different way, Leo announced that he had to work. He put his legal pad and pens and scotch and two volumes of Chekhov (Eric had convinced him to write the introduction to the new edition, though, of course, not until his own novel was finished) in a canvas tote bag and walked across the lawn to the tiny one-room cottage at the back of the property. With its little desk and single bed and overstuffed chair, its ottoman and floor lamp, it was easy to imagine that the place had been built for exactly this purpose: not to write, because Leo was not writing, but to get away from the hordes of moths that had been drawn to the house’s magnificent flame.

“It’s good that he’s working,” Eric said to Franny. He was holding his coffee cup with both hands, looking wistfully in the direction where Leo had disappeared, the way a woman standing on the beach will look at the place on the horizon where the whaling vessel had disappeared. “We’ve got to encourage him, make sure he keeps at it. He can’t lose his momentum again.”

Franny didn’t mention that there was no momentum because there was no book. She wondered what Leo had told him. “He will,” she said vaguely, “once everything settles down and gets quiet.” Could she ask him what Jitney he was planning to take back to the city? She looked at Eric, his gray hair long and curling, his glasses pushed to the top of his head. “Let me know about the Jitney,” she said. “I’ll drive you down. There can be a line on Sunday if you wait too long.”

Marisol shook her head. “Friday was enough for me. I can’t even imagine Sunday.” She looked at her husband. “When are you going back?”

Eric tilted his head back and forth as if he were trying to calculate a tip. “Tuesday? Maybe Tuesday. I’ll have to check and see.”

Marisol nodded and pulled the style section out of the paper. “Well, I get an extra day. I came out a day later than you did.”

Jonas arrived in the kitchen wearing green swim trunks and a T-shirt. “Can I just have coffee for now?” he said, squinting against the morning light. “I’m going for a swim.”

Franny had so much to say, but in that exact moment she was distracted by the writer’s swim trunks, stunned by them. “Where did you get swim trunks?”

Jonas looked down at himself. “These? I don’t remember. REI?” In the T-shirt, in the bright light, he looked no more than twenty.

“They’re yours? You brought them here?”

They were all looking at her now.

“I brought them here,” he said. He plucked at the fabric with two fingers. “Are they okay?”

“You brought extra clothes?”

He caught her line of questioning and came back at his hostess with an ill-prepared defense. “I get carsick. And I don’t like to ride in cars at night. Astrid said it was a big house.”

Franny had been at the market when they arrived. She hadn’t seen him come in with a suitcase. She would need to wash the sheets in his bedroom unless he wasn’t planning to leave. The phone started to ring and Jonas, in a gesture of independence, poured his own coffee and went out the back door.

“I want to talk to my father,” the voice on the phone said.

“Ariel?”

There was no answer, because the answer would be that Leo had three children and two of them were boys and only the girl was speaking to him these days, so if a woman called asking for her father, then, yes, it was going to be Ariel.

“Hold on a minute,” Franny said. “He’s out in the back. I’ll have to get him.”

Eric gave her a look to inquire as to the nature of Ariel’s call but Franny ignored him. She crossed through the wet grass, beneath the cherry trees and past the pool where Jonas was already lying shirtless on the diving board, the cup of coffee beside his head. When she got to the cabin door she didn’t knock.

“Ariel’s on the phone,” she said.

Leo was stretched across the single bed with a volume of Chekhov in his hands. He looked up at Franny and smiled. “Would you tell her I’m working? Tell her I’ll call her back.”

“Not on your life,” Franny said.

“I can’t talk to her now.”

“Well, neither can I, so I suggest you go down to the kitchen and hang up the phone.”

She walked out of the cabin and to the back of the property. She knew where there was a break in the hedge and she took it: through the neighbor’s yard, down their driveway, and out onto the street, her flip-flops slapping against her feet. She wished she had her bicycle, a hat, some money, and at the same time she wished for nothing in the world but to be alone. Franny couldn’t help but believe that she had brought every discomfort she experienced down on herself. Had she done something with her life no one would be asking her to make them cappuccino, and had she done something with her life she would be perfectly happy to make them cappuccino, because it would not be her job. She would make the coffee because she was a gracious and helpful person. She could feel good about being kind without continually wondering if she were anything more than a nice-enough-looking waitress. She wished, as she approached thirty, that she had figured out how to be more than a muse, or, as her father had put it the last time she had seen him in Los Angeles, “Being a mistress isn’t a job.”

Her father hadn’t read Commonwealth but her sister had.

“There’s nothing particularly libelous about it,” Caroline said to Franny. “He’s covered his tracks.”

“I’m grateful that you don’t review for the Times.”

“I’ll put it another way: I didn’t enjoy it but I’m not going to sue him.”

“You’re hardly even in the book.”

Caroline laughed. “Maybe that’s what irritated me about it. Anyway, if I was going to sue I’d make it a class-action case, get the whole family involved.”

“Well,” Franny said, “that would be one way to get us all together again.”

It was funny how much Franny missed Caroline now. For as much as they’d hated each other growing up, a peculiar fondness had crept in somewhere along the way. Franny and Caroline knew all the same stories. Caroline practiced patent law in Silicon Valley. There was nothing harder than that. She was married to a software designer named Wharton. Wharton was his last name but no one ever called him anything else because his first name was Eugene. Franny believed that Wharton had softened her sister up. He made Caroline laugh. Franny had no memory of her sister ever laughing about anything when they were growing up, at least never in front of her. Caroline and Wharton had a baby named Nick.

Franny got to spend a lot of time with Caroline the semester Leo was teaching at Stanford. Caroline still badgered her about going back to law school, and Franny was able to believe that the badgering came from a place of affection.

“Believe me,” Caroline said, “I know school is miserable. I even know that practicing law can be miserable. But sooner or later you have to do something. If you think you’re going to find one thing that will be perfect for you, you’re going to spend your eightieth birthday reading the want ads.”

“You sound like you’re trying to talk me into a bad marriage.”

“But it doesn’t have to be a bad marriage. Why can’t you see that? Get a law degree and go fight housing discrimination, or go get a job for a publisher and write book contracts for authors.”

Franny smiled and shook her head. “I’ll figure it out,” was what she had said to her sister.

But she hadn’t figured it out, and now she was in Amagansett walking through town in order to avoid the man she loved and his friends. Franny looked in shop windows, and when she saw a newspaper on a bench she sat down and read the entire thing. The light was so soft, so honeyed, that she could almost forgive her houseguests for wanting to stay. She waited until she was sure it was too late for anyone to ask her to make them lunch. She passed the restaurant she and Leo liked, hoping that by some chance she would see him there. Finally she decided to go back. There was nothing else to do. She had planned to sneak up to the bedroom undetected, but they saw her from the side porch and waved.

“Franny, what a day we’ve had without you!” Leo said, as if there had been nothing strange about her leaving or her return.

Astrid, back from Sag Harbor, nodded. “I had to bring the sandwiches for lunch. There’s still some sorbet.”

“And Eric and I went into town and bought things for dinner,” Marisol said.

“Someone’s still going to have to go back into town,” Eric said. “We didn’t get enough.”

Franny looked at them up on the porch, everyone softened by the veil of the screen, by the light that was slanting in behind them, by the bank of yellow lilies that separated them from her. It was not unlike seeing tigers at the zoo.

“Hollinger called,” Leo said. “He’s driving in from the city with Ellen. They should be here in an hour or so.”

“Hollinger?” Astrid said. “You didn’t tell me that. How did he know where you were?” John Hollinger was not Astrid’s client. His novel The Seventh Story had beaten out Commonwealth for the Pulitzer, and both men made a great show of how this fact had not affected their friendship, even though they hadn’t exactly been friends in the first place.

Marisol gave a single, dismissive wave. “It won’t be an hour. He’s always late.”

There was a time when Franny would have been overwhelmed by the thought of John Hollinger coming for dinner, but that time had passed. Now he and his wife represented nothing more than two extra place settings at the table. This brought them up to eight, assuming that Jonas and Astrid would never leave.

“What about you?” Eric said, glancing down at Franny as if finally remembering she’d been gone. “Nice day?”

Franny shaded her eyes with her hand and looked up at him, puzzled. “Sure,” she said. That was all they needed to release her from the conversation.

There were six cardboard boxes on the long wooden table in the kitchen, a half a dozen ears of corn still in their green sleeves. She heard the sound of scratching, and then one of the boxes jerked abruptly forward.

Leo came into the kitchen and stood behind her. “I’m sorry about Hollinger,” he said, kissing the side of her head. “He wasn’t asking. He called to announce his impending arrival. We should have rented a motel room in the middle of Kansas for the summer.”

“They would have found us.”

“I spent the day hiding in the cabin so that everyone would think I was writing a novel. Where did you go?”

“What’s in the boxes?” Franny said, though of course she knew exactly what was in the boxes.

“Marisol thought it would be fun to have lobster.”

Franny turned and looked at him. “She said she was a vegetarian. Does she know how to cook them?”

“I don’t think it’s a science. You just drop them in water. Listen,” he said, putting his hands on her shoulders and looking at her straight on in a way that made him appear very brave. “I have to tell you this and I’d rather not: Ariel is coming out for a couple of days.”

Many things were possible but Franny and Ariel in the same house was not one of them. For Ariel’s sake Franny stayed out of the entire neighborhood surrounding Gramercy Park when she went to New York. It was the single way they respected one another: they did not overlap. “She wouldn’t come out when she knows I’m here,” Franny said. “I answered the phone.”

“I think she really just wants to see the house. I made the mistake of telling her about it months ago. I didn’t think we were going to rent it then. She said she needs a vacation.”

Franny was distracted by the scratching. The boxes, she could see now, were shuffling across the table in microscopic increments. The thought of each separate lobster in the dark was every bit as excruciating as the thought of Ariel Posen coming to Amagansett, either that or she was experiencing some sort of emotional transference. Leo followed her gaze to the table.

“I should have been a pair of ragged claws,” he said, looking at the sad containers trying to get away. “Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

“Leo, she hates me. That’s been made clear.”

Leo mustered the energy for a wan smile. “Well, maybe this is the summer she stops hating you and we all get along. It’s got to happen sooner or later.”

“When?” Franny asked. Not When will she stop hating me? — Franny knew the answer to that one — but When is she coming?

He sighed and pulled her to him, the wide, warm chest of literature. “She didn’t know. Probably tomorrow, possibly Tuesday. She said if she got everything together she could come out tonight, but I don’t think we need to worry about tonight.”

“Is she bringing Button?” Button was Ariel’s daughter, the four-year-old granddaughter of Leo Posen, the only grandchild.

Leo looked at her, surprised. “Of course she’s bringing Button.”

Of course. “Anyone else?”

Leo went to the refrigerator and found a bottle of pinot gris unfinished from lunch. He poured what was left in a glass sitting out on the sink. “Maybe a boyfriend. There’s someone named Gerrit. I think he’s Dutch. She said she didn’t know what Gerrit’s plans were yet. She might be on better behavior if she has someone to impress.”

“Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” Franny asked the lobsters.

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Leo said.

Franny shook her head. “Nothing. It’s the next line.”

“It’s not the next line,” he said, and took his wine out to the porch.

Franny put a pair of scissors in her purse and carried the six boxes out to the car. Franny, who felt herself to be without talent, was very adept at carrying more things than anyone would have thought possible. She could feel the lobsters scrabble as their bodies slid heavily into the dark cardboard corners of the boxes.

“Need a hand?” Jonas said, speeding up his pace when he saw her. He was coming back from the pool, his chest and back unevenly scorched.

“I’ve got it,” she said, setting the boxes down to open the car door.

“Are you going into town?”

“Back into town.” She arranged her passengers on the floor of the backseat — three on either side.

“Let me just run inside and get my shirt,” he said, his face bright with opportunity. “I need some things in town. I’ll keep you company.”

She started to tell him no, to explain, but instead she nodded. She waited until the kitchen door had closed behind him, waited another ten seconds, and then got in the car and drove away.

Franny and Leo didn’t talk about marriage, except sometimes sentimentally in bed, his hands spreading wide across her back, and even then it was only to say how quickly they would have married had it not been for the future and the past. What they never spoke of was the prohibitive element in the present, which was Leo’s daughter.

For the most part, Franny tried her best not to think about Ariel, whom she had met on several disastrous occasions early on in her relationship with Leo. Franny didn’t aspire to like Leo’s daughter, but she hoped to someday achieve a low level of distant compassion towards her. To that end she disciplined herself to think of her own father whenever Ariel came up, to imagine Fix showing up with someone younger than she was, poor dear Marjorie pushed to the side. Fix taking up with his favorite cocktail waitress, not just for the weekend but going on five years. Her father in love with this cocktail waitress who had no means of supporting herself but who would wait for him in motels when he went on stakeouts. When she could think of things that way, the lava of Ariel’s rage against her was easier to bear. The simple truth was that Franny couldn’t stand to be hated. Sacred Heart hadn’t prepared her for it and college hadn’t prepared her for it. Law school had been doing its best to toughen her up but then look how she’d done in law school.

Franny found a parking spot two blocks from the water and carried the six boxes down to the end of the pier, past the fishermen with their buckets and lines, past the tourists holding hands. She wanted the lobsters in deep water. Maybe they’d be stupid enough to crawl into someone else’s pot tomorrow but she didn’t want them walking straight up on the beach minutes after their exoneration. She set the six boxes out in a line and opened them up. Christmas at the pier. Christmas for crustaceans. They were a dappled black and green now, not the electric red they would have been after boiling. They were still frisky, energized by their proximity to salt water, waving their bound claws in impatience. They would never know what they had missed, though being lobsters, they would probably never know anything. She took the scissors and stuck them in the box, doing her best to cut off the wide rubber bands without nicking a claw or losing a finger. (The first band on each one was easy, the second a challenge.) When she finished, she tipped them one at a time out of their boxes and into the ocean, where they made a pleasing smack against the water and then sank from view.

By the time Franny had loaded down the car with all the necessary provisions and driven back to the house it was late in the afternoon. She caught a glimpse of Leo on the front porch talking to someone by the door (Nine for dinner? She had enough) while the rest of them were off who knows where. There was a sleek silver Audi pulled to the back, the Hollingers must have arrived by now. Franny thought how nice it would have been to have taken a shower before she saw them but that wasn’t going to happen. She started carrying the boxes and bags into the kitchen. She’d made three trips when Leo came in with a tall young man with a long black braid.

“Franny,” Leo said.

Franny put the heavy box she was holding down on the table, half liquor, half wine. There was a second case of wine still in the car. She kept her hands on top of the box to keep them steady. That first moment she saw him she knew exactly what it was she’d done, how serious and wrong it was to have given away what didn’t belong to her. She had known it at the time, too, but she hadn’t cared. It was the way Leo had listened to her, the way he had asked her so many questions and then told her to tell him everything again. There had been nothing in her life to equal the light of his attention.

“Christ,” Albie said. “You look exactly the same.”

He was taller and thinner than she could have ever imagined he would be. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt and some oversized pants covered in pockets. His arms were dark and muscled, his wrists tattooed. He was at once someone she knew as a brother and someone she had never met. “Not you,” Franny said.

Hadn’t she thought he’d show up sooner or later? She had expected him around every corner in those first months after the book came out, but time passed. Did she forget about him then? “How did you find us?”

“I found him,” Albie said, motioning to Leo. “It turns out he’s the easiest person in the world to find.”

“That’s good to know,” Leo said.

“I wasn’t thinking about you,” Albie said to Franny. “But I guess it makes sense. Somebody had to have told him.”

They had wanted to go to the barn and brush the horses. If they brushed the horses and mucked out a few of the stalls then usually Ned would let them take turns riding the mare for the afternoon. But Albie was driving them crazy. What was he doing that was so intolerable? Standing here in front of him now, Franny couldn’t remember. Or maybe he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Maybe it was just that someone had to watch him around the horses and none of them wanted to do it. He wasn’t the monster they told him he was, in fact there wasn’t anything so awful about him. It was only that he was a little kid.

“Albie has terrible breath,” Franny announced. Then she turned to him. “Didn’t you brush your teeth this morning?”

That was how the ball got rolling. Holly leaned in and sniffed the air in front of her brother’s face. She rolled her eyes. “Tic Tac, please.”

Caroline looked at Cal. “You might as well. You know he’s never going to brush his teeth. I don’t think he’s brushed them since we got here.”

Cal pulled the little plastic bag out of his pocket. He had four in there and so he gave him four.

“All of them?” Albie asked.

“You stink,” Cal said. “If you don’t you’re going to scare the horses.”

Jeanette left the room then. She didn’t say where she was going but the rest of them said they had to wait for her.

“I want to go!” Albie said.

Franny shook her head. “Ernestine told us we had to stay together.”

They waited until he fell asleep. It never took that long. Cal carried Albie down to the laundry room and left him under a pile of towels on the floor. It was Sunday and Ernestine was making a big supper. She never did laundry on Sunday.

And now twenty years later here was Albie in the actress’s summer house, having read about that day he had largely slept through in a novel written by someone he’d never met. Franny shook her head. Her hands were cold. She had never been so cold before. “I’m sorry,” she said. The words came without volume and so she said them again. “I know that isn’t worth anything but I’m sorry. I made a terrible mistake.”

“How did you make a mistake?” Leo said. He reached into the box and took out the bottle of Beefeater. “I’m going to have a drink. Would anyone else like a drink?”

“Did you think I was never going to see it?” Albie asked. “I mean, maybe that was a good guess. It took me long enough.”

“I was trying to explain to him before you got here,” Leo said, pouring some gin in a glass. “Writers get their inspirations from a lot of places. It’s never any one thing.”

Franny looked at Leo, willing him to pick up his glass and go back out to the porch to smoke with his guests. “Just give us a minute,” she said to him. “This isn’t about you.”

“Of course it’s about me,” Leo said. “It’s my book.”

“I still don’t understand this,” Albie said, pointing at Franny and then at Leo. “How did he wind up with my life?”

“It isn’t your life,” Leo said. “That’s what I’m trying to explain. It’s my imagination.”

Albie swung around like a whip, his hands coming up to Leo’s shoulders, pushing him back. Leo, startled, dropped his glass on the floor, and for a moment the room was suffused with the clean smell of gin.

“You don’t understand why I’m here, do you?” Albie said. “You have no idea how hard I’m trying not to kill you. I really might. And if you made me up then you’ll understand just how little there is at stake for me here.”

There was a clear case for stepping towards Leo then, for putting her hands on Leo’s arm, but Franny turned to Albie instead. Albie was the one she had wronged. She and Leo had wronged him together.

“Listen to me, let’s go and talk,” she said to Albie. “Come outside and talk to me.”

Leo stumbled back as if struck, his face flushed. Leo — shorter, heavier, more than twice Albie’s age — would later swear there had been a blow. The highball glass rolled past his feet, miraculously unbroken. “I’m calling the police,” he said. He could hear the unevenness in his own breathing.

“Nobody’s calling the police,” Franny said.

“What in the hell are you talking about?” Leo said.

Marisol came in the kitchen through the swinging door, Eric behind her. “Franny, where are my lobsters?” she said.

Franny couldn’t think of what she was talking about at first or why she was even still in the house, but then she remembered. “Go,” she said. She kept her eyes on Albie.

“Do you even know what lobsters cost?”

Eric touched his wife’s shoulder. “Come back to the living room,” he said. “They’ve got company.”

“We’re the company!” Marisol had put on a silk shift dress of emerald green, a flat gold necklace. The Hollingers had come and she was dressed for dinner. Only Hollinger was a bigger name on the marquee than Posen, and some might disagree with that. Hollinger had been more consistent in his career, he’d had the bigger wins. Dinner, unassembled, was on the table in the boxes, in the shopping bags. “Jonas told me you put them in the car. Was something wrong with them?”

Albie turned to Franny. “Do you work for them?”

Franny took her hand off Albie’s arm and put her hand in his hand instead. “We have to go.”

“Who is this?” Marisol said. Marisol, who wasn’t part of anything, who had never been invited.

“This is my brother,” Franny said.

“He is not your goddamn brother,” Leo said, his voice loud enough to go through the windows and out across the lawns.

Franny had made a mistake when she’d left the house that morning without taking her purse and she did not make the mistake again. “Stay here,” she said to Leo. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

Albie picked up the bottle of gin.

“You’re not leaving with him,” Leo said.

“If I don’t leave here with him I’m going to invite him to dinner. I’m going to put him upstairs in the guest room, okay?”

“I’ll tell you what,” Eric said. “Why don’t we take some drinks out to our guests? Marisol, you get the corkscrew and some glasses. Maybe we should all sit down and have a drink. You’ve got the gin.” Eric nodded at Albie, then he turned to Franny. “The Hollingers are here. They came while you were in town. Just come out and say hello.”

Eric was trying to turn the evening back into a dinner party. It occurred to Franny then that of course he wouldn’t know who Albie was, he wouldn’t know who she was either, other than Leo’s girlfriend. Because when Leo called her his inspiration, and he always did, no one thought he meant it literally. The story of two couples moving in next door to each other, their awful children, that was nothing more than the plot of a novel as far as Eric was concerned. Franny wanted to go to Leo, to reassure him, but Marisol had opened the door from the kitchen. Everyone could hear the voices coming in from the front hallway, so many voices! Hello! Hello! the sound of car doors, of laughter, the sound of Ariel’s voice calling out for her father.

* * *

If Beverly or Bert were to tell the story now, they would say they divorced after Cal died. And of course that was true, they had, but in this instance the word “after” would be misleading. It linked together the death and the divorce as if they were cause and effect, as if Beverly and Bert were one of those couples who, upon a child’s death, are led down such separate paths of grief that they can no longer find their way back to one another. This was not the case.

Bert blamed Beverly for leaving the six children alone on the farm with Ernestine and his parents, for not telling anyone she was taking his mother’s car into Charlottesville to sit through two back-to-back showings of Harry & Tonto. (She hadn’t planned to see it twice, but the theater was so empty and quiet and cool. She had cried at the end of the picture and all through the credits, and rather than walk into the lobby with her mascara running she just decided to stay where she was.) Did he really think she supervised the children every minute? Did he think that had she stayed home that afternoon, after reading another book up in their room, another magazine, taking one more nap, after she had officially died of boredom she might have gone with them to the barn and curried the horses? The truth was she left the children alone in Arlington too, she left them in order to preserve her sanity. At least at the farm there was adult supervision. Did his parents bear no responsibility for what happened on their property? And what about Ernestine? Beverly had left the children in Ernestine’s care even if she hadn’t told Ernestine that’s what she was doing. Ernestine had more parental sense than Beverly and Bert and Bert’s parents all combined, and Ernestine thought it was fine for them to walk the half a mile to the barn.

Bert should not have insisted that Beverly and the children stay at his parents’ house in the country for the week while he took the station wagon back to Arlington for work. If he thought that the children needed an escort to the barn then he should have stuck around and escorted them himself. Beverly didn’t want to be a guest in his parents’ house. They were forever asking the children about their wonderful mother—How’s Teresa? What’s Teresa doing now? I hope your mother knows she’s always welcome to come and stay with us.

The children didn’t want to stay with Bert’s parents either. They had been much happier at the Pinecone, where they had stayed in summers past. At Bert’s parents’ house they had to take their shoes off at the back door and wipe their feet with a towel. Because they weren’t allowed in the living room under any circumstances, they had inevitably made a game out of dashing through at top speed on dares whenever they heard someone coming down the hall. A porcelain figurine of an English gentleman and his wolfhound was knocked from an end table and smashed.

Bert’s parents didn’t want them there. They had made the offer of this extended and highly unusual visit in hopes of seeing their son, not his children or his second wife or her children. But then Bert left.

Ernestine didn’t want them there. She couldn’t have. It meant eight extra mouths to feed (seven after Bert decamped), piles of laundry, games to invent, fights to break up, employers to soothe. The load fell heaviest on Ernestine’s shoulders and yet she alone carried her burden without complaint.

Bert went back to Arlington because under the circumstances of a normal work week it was expensive, impractical, and stimulatingly dangerous to find a place to continue his affair with his paralegal. Linda Dale (two first names; she did not answer to Linda) said for once she would like to have dinner together in a restaurant like regular people, go to bed in a real bed, wake up in the middle of the night and make love while they were still half asleep, and then do it again in the shower the next morning. Bert was not crazy about Linda Dale, she was petulant and demanding and very young, but she talked like this on the phone when he called the office, so what was he supposed to do? Stay at the farm?

He was in the office when his mother called to tell him about Cal. He jumped in his car and broke every speed limit, making the two-hour drive to the hospital in Charlottesville in just under one and a half like any parent would do. There wasn’t time to go home and straighten up the house. He never thought of it.

Sometimes it was hard for Beverly and Bert to remember what had destroyed them. When Beverly wept over the affair, the unfamiliar red panties surfacing in her unmade bed, Bert was aghast. The death of a child trumped infidelity. The death of a child trumped everything. It was a logic Beverly could nearly embrace. If pain and loss could be ranked then surely Bert had won and this was the time for them to pull together, for the sake of their marriage, or their remaining children. But accepting the circumstances didn’t turn out to be the same as forgiveness. They bound themselves together with a little tape and soldiered on, and even though their marriage held for nearly six years after Cal’s death, neither of them would remember it that way. They would say that their separate griefs had broken them apart much earlier.

If the end of Beverly and Bert’s marriage could not rightfully be attributed to Cal, neither could it be pinned on Albie, though the couple’s emotional resources were so depleted by the time Albie arrived from California that he didn’t have to do much of anything but watch them go over the cliff. The mere fact that he had come turned out to be enough. Five years, two months, and twenty-seven days after Cal died, Albie had dropped a lit book of matches in the trash can of the art room of Shery High, in Torrance. Teresa called Bert and told him about the fire, told him through her exhausted tears that Albie was being held in Juvenile. Bert hung up and had Beverly call her ex-husband to get the kid out. With that behind them, Bert called Teresa back to tell her what an incompetent parent she was. Saturday morning and she didn’t even know where their only son had gone to on his bike? He told her the home she provided was unfit, unsafe, and she had no choice but to send Albie to him. Bert had this conversation on the phone in the kitchen where Beverly was sautéeing onions to start a Stroganoff for dinner. She turned off the fire beneath the pan and walked slowly up the stairs to Caroline’s bedroom. She often hid in Caroline’s room now that her older daughter had gone to college. Bert never thought to look for her there.

Of course there were many things Teresa could have volleyed back, but at the heart of her ex-husband’s bombastic cruelty was one simple truth: she couldn’t keep Albie safe. She didn’t necessarily think Bert could do it either, but different friends, a different school, the other side of the country, might afford Albie a better chance. On Monday morning the principal called to say that Albie and the other boys were suspended pending investigation, and if the investigation found them guilty (which was likely considering they had been seen running out of the burning building on a Saturday morning and had confessed to starting the fire) they would be expelled. On Tuesday she called Bert back. She was putting Albie on a plane.

Albie, nearly fifteen, walked as far as the back patio, dropped his suitcase, sat down in a white wrought-iron chair, and lit a cigarette. His father was still trying to wrestle the giant sheets of cardboard that had been taped together to form a sort of box around the bicycle from the back of the station wagon. Bert had already told him on the ride in from Dulles that Beverly wouldn’t be home for dinner tonight. On Thursday nights Beverly took a French class at the community college and after that went to dinner with her school friends where they practiced conversational French. “She’s trying to find herself,” his father said, and Albie looked out the window.

“How is he getting home from the airport then?” Bert had asked her when Beverly announced she wasn’t going to be there. He walked right into that one.

When he got the bike unwrapped, Bert wheeled it out of the garage like it was Christmas morning. He had meant to say, Look at this! Good as new! but instead he saw the pack of cigarettes and, more distressingly, the red Bic lighter sitting on the table in front of his son. The bike didn’t seem to have a kickstand so he leaned it against one of the patio chairs.

“You aren’t allowed to have a lighter,” Bert said, though it came out as more of a question than he’d meant it to.

Albie looked at him, puzzled. “Why not?”

“Because you burned down your goddamn school. Are you telling me your mother didn’t ground you from fire?”

Albie smiled at the sheer expansiveness of his father’s stupidity. “I didn’t burn down the school. I set a fire in the art room. It was an accident, and they needed a new art room. The school is already open again.”

“I’ll say it then: You’re grounded from fire. That means no arson and no cigarettes.”

Albie took a long draw on his cigarette. He turned his head respectfully and blew the smoke to the side. He was respectfully smoking the cigarette outside the house in the first place. “Fire is an element. It’s like water or air.”

“So you’re grounded from an element.”

“Can I use the gas stove?”

They were both looking at the lighter on the table. When Bert reached down to take it Albie swept it into his hand, looking right at him. That was the moment: either Bert would hit his son or he would not. Albie held his cigarette down and lifted his face, eyes wide open. Bert straightened up, stepped back. He had never hit his children. He would not hit them now. The few times he’d ever smacked Cal played in his daydreams on a continuous loop.

“Don’t smoke in the house,” Bert said, and went inside.

Albie stared up at the house. It was not the one he’d come to as a child. It wasn’t any house he’d ever seen before. At some point between the last time he was in Virginia and now, Bert and Beverly had moved and failed to mention that fact to Holly or Albie or Jeanette. And why should they, when no one thought that Holly or Albie or Jeanette would ever visit again? But his father hadn’t mentioned the new house at the airport either. Did he forget? Did he think Albie wouldn’t notice? This place was bloodred brick with fluted white columns in the front, a junior relation of the house his grandparents lived in outside Charlottesville. It was heavily landscaped with plants and trees he didn’t recognize, everything orderly and neat. He could see the edge of a swimming pool already covered in tarp for the winter. He could look in the window from the patio and see the kitchen, see the fancy copper pots that hung from a rack on the ceiling, but if he got up and opened the door and walked through the kitchen, he wouldn’t know which way he was supposed to turn. He wouldn’t know what bedroom he was supposed to sleep in.

Caroline would be off in college by now, and if Albie were to guess he would guess that she had plenty of friends who invited her to their houses for the holidays. She probably had some all-encompassing summer job as a camp counselor or government intern that prevented her from ever coming home or even using a pay phone. Caroline had always made it clear that once she got out of there she wasn’t coming back. Caroline was a bitch by any standard, but she was also the one who had organized all the subversive acts of their childhood summers. She hated them all, especially her own sister, but Caroline got things done. When he thought of her cracking open the station wagon with a coat hanger and getting the gun out of the glove compartment, he shook his head. He had never in his life adored anyone the way he adored Caroline.

That meant it would just be Franny. He hadn’t seen either of the girls since summer visits to Virginia had stopped five years ago, but Franny was harder for him to fix in his mind. It was weird since she was the person in the family closest to him in age. He remembered that she was always carrying the cat around, and in his memory the girl and the cat had merged: sweet and small, eager to please, quick to nap, always crawling into somebody’s lap.

Albie stayed on the back patio and smoked while the light turned gold across the suburbs and the cold air pricked his arms. He didn’t want to go in the house and ask his father where he’d be sleeping. He thought about rummaging through his suitcase and finding the generous bag of weed his friends had put together as a going-away present but he figured he’d already pushed the limits of brazenness for one day. It would have been one thing if his lighter were confiscated in a world full of free matchbooks but he didn’t want anyone taking his pot away. He could ride his bike around the new neighborhood, acquaint himself with what was there, but he stayed seated. Thinking about moving was as far as he’d gotten when Franny pulled into the driveway and parked.

She was wearing a white blouse with the sleeves rolled up and a blue plaid skirt, knee socks, saddle shoes, the universal attire of Catholic school girls. She was skinny and pale with her hair pulled back, and when he stood up and dropped his cigarette he had a split second of uncertainty as to whether or not there was good will between them. Franny dropped her backpack on the ground and came straight to him, arms out. Franny, not understanding that he lived on the other side of a thick wall and so no one could take him into their arms, took him into her arms and squeezed him hard. She was warm and strong and smelled slightly, pleasantly, of girl sweat.

“Welcome home,” she said. Two words.

He looked at her.

“Are they making you stay outside?” she asked, looking down at his suitcase. “Can you at least go in the garage?”

“I like it out here.”

Franny looked at the house. The light in Bert’s study was on. “Then we’ll stay out here. What can I get for you? You must be hungry.”

Albie looked hungry, not only in the unnerving thinness that all the Cousins children possessed, but in his hollow eyes. Albie looked like he could eat an entire pig, python-style, and it wouldn’t begin to address the deficit. “To tell you the truth I could use a drink.”

“Name it,” Franny said. She was half-turned towards the house, her mind already considering the secret stash of 7-Up her mother disapproved of.

“Gin.”

She looked back at Albie and smiled. Gin on a Thursday night. “Did I tell you I’m glad you’re here? Probably not yet. I’m glad you’re here. Are you going to come with me?”

“I will in a minute,” he said.

While she was gone Albie looked at the sky. There were animals zipping around up there — sparrows? bats? — along with the near-deafening roar of something cricket-ish. He wasn’t in Torrance anymore.

In a minute Franny came back with two glasses half-full of ice and gin, a bottle of 7-Up under her arm. She topped off her glass with the soda, used her finger to stir it around, and then looked at him, wagging the 7-Up back and forth.

“Pass,” he said.

“Very manly.” They tapped their glasses together the way people did in movies, the way her girlfriends did at slumber parties after siphoning off what could be taken discreetly from the family supply. Franny had had some drinks before, just not at home, not on a school night, not with Albie, but if ever there was a day to break the rules it was today. “Cheers.”

She made a little face at the taste while Albie just sipped and smiled. He lit another cigarette because it went so nicely with the gin. It felt like they were catching up just sitting there not talking. Too much had happened, too much time had passed, to try putting it into words now.

After a while Bert came back out. He seemed so happy to see Franny there. He kissed the side of her head, the cloud of cigarette smoke eradicating the smell of gin. “I didn’t know you were home.”

“Both of us,” Franny said, smiling.

Bert jingled his car keys. “I’m going to get a pizza.”

Franny shook her head. “Mom made dinner. It’s all in the fridge. I’ll heat it up.”

Bert looked surprised, though it would be hard to say why. Beverly always made dinner. He picked up Albie’s suitcase. “You kids come inside now. It’s getting cold out here.”

The three of them went inside just as the deep darkness of night was setting in. Franny and Albie picked up their glasses, the cigarettes and the lighter, and followed Albie’s father through the door.