Tina and Frances lived close and grew even closer. Ed liked Frances too, or rather, Frances allowed Ed to like her. He was in his eighties by then, and growing frail. He never even touched Tina anymore. All he asked for was companionship, and Tina didn’t see how she could refuse him that, not after everything he’d done for her.
For their seven-year anniversary, Frances invited Tina and Ed over for dinner. Ed was a stickler for Frances’s steak frites with peppercorn sauce. He could go through three ramekins of the stuff, and Frances always set out extra for him.
That night, after the first few bites, Ed started licking his lips, clearing his throat. “More peppercorns in the sauce this evening,” he remarked, not yet afraid.
“I’m experimenting with Chinese hot mustard instead of Dijon,” Frances said.
Ed coughed. “What’s in that?”
“Just mustard powder and water,” Frances said, as Ed rubbed his lips together and wondered why they were going numb.
Tina dropped her fork as Ed started to claw at his throat, wheezing through a windpipe that had constricted to the diameter of a cocktail straw. “We need to call an ambulance!” she cried, pushing back her chair.
Frances stood up too. “The phone is in the living room,” she said. She put her arm around Tina and led her to the kitchen, where there was a container of shellfish stock, open next to the saucepan. She held Tina firmly by the shoulders and quizzed her on Piaget’s stages of moral development to drown out the sounds coming from the next room, uncannily like those of a baby first learning to burble.
He was an old man who lived a long, prosperous life and died surrounded by a dear friend and his beloved wife, eating his favorite meal. As peaceful a death as one could hope for, seemed the presiding sentiment at the funeral back in Dallas. Though every time Tina looked over at Deb, she found her staring back with watery black eyes.
The plan, after the funeral, was to gather at Ed’s Highland Park home and make some decisions about what to do with his various properties. But when Tina arrived, she found the doors barricaded and the locks changed, all five of Ed’s children wandering the perimeter of the house in their funeral attire, trying to figure out how to get inside. Tina counted again, more carefully this time. No. Not all five, actually.
A window on the second floor cracked open, and Deb’s hard voice ricocheted against the grounds. “I need to speak to Tina.”
The two of them sat in the grand room, where, at Christmastime, hundreds of presents ringed the base of a fourteen-foot Douglas fir like an impassable moat. Underprivileged children from underprivileged neighborhoods were invited into the Highland Park grand room and given their pick—Tina’s mother was one of them once. Now Deb was there to offer Tina another kind of gift.
Ed had noticed Deb’s withdrawal from the family several years prior, and had tried to buy back her affections by modifying his will to make Deb the executor, saying in the codicil that only his firstborn could see to dividing his assets fairly. To that effect, Tina would inherit the Maui house, retain the Seattle residence, and receive a small but substantial portion of the proceeds from the sale of the real estate company. Everything else belonged to Deb, and if any of her siblings tried to fight her on this, she would go to the press and destroy the memory of their father.
The offer was good on one condition—Tina was never to step foot in Highland Park again, because Deb couldn’t stand to look at Tina. In Tina, she saw only what her father had done to her when she was young too. She had been asked to divide the assets fairly, and this, she had decided, was fair.
Tina thought about her mother and what she had said through the scrim of antique lace, whitened with lemon juice and salt for her wedding day. Rising from the couch, hand extended in Deb’s direction, she punched out.
PAMELA
Aspen, 1978
Day 13
I woke in the hotel room in Aspen seconds shy of three a.m., only, instead of lying pancaked to the bed in fear, I bolted straight up as if I had overslept for class. Something had resolved for me with those few hours of sleep, something so important that it could not wait until the morning.
I reached over and switched on the tableside lamp. Immediately, my eyes went to Carl’s duffel. The hotel had promised to send someone up to take my bag to Carl’s room and Carl’s bag to mine, but they must have knocked on the door when I was downstairs talking to Tina. I knew he was staying in room 607 because I’d noted the engraved brass numbers on the key fob when Tina had passed them out. I dressed in the previous day’s clothes and ran my fingers through my hair, brushed my teeth, and pinched life into my cheeks. I looked as good as I could, given the circumstances. Anyhow, I was engaged.