Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [14]
“Are you worried she’s going to spend our inheritance?” Tommy asked, spinning the wheel of his lighter.
“It’s not about the money,” I said, ignoring the twinge I felt at the thought of this stranger squandering what should have been mine. I had a trust fund, worth ten million dollars, that I’d be able to access on my twenty-first birthday, which was coming in two months. My father had already told me he’d buy me an apartment after I graduated, in whatever city I ended up working. Needless to say, I had no student loans. I’d most likely get a job that offered health insurance, and I’d inherited all the clothes, shoes, furs, and jewelry that my mother hadn’t sold before decamping to New Mexico. Even if my father married some grasping bitch (unlikely) and didn’t sign a prenup (even more unlikely), my brothers and I would be fine. I knew, for example, that my dad had already set up a trust for Trey’s daughter, Violet, and that he’d bought new amps for Dirty Birdy, which specialized in thrash-metal covers of female singer-songwriter ballads.
I ground my cigarette under my heel. “It’s not the money, it’s the principle of the thing. This woman just thinks she can waltz on in here and have . . .” I waved my hands out at the lawn, which rolled, lush and green, down a gentle slope to the ocean. “... all of this, and she didn’t earn any of it.”
“Well, when you think about it,” Tommy said, “we didn’t exactly earn any of it, either.”
“We survived Mom and Dad,” I reminded him. I’d given the matter of what we were and were not owed considerable thought . . . sometimes while I was walking into what passed for downtown Poughkeepsie so my roommates wouldn’t see me being picked up by a driver.
“I think we need to give her a chance,” said Tommy.
“Do we have a choice?” I inquired, and Trey, who’d been looking at his BlackBerry again, shook his head and said, “We do not.”
I sighed. Tommy finished his cigarette. Trey put his telephone back in his pocket. “Dad knows enough to be careful.”
I didn’t answer. My brothers had both been away at school when my mom had left. I’d been the only one home. What happened to my dad hadn’t been dramatic . . . he’d just gotten quieter and quieter, more and more pale. Prior to my mother’s departure, he was rarely home before eight o’clock at night, but, after she left, he started returning at five, then four, then three in the afternoon, locking the bedroom door behind him, saying that he needed a nap. My mother had left in September. By Christmas he’d stopped sleeping. He’d take his naps, then sit up all night by the windows, not eating, not drinking, not talking. I’d ask him, over and over, if he was all right, if he wanted anything. He’d shake his head, trying for a smile, unable to manage more than a few words. I’d talked about therapists; I’d mentioned antidepressants—half the kids I knew had been on some kind of medication for something at some point in their lives. I’d called my brothers, who’d told me—brusquely, in Trey’s case, kindly, in Tommy’s—that Dad would be fine, that this was just something he had to get through. Easy for them to say. They weren’t the ones who saw him frozen in an armchair, underneath a de Kooning on one wall and a Picasso etching on another, not noticing the art, or the sunsets over the park. They didn’t see the way his pants sagged around his shrinking waistline and flapped around his diminished legs, or the silvery stubble glinting on his chin.
One dark day in February, I came home from choir practice and found every dish in the kitchen smashed and my father shin-deep in the shards of china and porcelain. My parents had had half a dozen sets of dishes, and the mess was considerable. My father stood there, blinking, a dish with a blue bunny painted in its center in his