What an unlikely group they made, Lily thought, crowded together in Peggy’s small dining area, lack of elbow room forcing them to hunch over the table like paranoid card players. Peggy presided at the head of the small table. Next to her was Sophie, and next to her, her boyfriend, Paco. There was pouty, sullen William. Silent, shlumped Monroe. Resolutely upright Nanny, who had stayed for dinner in honor of Sophie’s fifteenth birthday, focusing intently on her plate except for the occasional stolen glance at Larry, sitting opposite Peggy in the place of honor, the target of everyone’s curiosity.
A few weeks earlier, shortly after Thanksgiving, Sophie had dyed her once-lustrous, naturally auburn hair a sickly, metallic red that flaunted its artificiality. Whatever coloring agent she’d used had leeched all the body out of her hair, so that it hung like old curtains on either side of her face. Her shirt, a bandage-sized expanse of polyester with the word Juicy sequined across the chest (a brand name, not an adjective, Lily had been relieved to learn), exposed two inches of pale, adolescent flesh. Booker T. Washington High School forbade belly shirts, so each morning Lily made sure that Sophie’s shirt covered her midriff, as that formerly forbidden territory had once been known. But by the time Sophie returned from school, her pants had somehow drifted downward and her shirt in the opposite direction, exposing a generous swath of skin. Lily took some modest consolation from the fact that the midsection that her daughter chose to reveal to the world was pleasingly flat—a few of her friends had tummies that flopped brazenly over the tops of their pants. No sooner had Lily inured herself to the belly shirts, however, than Sophie had appeared at dinner a week or so ago sporting a belly ring, a silver band that, though tastefully simple, caused Lily’s abdominal muscles to clench in sympathetic pain and her jaw to clench in maternal disapproval. She’d made a minor fuss over the ring but hadn’t insisted that Sophie remove it, because that would have done no good—there was nothing like having your husband desert you, and then moving back in with your parents, to rob you of what little authority you might once have had with your children.
“Lily, these are awesome,” Paco said through a mouthful of the roasted potatoes to which Lily assumed he was referring. “There’s like this flavor, you know?”
When had she granted him permission to call her Lily?
“Rosemary,” she said.
Paco glanced around the table before smiling and pointing to his mouth.
“Oh, rosemary, like the flavor, I thought you meant a—” A poke from Sophie shut him up.
Paco was in the tenth grade at Booker T. Washington High School, but he looked much older than Sophie. He was handsome—ominously so, Lily thought—with lustrously dark skin and very fine features, but she couldn’t help focusing on the silver ring through his right eyebrow and the disturbing fact that he never blinked when looking at her, which seemed of a piece with calling her Lily. She’d attempted a mother-daughter talk with Sophie when Paco first appeared on the scene, but Sophie had brushed her off. “Mom, I know about safe sex, okay? I’m not a child.” Lily, who had planned to address the pros and cons of having sex at age fifteen, not strategies for having it safely, had backed off. She was, however, pleased that Paco’s approval of her roasted potatoes had elicited an enthusiastic nod of agreement from Larry. Roasted potatoes was one of the half-dozen dishes in her repertoire, a holdover from the days when she would help her mother prepare seders. She’d also managed to roast a tolerable chicken and prepare string beans without overcooking them.
Nanny looked stiff and uncomfortable at the table, taking tiny, birdlike pecks at her food and saying nothing. Her reticence didn’t stop Peggy from casting hateful glances at her, as if she were dominating the conversation rather than doing her best to remain inconspicuous.
“Larry looks so handsome,” Peggy had said in the kitchen as she helped Lily serve dinner. “Just like always.”
Peggy had always liked Larry. At a time when most Jewish mothers on the Upper West Side dreamed of their daughters marrying doctors or lawyers (while they inured themselves to the idea that their daughters might become such things), Peggy had overlooked his lack of ambition and focused instead on his straightforward openness. He’ll never disappoint you, she used to say, as if that were the highest praise.
Lily wondered if she herself weren’t perhaps the strangest figure of all at the table—abandoned by a husband who was on the lam from the federal government, living with her parents at age forty-two, carrying on an affair with her high-school boyfriend twenty-three years after high-school graduation, and strangest of all, risking a long prison sentence by spending three days a week in Queens with a counterfeiter named Mohammed.
“Larry, you still have the best nuts on Broadway,” Peggy said, triggering immediate giggling from William, Sophie, and Paco. “What’s so funny? It’s true. Everyone in the neighborhood loved his father’s nuts, too. Oh…I see.” Peggy frowned. “You’ll have to forgive the repartee at the table, Larry.” Peggy had become ludicrously coquettish since Larry’s arrival. Lily wondered just how unintentional her references to his family’s nuts had been.
“Nut jokes were a cross I bore all through adolescence,” he said.
“So you and my mom were, like, boyfriend and girlfriend?” William sounded more accusatory than curious.
“All through high school,” Larry said.
William turned to her and squinted.
“Yes, Will, I was in high school once, and yes, I even managed to have a boyfriend.”
“Not just any boyfriend, a star athlete,” Peggy added. “And a top student.”
“Then how come you’re still at the candy store?” William asked.
“The Broadway Nut Shoppe,” Peggy said.
“The ‘shoppie,’ we used to call it,” Lily added.
“The best nuts,” Paco guffawed, drawing a thigh smack from Sophie.
“No, seriously, if you were this great athlete and student, how come you’re working in a candy store?”
“As opposed to starting for the Yankees?” Larry said with no apparent defensiveness.
“As opposed to…I don’t know, like working for, like, a company or something.”
“I’m sure he had many opportunities,” Peggy said. “He chose to enter the family business.” She lingered over the last two words, transforming the Broadway Nut Shoppe into an enterprise of Wal-Martian scale.
“Well, it wasn’t much of a choice, really. My father died during my senior year at Cornell. I took over the shoppie right after graduation, figuring I’d run it until I got a real job. But I found I liked it. So I stayed.” He glanced at Lily. “I guess I was never all that ambitious.”
“Ambition,” Peggy said. “Look where it gets you.” She gestured first at Monroe, Exhibit A in the Gallery of Failed Ambition, and then at Lily, the gallery’s true masterpiece.
“So what are you all saying, I shouldn’t bother trying to get anywhere?” William asked.
“That’s not what anyone’s saying,” Lily said, frowning at Peggy.
“You just have to know what you want, what makes you happy,” Larry said.
William shrugged and refocused on his food. A shadow of gloomy hostility clung to him lately. Lily had tried to feel him out, but after alluding that one time to being teased by other kids, he’d clammed up. Lily couldn’t tell if he was experiencing typical adolescent angst or reacting to having a father who was a fugitive from justice. Whenever she brought up the subject of Barnett, he’d say, “I’m over it, okay?”
“You gotta find your bliss and shit,” Paco said, proffering a nod for each guest as he glanced around the table. “Like, if you’re not happening with what you’re doing, you won’t do it good, anyway, am I right? Like, I hate when—”
“That is such bullshit,” William said. “Where do you pick that crap up?”
“William!” Peggy said, looking directly at Lily. “Your language.”
“You didn’t say anything when Paco said shit.”
“He did not say…that word.”
“His exact words were ‘find your bliss and shit.’ You don’t forget poetry like that.”
Paco couldn’t suppress a satisfied grin.
“Let’s change the subject,” Lily said, and had an unwelcome flashback to countless nights at the Temple of Dendur and other party sites, when she could always be counted on to divert the conversation from uncomfortable topics. “I was thinking we could use a vacation at Christmas.”
“Vacation?” Peggy said. “Miss Moneybags all of a sudden.”
“See, that’s why kids pick on you,” Sophie said, addressing William. “You have this attitude.”
“What attitude?”
“Like you’re too good for the world.”
“Too good for your world, maybe. Who isn’t?”
“Stop it!” Lily said.
“Anyone want to talk about nuts and candy?” Larry asked.
“See, you go around acting like you got attitude,” Paco said to William, who was looking resolutely in the opposite direction. “I tell guys, That’s my girl’s brother, keep your paws off him, you know? We’re, like, related or something, almost.”
“When hell freezes over.”
“And they’re, like, that girl you been—” He came to an abrupt halt on a hard consonant that Lily thought might have been a b or, more ominously, an f. “That girl you been goin’ out with, that dickhead’s sister? Man, you gotta get your head examined. She may be a piece a ass, they say, but her brother—”
“Okay, Paco, we get the picture,” Sophie said.
A tense but welcome silence fell on the table, broken by Peggy.
“What are you looking at?” Peggy was glaring directly at Nanny.
“Me? Just trying to finish me dinner, that’s all,” Nanny said. As if to demonstrate the depth of concentration that task required, she daintily speared a piece of white meat, then a section of roasted potato, and finally a green bean and directed the entire shish kebab into her mouth.
“Some of the hotels in the Bahamas are quite reasonable in December,” Lily ventured. “You can’t count on good weather in December, but that’s why it’s affordable.”
“I’ve never understood why the British eat like that,” Peggy said. “Cramming a bit of everything on the fork at once. It’s barbaric.”
“I’m barbaric? I’m not the one with grandchildren who…”
“Grandchildren who what?”
“They had lovely manners when we lived across town.”
“That’s enough, Nanny,” Lily said with recidivistic hauteur. “Let’s have a toast to Sophie.” Glasses of water and soda and white wine were raised all around. “Happy birthday, sweetheart.”
Glasses were clinked and sipped from and set down.
“You ever consider franchising?” Monroe said to Larry. All eyes turned to him in wonderment at this first sign of cognizant life in what seemed like ages.
“Franchising the store?”
“The smart money is saying that franchising is the next big opportunity.”
“Monroe, since when has the smart money been talking to you?” Peggy turned to Larry. “He doesn’t even watch television anymore.”
“Actually, we watch CNBC together,” Nanny said. “Market Watch at eleven, then the closing wrap-up at four. Don’t we, Mr. G.?”
Peggy regarded her with the speechless incredulity of a woman encountering her husband’s mistress for the first time.
“Market Watch…” she managed to wheeze. “The closing wrap-up…”
“I’ve thought about opening a second location,” Larry said, “but it’s hard enough managing one.”
“But that’s the beauty of franchising,” Monroe said. “People pay you for the privilege of opening a new location. Then they run it. Once you have critical mass, you can take the company public.”
“That’s nuts, Monroe,” Peggy said, causing an outburst of giggles from Paco and Sophie. “It’s a candy store.” She glanced sharply at Nanny, who was gazing fondly at Monroe, as if he were one of her young charges.
“I think Daddy makes a lot of sense,” Lily said. It was nice hearing her father utter something other than It’s time for my pill. “How about it, Larry? Broadway Nut Shoppies from Maine to Texas.”
“We could call the company That’s Nuts.” Larry raised his wineglass. “To franchising!”
Monroe sat up straight and managed to raise his water glass without spilling any.
“I know a chap at E. F. Hutton who can get you the capital you need.”
Peggy rolled her eyes. “For heaven’s sake, Monroe, there is no E. F. Hutton anymore, they—”
Lily whacked her mother’s side, silencing her. She looked at Larry, then at her father, men from her past with, it seemed, new claims on her future.
“To the future,” she said, and drank her wine.
“What the hell happened to Hutton?” Monroe asked, glancing plaintively around the table.
“Stay.”
Larry grasped her shoulder and gently pulled her back onto the bed.
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m still a married woman. I can’t just walk into the apartment tomorrow morning wearing the same clothes as the night before.”
“You’re still obeying rules that no one else cares about.”
“It just seems wrong. I leave our apartment to ‘walk you home’ and don’t come back until the morning?
“The Lily Gimmel I knew twenty-five years ago didn’t give a rat’s ass about what anyone else thought. What happened to her?”
“She’s long gone.”
He looked at her sadly, and when she couldn’t take it any longer, she hugged him, thinking how nice it would be to wake up next to him, make lazy, morning love. Even the prospect of curtains on the windows and a real mattress seemed fraught with sybaritic possibility.
“Were you serious about franchising the store?” she asked.
“Would you stay if I said yes? Wait, don’t answer. No, of course I wasn’t serious.” He studied her a beat. “Disappointed?”
She shook her head. “But it was nice to see my father back in the game.” She wriggled out from his embrace and started to get dressed. “Maybe we could go away for a few days, just you and me.”
“How about next weekend? We could leave Thursday night. There’s an inn in northwestern Connecticut I know, you could introduce me to the joys of bird watching. Lily?”
“Oh, right, bird watching.”
“What just happened? Where’d you go? You look like you got horrible news.”
“Good news, actually. Talking about going away on Thursday…” She pulled her blouse over her head. “I was so focused on the dates…” She hiked up her trousers and fastened them. “I never paid attention to the day of the week.” She stepped into her shoes. “Do you know what this means?”
“What what means?”
“Barnett really was innocent.”
“Him again.”
“Not him, me. If he’s innocent…”
“Right, if Barnett is innocent, you’re rich again. The fact that he ran away, leaving you and the kids with nothing…a minor detail.”
“It’s not that,” she said. She leaned over the bed to kiss him but he rolled away.
“Good luck getting your life back,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, at least this time I get an apology before being dumped.”
“Nobody’s dumping you.”
“I hope everything works out for you. The front door locks automatically when you shut it.”