Once, the room had held a sectional couch and a table that sat eight, with eight heavy chairs made of dark, carved wood. There’d been floor lamps and tables, all of them, to Sam’s eye, almost exquisitely ugly. When he’d gotten sick, Julie’s father had demanded that every piece of furniture be pushed against the walls so that his bed could be set up in the very center of the enormous room. It gave the space the appearance of a theater, with Saul center stage and all those empty chairs and couches waiting for an audience to fill them. To the left of his bed was a rolling tray table covered in bottles of medication, rolls of gauze, tubes of various ointments, a box of baby wipes, a bottle of talcum powder, a bedpan, and a urinal. Sam dragged a chair over the right side.
“Saul?” he called.
For a moment, Saul Barringer’s body remained motionless. Then Saul craned his tanned, wrinkled neck upward and peered around, his bald head turning slowly. He looked like a turtle, Sam thought. Not a kindly one, but an ancient, crafty tortoise with a brutal bite.
“Who’s that?”
“It’s me. Sam. Sam Levy-Weinberg.”
“What kind of name,” asked Saul Barringer, his lips curling in a sneer, “is Levy-Weinberg? Why don’t you just call yourself Jew?”
Sam didn’t respond. The thing about Daddy is, you can’t let him bait you, Julie had told him. Plus, Sam knew that Saul Barringer had been born Sol Bernstein. “Mr. Barringer,” Sam said, “your daughter and I would like to be married.”
Saul pursed his lips. “Which daughter is this?”
The only one you have left, Sam thought. “Julie.”
Saul closed his eyes. “Julie. Her mother was Laurie.” His lips thinned in an approximation of a smile. “Laurie was my favorite.” Well, that’s nice, Sam thought, as Saul tried to push himself up straight. There was an uncharacteristically fond expression on his face; a softening around his mouth and his eyes. Saul smiled, gently, lost in memory. Then he said, “She could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch.”
That isn’t nice at all, thought Sam, and considered how awful it would be if Saul Barringer had ended up being the man in Connor’s life. “Julie and I love each other,” he said.
“Sweet,” Saul said dismissively.
“I think we can make each other happy.”
“Not your job.”
“Pardon?”
“I said,” said Saul, shouting each word, “that it is not your job to make someone else happy.” He glared at Sam suspiciously. “A person’s happiness is his own business. Or hers.”
Sam didn’t know what to say. “I love her, and I love Connor.”
“Connor?” Sam supposed he could have ascribed Saul’s confusion to his age or his failing health, but Julie had told him that he’d never bothered to acquaint himself with any of his grandchildren. “That’s her boy, right? The musician’s son.”
“Yes, that’s Connor. Your grandson.”
Saul thought it over, and eventually grunted, “Fine. Only don’t think I’m paying for anything!” he’d added before Sam could thank him. He lifted one arthritic finger, with its horny nail, in the air, and jabbed it at Sam. “I already paid for one wedding. It’s one per customer!”
“We’ll pay,” Sam promised, and Saul had waved him away with one age-spotted paw and started looking around for a nurse to berate. That afternoon, Sarah called Julie to start planning the wedding—a ceremony at a restaurant, with dinner and dancing after, and Connor serving as the ring bearer, Marcus as Sam’s best man, and Sarah as his best woman.
Julie’s father wasn’t well enough to leave the house, which Sam regarded as more of a blessing than a disappointment. Lee and Ronnie flew in from Boston. Sarah and Eli and their kids had come from New York, and Gracie had come from Seattle, and Marcus had arranged a bachelor party （Sam had bargained him down from a strip club and a steakhouse to Cirque du Soleil and In-N-Out Burger）。
The wedding had been exactly what Sam and Julie had hoped for. Julie told Sam that she’d already survived a two-hundred-person blowout that her parents had insisted upon when she’d married Connor’s father and had hated the entire experience. “I just want a great party, where there’s a fifteen-minute interlude for the ceremony,” she’d said, and Sam, with his mother’s and sister’s help, had done his best to oblige her. Julie had chosen the restaurant; his sister had helped her plan the menu. His parents had come out a week early to help. “Tell me about the kind of work you did,” Lee Weinberg had said to Julie’s father, pulling a chair up to Saul’s hospital bed, and Saul, recognizing a fellow attorney, had expounded at length on the advantageous deals he’d made over the years, and was happier than Sam had ever seen him.