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?On Saturday, it’s time to tackle Theo. I’m waiting for him outside Massey Klein, the art gallery on Forsyth Street where he told me to meet him. I’m convinced the staff will be able to intuit my relative poverty through my clothes or my haircut or maybe my smell, so I’m shivering on the sidewalk listening to Clementine Del’s new album while I wait. This new record is much darker than her old music.
My playlist is interrupted by an incoming call from Brooke. I do not have the capacity to deal with her today, although there’s never an ideal time to talk to my sister. I let it go to voicemail.
When we were kids, I worshiped Brooke. Of course, our six-year age gap meant I was just her annoying tagalong kid sister. Someone our mom insisted she bring with her to the town pool where she met up with her actual friends. But I cherished those days, pretending to read one of my Goosebumps mysteries, while eagerly devouring every morsel of gossip Brooke traded with her trio of girlfriends. I harbored a fantasy that once we were older, we’d be best friends, like the sisters on Charmed, Brooke’s favorite TV show at the time.
Brooke and I were close for exactly one week in our lives. The week after our dad died.
We weren’t surprised when our mom passed. The cancer took over her body in increments. First her lungs, then her brain, then everywhere. When she died, it was like reaching the destination on a long road trip. Everyone was tired, cranky, and sick of the other passengers in the car. We were sad, but there was also relief. After the funeral, Brooke was free to go back to Georgetown and spend the final Saturdays of her senior year partying at Sigma Phi Ep without feeling guilty she should be sitting vigil at our mother’s bedside.
But our father’s death came out of nowhere. One morning, three months after our mom died, he went to work and didn’t come home. He hit a tree driving back from the commuter lot at the NJ Transit station in the center of town. He fell asleep at the wheel, the police officer told me when he knocked on our front door and mistook me for someone old enough to unload this news on. In my worst moments, I wondered if he crashed the car on purpose. If he didn’t want to live in a world without my mother.
Brooke and I spent the week after the accident haunting our childhood home in a shared haze of grief. We spritzed ourselves with clouds of Mom’s Chanel N°5 perfume and cocooned into the worn flannels and vintage band tees Dad favored on weekends. During the week he wore what he called his “office drag”—a collection of khakis and pastel button-downs—to collect a paycheck as a graphic designer at an ad agency in the city. “Unfortunately, there’s not much money in doodling,” he’d lament as he sketched caricatures of me and Brooke while we did our homework at the kitchen table. “So you better learn this math stuff.” That was the saddest part; he died commuting home from a job he hated.
Brooke and I were alone in the world. We were the only family the other had.
We took turns reading aloud diary entries from a journal we didn’t know our mom kept, but found in the top drawer of her nightstand beside a small pink vibrator, which got thrown in the trash amid much shrieking. The entries alternated between funny anecdotes from our childhood and plans for the future she would never have, enumerating the exotic trips she and Dad would go on once I graduated high school. Brazil, Bermuda, Botswana, and that was only the B’s.
Our closeness lasted the length of Brooke’s allotted bereavement leave from her first post-college job as a junior analyst at Lehman Brothers. Then she got on with her life.
Brooke was appointed to be my legal guardian. There was no one else, really. Dad was an only child; his parents were already gone. Mom barely spoke to her family. “Fundamentalist wackos,” she called them. None of them showed up at the end, even for her funeral.
Brooke’s role as my guardian existed more on paper than in practice. What did a twenty-two-year-old know about taking care of a sixteen-year-old? Brooke could barely take care of herself.
In our new living situation, we were about as feral as you’d expect. I survived on a diet of pizza delivery and pity dinner invites to friend’s houses. Brooke lived at home and commuted into the city, but more often than not she crashed on friends’ couches near her office, coming home every couple of weekends to do laundry and make sure I hadn’t destroyed the house. It didn’t even occur to us to enroll me in a new school in the city.
After a minute, my phone dings with a voicemail notification.
“Hi! It’s Brooke. You never answered my text about Thanksgiving, so I’m checking in. Spencer’s parents are coming up from Florida and his brother’s family is driving down from Maine this year, too. We’d love to have you. Finn is welcome, too. Or David. Or both. Well, call me back and let me know if we should expect you. I need to give a final head count to the caterers by Tuesday.”
I can’t believe Brooke hired caterers for Thanksgiving. On second thought, I can absolutely believe it. Her commitment to the Stepford Wife persona she invented after marrying Spencer is Oscar-worthy. I shoot off a quick text: Going to David’s parents’ house this year.
She sends back a thumbs-up emoji, probably equally relieved not to have me as I am not to go. I’d be an ugly stain from her sad past marring the otherwise perfect family she’s built for herself.
At ten past one, a black SUV deposits Theo on the sidewalk outside the gallery. He’s dressed in a charcoal wool overcoat with a Burberry scarf tied around his neck, impeccable as always. His face breaks into a grin when he spots me leaning against a bike rack.
“Why are you waiting out here?”
“It says ‘by appointment only’ and I don’t have an appointment. Do you?” I point at the tasteful placard in the window.
“They don’t mean us. You must be freezing your bollocks off out here.”
“Theo, I don’t think ladies have bollocks.”
He laughs. “Your tits, then. Come on.” He leads me into the gallery.
A black-clad gallery girl looks up from her laptop and flashes Theo the barest of smiles. “Let me know if you need anything.”
“What are we looking for?” I whisper as he leads me into the first room.
“You don’t need to whisper, it’s not a library.”
“Well?” I ask using my full voice, but it feels wrong in a place like this.
“I’m looking for a piece for the bedroom.” He pauses like he’s debating whether to say more. “The piece above the bed was Elliot’s, but he took it with him when he left.”
Elliot is the latest in Theo’s string of mysterious paramours. Over the five years we’ve known Theo, we’ve heard rumors of his love interests, but rarely met them. Elliot, the third-chair violinist for the New York Philharmonic, was a notable exception. Theo seemed more serious about him. They lasted seven months, a record as far as I know. He moved into Theo’s apartment this summer after two months of dating.
Theo claimed Elliot sublet his apartment because he planned to be out of the city for the summer. The way Finn told it, Elliot was a gold digger using Theo for a lifestyle upgrade. But you could never be sure about Finn’s opinions on Theo’s romantic partners. He disliked them all on principle. The principle being they were not him.