The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [91]
He can’t tell Arlene either because they have been together too long now, the time for such secrets is past. There’s Sean, but Sean is even more adamant than their parents that they must not speak about the night of the hurricane. Tim thinks it’s because it doesn’t jibe with Sean’s version of Sean. Gwen, Mickey-now-McKey?
Gwen. Despite his habit of teasing her, he likes and respects her. As a kid, he was even a little into her, and not just out of envy for whatever sexual favors his brother was being granted. Tim liked Gwen before, when she was a plump little girl. She was smart beneath all her girly mannerisms. He doesn’t have any present-day yearnings for her. Arlene is the love of his life, and he is grateful for the clarity with which he sees that, accepts the compromises required by monogamy. He’s a man. He thinks frequently about other women, wonders what it would be like to fuck this one or that one. There are things, extreme things to be sure, that he has never done, and it now seems unlikely that he will. It’s okay. He has a good imagination, which serves him well when he’s alone. Still, he would like to talk to Gwen, just talk.
Tim carries the clean platter, one of his mother’s “good pieces,” to the built-in corner cupboard. It goes on the highest shelf, which is not quite within his reach. “Ma, where’s the stepladder?”
“Oh, I put that out in the garage, years ago. Just stand on a chair.”
He does, although he’s nervous about his weight, and he doesn’t like the idea that his mother gets up and down from a chair when she needs something from the upper reaches of the breakfront. He really should get that stepladder out of the garage, have it closer to hand.
His father always complained that the house wasn’t well built, but it appears more solid to Tim than the overpriced town house Go-Go bought for his family last year. Tim couldn’t begin to help with that purchase. One thing to hide a thousand or so from Arlene, quite another to come up with fifty thousand. His mother mortgaged this house without consulting him or Sean. He probably should be grateful that the housing market had already imploded, even if the stock market crash did ding the hell out of his girls’ college funds. Otherwise, his mother would have taken out even more and ended up underwater in her mortgage in a house that had been hers in full before his father died.
Both Tim and Sean were outraged when they heard about the loan, but it was too late to do anything. Doris claimed she didn’t understand why they were angry with her. “I bought a house for my grandbabies, and that’s who all my money is for anyway, the grandchildren.” Tim didn’t want to explain to her that she had taken her primary asset and given it in full to two of her six grandchildren. The whole subject made him feel small and mercenary. But Sean had no problem expressing his fury. He told Doris she should rewrite her will to make up for this inequity, reflect the fact that the $50,000 loan was an advance against what the girls might have inherited and they would be entitled to nothing else. A disproportionate advance, he added, with surprising bitterness. Of the three boys, Sean is the best fixed. Only one kid, the kind of kid sure to score a financial aid package to college because of his cross-country stuff. Plus, Sean’s father-in-law is loaded. “It’s not about the money,” Sean said heatedly when Tim called him on this.
In Tim’s experience, everything is about the money, especially whenever people say it’s not about the money. Granted, the money stood for something in Sean’s eyes, but what? Attention, love? Sean never lacked for either. And he still gets to be the good son, even though it’s Tim standing in their mother’s kitchen, drying the things that are too precious or too large to go in the dishwasher.
Arlene catches his eye and gives him a smile, one in which there is a world, a history of understanding. She is both insider and outsider in the Halloran family and her perspective,