SO, WHAT’S YOUR DEAL, ANYWAY?” Gus asked over coffee.
“Define ‘deal,’ ” said Jeff.
“Like, I don’t know—what do you live for?”
He shrugged, then pushed out his lips. “I don’t know. Just getting by. Trying to have a good time while I still can.”
“I guess that’s hard for me to understand, since I’ve never lived that way,” said Gus.
“You always knew you wanted to be a lawyer?”
“Maybe not a lawyer, but I knew when I was pretty young that this was a fucked-up world, and I had to do my part to change it.”
“Wow,” said Jeff, laughing lightly. “I was never that motivated. My only strong emotion was that I wanted to whip Mike’s ass at every sport we played. Which, frankly, wasn’t that hard.”
“You’re really competitive with your brother. Aren’t you?” said Gus.
“And you’re not with Perri or Pia?” he asked.
“We’re all a little competitive. But we’re nothing alike.”
“Nothing alike, my ass.” Jeff chuckled again. “Maybe you’ve got different taste in brothers. But I hope you don’t mind me saying, I can tell from a hundred miles away that you and Perri hark from the same gene pool. Never in my life have I met two girls so obsessed with getting shit done!”
The observation discomfited Gus. “I guess I never thought about it that way,” she muttered.
“I don’t know what your mother did to you,” Jeff went on. “But damn. She did a good job. Or, depending on your perspective, a bad job. Honestly, I sometimes worry about my brother. The guy is driven enough. But Perri, man—she’s always on his ass! I’ve never seen anything like it. He lost his job in a recession—big deal. She can’t let the man collect unemployment insurance for even a day without bugging him about job interviews. And it’s not like they aren’t already loaded.”
“I didn’t know she’d been bugging him. Are you sure?” asked Gus, embarrassed on her sister’s behalf and also on her own—because she recognized herself in Jeff’s description, giving Debbie a hard time about not trying to climb the ranks of the GLTF.
“Pretty sure.” Jeff took a sip of his coffee, narrowed his eyes. “She hates seeing us hang out, too. Doesn’t she?”
“I got that feeling,” concurred Gus.
“I got the feeling it’s freaking both of them out—Perri and my brother, that is,” said Jeff. “Whatever—too fuckin’ bad. I’m a free man.” He reached for Gus’s hand, stroked it, and smiled. “Besides, I like you.”
“I like you too,” Gus said, swallowing.
“You ski?”
“Can’t say I do.”
He gestured with his chin. “I’ve got a friend who operates the lift at Stowe. Next winter, if we’re still hanging, we’ll road-trip and I’ll teach you.”
“Sounds like a plan,” said Gus, even as she put the odds at fifty-fifty as to whether they’d make it to the end of the week.
Jeff leaned in. “Dude, it’s a whole other world up there. It’s just you and the elements—the snow, the ice, the wind—and God, I guess, if you believe in that stuff.”
“Do you believe in that stuff?” asked Gus, curious.
Jeff released her hand, took another sip of his coffee, got a far-off look. “To be honest, when you’re up in the clouds, you kind of feel like you’re in heaven already. Know what I mean?” He turned back to her, his head cocked, his eyes squinty.
The political part of Gus had always hated that kind of back-to-nature talk—considered it mumbo jumbo of the highest form. (What good were ski trails to a domestic violence victim in the South Bronx?) Not for the first time, it occurred to her that Jefferson Sims was a total idiot. But another part of her—the part that was currently pulsating below her waist—was ready to follow him off the next cliff. “I can definitely see that,” she said, nodding vigorously.