Company E-Book

Shannon Sanders

• Herausgeber: ONE
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 357

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'A riotous, dazzling debut' DEESHA PHILYAW 'Reading Shannon Sanders makes me want to visit home' TONY TULATHIMUTTE The heartfelt celebration of family and the messy beauty of belonging for fans of Blue Sisters and Small Worlds One family. Thirteen stories. Meet the sisters - Cassandra, Fay, Lela, and Suzette - and their circle of relatives, friends and lovers. A jostling clan of dropouts and overachievers, bickering siblings and delightfully bossy aunties. Journeying from a smoky jazz bar to a glittering campus soirée, this is a family portrait that refuses to sit still and a joyful, multigenerational celebration of belonging. Further praise for Company... 'A brilliant debut with each incisive chapter offering a new window into the beguiling Collins family' Ann Napolitano, author of Hello Beautiful 'There are undeniable shades of Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other. . . Sanders has fun playing with her characters as alignments and allegiances shift' Marie Claire 'A deftly woven tapestry that scrupulously depicts familial ties and estrangement' New York Times 'Offers sharp and original insight into the intimate politics of race and class' Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections

Leseprobe

‘A deftly woven tapestry that scrupulously depicts familial ties and estrangement, richly told with a nuance that allows each character dignity and grace’

New York Times

‘The prose is subtle and lean… Company shows the frayed edges of friendship and family, and Sanders extracts comedy from the formidable situations that erupt in people’s lives’

Washington Post

‘Assured and incisive… hums with the dark comedy of striving’

Tracy O’Neill, author of Quotients

‘The extended clan Sanders conjures in Company is fully alive – and very funny! – recognizable but wholly new, and to read their stories is to get the gift you don’t always get from your own family: the feeling of being seen’

Will Allison, author of Long Drive Home

‘Secrets are kept, traumas heal and endure. A rich, multigenerational portrait of a Black family’

Electric Literature

COMPANY

shannon sanders

5For Fox, Calloway, and Miles

67

8

910

COMPANY

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEDEDICATIONFAMILY TREETHE GOOD, GOOD MENBIRD OF PARADISETHE GATEKEEPERSRULE NUMBER ONERIOJALA BELLE HOTTENTOTEMOTEDRAGONFLIESAMICUS CURIAETHE OPAL CLEFTTHREE GUESTSCOMPANYTHE EVEREST SOCIETYACKNOWLEDGMENTS ABOUT THE AUTHORAVAILABLE AND COMING SOON FROM COPYRIGHT

11

THE GOOD, GOOD MEN

Theo had come all the way from New York with no luggage. From the parking lot Miles watched him spring from the train and weave past the other travelers, sidestepping their children and suitcases with practiced finesse, the first of anyone to make it across the steaming platform. His hair was shaved close on the sides, one thick strip left to grow skyward from the crown of his head. In his dark, lean clothing, hands shoved deep in his pockets, he was a long streak of black against the brightly colored crowd. He alone had reached their father’s full height.

He made no eye contact with Miles as he strode to the car and yanked at the door handle. Still didn’t as he folded himself in half and dropped heavily into the passenger seat, releasing a long breath. “Fucking hot,” he said, pulling the door shut.

Miles threw the car into drive and steered out of the parking lot, out of the knot of station traffic. “Summertime,” he said by way of assent.

These words, the first the brothers had spoken aloud to each other in over a year, hung in the air between them until the car reached the mouth of the highway. Their mother, Lee, had finally moved back out to the DC suburbs, to the end house in a single-family neighborhood all crisscrossed with telephone wires that Miles had seen often from the road. He was grateful for its 12proximity, only a four-mile drive from the train station. Last time around, searching for her dumpy apartment deep in the District, he and Theo had lost precious time to gridlock and confounding one-way streets and been beaten there by their sisters, turning the whole operation to chaos. A mess of shifting allegiances, tears, hysteria. Later, in the relative quiet of Miles’s living room, Theo had complained of his ears ringing.

“No bag, nothing?” asked Miles now, nodding toward Theo’s empty hands. “We need to stop for a toothbrush?”

“No,” said Theo. “I’m good. I’m out tonight, right after Safeway.”

Miles thought of Lauren back home, washing the guest linens and googling vegan dinner recipes since morning. “Okay,” he said. “Quick trip, though.”

“Just to keep it simple,” said Theo. “We dragged it out last time. A task like that always expands to fill whatever time you allocate for it. You know? We gave it two days, and it took two days. We were inefficient.” He reached for the dashboard and gave the AC knob a hard crank, calling up a blast of chilled air. “This time, two hours. We’ll give it two hours, and we’ll get it done in two hours.”

Miles suppressed a shiver. Stealing a glance at his brother’s outstretched arm, he saw an arc of freshly inked letters at the biceps, disappearing beneath a fitted sleeve. Lauren, who maintained aggressive Facebook surveillance of all her in-laws, had kept Miles apprised of each of Theo’s new tattoos for years, undeterred by Miles’s disinterest. Only this last had caught his attention.

“Bad stakeholder analysis, is what it was,” Theo was muttering. “Last time, I mean.” 13

“What’s the new tattoo?” asked Miles, pointing.

Theo blinked at the graceless transition, then obligingly pushed up his sleeve. “Got it in Los Angeles, on a work trip. A girl I was with talked me into it. I had been thinking about this one for years.” He traced his finger around the lettered circle, four words rendered to look like they’d been scrawled by hand in a familiar chicken scratch. “Miles, Thelonious, Mariolive, Caprice. For us, obviously.”

“But where did you get Daddy’s handwriting to show the tattoo artist?”

Theo let the sleeve drop and folded his arms across his chest. “From a check he sent to the old house for us, with our names in the memo line. I found it in a stack of Lee’s work papers with a bunch of other ones and took it when I went to New York. It was in my wallet when I went on the Los Angeles trip.”

Miles felt a swell of heat despite the frigid air. “You took a check from her and never gave it back?”

“Did you not hear me? It was with a bunch of other ones, and it was about eight years old. All the checks were years and years old, some of them reissues of older ones. He would write that in the memo line. He would send them, and she would put them someplace idiotic like tucked in the finished crossword puzzles or a pile of old magazines. And then, I guess, lose them, so he had to write new ones. She was always doing that kind of shit with checks. I found this one, and the others, all mixed in with the girls’ old coloring books. I took one and left the others there for her to find never. Is that okay with you?”

Theo’s posture had gone rigid, his face turned squarely in Miles’s direction. Miles took his eyes off the road long enough 14to stare back; but like a traveler gone too long from his hometown, forgetting its habits and idioms, he had lost his fluency in the quirks of his brother’s face. At one time he had been able to tell, from the slightest twitch of an eyelid, that Theo had been teased past his threshold and was about to cry; to hear an impending temper tantrum in the sharpness of his inhale. All that was years ago, when any impulse would buzz between them like a current, felt by one brother even before the other acted on it; when a germ passed to either inevitably would invade the other. A faraway, definitively ended time. The composition of Theo’s face was the same as always, brooding features assembled slickly under a strong brow. But now it was like their father’s face in the pictures: impassive, all traces of thought as strange and unreadable as hieroglyphics.

Lee had a new man, again, this one a fellow patron at the karaoke bar where she’d been throwing away money every week for months. It was known that he mixed good homemade cocktails and spoke a little French, which was probably what had done her in, because he wasn’t particularly good-looking and didn’t seem like anyone’s genius. He had a dog as big as a wolf, supposedly, and for some reason wore too much purple and a signet ring on his little finger.

Miles’s spotty intel had come from Mariolive and Caprice, who, working innocently but in tandem, were only a bit more effective than either of them was separately. Lauren, for her expert stalking efforts, couldn’t find even a single Facebook reference to supplement what little was known about her mother-in-law’s 15new relationship. It was not known where the new man came from, what he did for a living, or what wives and children lay crumbled in his wake. Nor what in God’s name he was doing making regular appearances at karaoke bars, if not trolling for naïfs like Lee.

But without question he had established himself as a regular at Lee’s new house out in the suburbs, as evidenced by his car’s presence there on each of four spot checks Miles had conducted upon receipt of the intelligence. It was there on a Sunday afternoon, a black sedan parked casually in the carport behind Lee’s dented Ford Explorer. There again the following Thursday as Miles inched homeward past the wire-crossed neighborhood in rush-hour traffic. There on a Friday after dark, the lights on in the little house behind it, a hint of movement within. And then, confirming Miles’s nauseated suspicions, there again the next morning at sunup, the house still and silent.

Mariolive had said, At least this one has a car. Which was more than could be said of certain previous ones, like the one who’d needed Lee to drive him up to Philadelphia once a week to try to see his estranged son. Or the one who’d put the dents in the Ford Explorer driving down I-95 in the dark after cocktails.

But still: a grown man, well past any definition of middle age, living unashamedly off a woman with air between her ears. Who lived by the word of her daily horoscope and always kept a tambourine handy to punctuate moments of spontaneous group laughter.

And also: a karaoke bar. An unforgivable fall into the soulless and vulgar. Lee had met their father at a District jazz lounge that no longer existed, a place Miles had long imagined as dark and 16deliciously moody, like the man himself, with threads of light piano melody curling through the air between sets. He was the MacHale third of the regular Tuesday-night trio Somebody, Somebody & MacHale (Miles thought he would never forgive Lee for this offense alone, her willful forgetting of the group’s full name, which no amount of internet searching could recover), the long-fingered bassist who looked a little like Gil Scott-Heron and stood almost as tall as his instrument. MacHale never talked between sets, but he had a smile like a swallow of top-shelf whiskey. Lee had learned from him about melody and improvisation, about modality, how bebop could crush you, how the blues could lift you.

From that she had found her way, albeit over some thirty-five years, into the drunken sump of some suburban karaoke bar. A place where, by very expectation, the music was shit.

Mariolive estimated she’d been hearing consistent mentions of Mister Signet Ring for two months. Caprice, marginally more reliable in temporal matters, thought it had been four. In his email to Theo, Miles had taken liberties: Bro. Hope you are well. Yet another motherfucker living up in Lee’s house for the past six months. You have time to go to Safeway?

Theo, perpetually glued to his devices for work purposes, had written back within a minute: I’ll make time. When?

He was explaining again about the stakeholder grid. “It’s about maximizing your tools to push your agenda forward,” he said, drawing squares in the air with long fingers. “You look for the intersection of interest and influence—the people who want 17what you want and have some power toward achieving it—and you mobilize them. High interest, high influence: That’s your first quadrant. That’s who you need on your side. They can help you mobilize the folks in the other quadrants. As long as you keep your first quadrant happy, you’ll always have some muscle behind your agenda.”

“Got it,” said Miles.

“My mistake last time,” said Theo, “was thinking the girls were in the first quadrant. I thought they were with us and that I could use them that way.”

“When really …?”

“Low interest, high influence. Not actually on the same page as us, not actually ready to go to goddamn Safeway, but influential. You know? Noisy. They have Lee’s ear, she listens to them, wrong as they are. They’re third quadrant. You keep third quadrant as far away from the task as possible, because otherwise they’ll destroy it.”

“Ah.”

“Which is why, this time, no girls.”

As Theo said, their mistake last time had been inviting their sisters. Mariolive and Caprice were a storm of emotion, almost as changeable and ridiculous as their mother. The last time, with things coming to light fisticuffs between Theo and the squatter who had infiltrated Lee’s shoebox apartment in the District, both girls had simultaneously burst into tears. No, Theo, stop, they wailed, each clutching one of Lee’s shaking hands. It’s fine, it’s fine, just let him stay. When only days earlier, they’d agreed that the non-rent-paying leech of a boyfriend needed to be escorted out of the too-small apartment. When only minutes earlier, they’d 18been helping Miles gather the boyfriend’s belongings—tattered books, crusted-over cookware—and toss them unscrupulously into the cardboard boxes brought for this purpose. Mariolive had thrown herself in front of the boxes, her thick black braid darting from side to side with each shake of her hair. Let him stay with Mommy. Which was why it had taken a total of two days, two trips back to the apartment, two separate escalations of physical contact, to get the lowlife to leave, believably for good.

The time before that: uneventful. The brothers working alone, their sisters away at college, had sent the motherfucker packing for Philadelphia within twenty minutes of focused intimidation. Then, as now, Theo had been wearing head-to-toe black, and incidentally Miles had, too (he had come straight from coaching football practice), and to the infiltrator they had appeared a powerful and unified posse. The infiltrator had actually cowered—a foot shorter than Theo, who had reached his full MacHale height at that point—and promised he would never again take advantage of Lee’s generosity. Lee herself, crying and wringing her hands in the corner of the room, had been easy to ignore; both brothers had a lifetime’s practice.

Once, MacHale had sent Miles a letter. The letter, etched in blue ballpoint in MacHale’s erratic, challenging script, confirmed Lee’s memory of their first meeting at the long-gone jazz lounge. She had been the girl who turned up to all his gigs in halter dresses she’d made by hand from colorful see-through scarves, swaying her considerable hips at front-and-center as though they’d hired her as a dancer. Perfect rhythm, and stacked as all hell; but too 19pretty, an almost unbearable distraction. And too silly to be bothered by the fact that everyone—including MacHale, losing notes on his bass—was watching her. He had never seen anything like her, a Black girl with glowing cinnamon skin and hair the color of a well-traveled penny. Sometimes she wore an Afro with a shiny turquoise pick in it, even though it was the eighties and people weren’t doing that so much in the District anymore, and on those days he couldn’t look at anything but her.

She claimed not to know anything about jazz but somehow could hum all the staple melodies after hearing them once. Often, she brought her own tambourine and accompanied the trio from the lounge floor. The Black men and even some of the white ones stared greedily at her, hollering their approval, and even then she didn’t stop, her craving for attention apparently bottomless.

I’m sure you know the feeling, read the letter in MacHale’s labored handwriting. And even on his first read, Miles had known the feeling, having experienced Lee’s oblivious attention-seeking many times over, and having also experienced the misery of watching girls he wanted flirt with other men. He understood why his father had seen no other option but to set aside his bass one day and leave the lounge with her, thirty minutes before the gig was scheduled to end, and to marry her six months later and quit the gig altogether. He certainly didn’t need her, the someday mother of his children, swaying and twirling her hips into a future of infinite Tuesday nights.

Belatedly, something dawned on Miles. “Wait,” he said. “So you think I’m in your first quadrant.” 20

Theo, thumbing through emails on his phone, grunted in reply. “If this is done in two hours,” he said, “I can get the 7:05 back to New York. There’s a gin-tasting event in Brooklyn that I want to get to by midnight.”

“Gin at midnight is worth rushing back for?”

“Networking. There’s these guys who’ll be there that I need to maximize face time with to kick off some new stuff I’m doing in the coding space, and if I hit them up while they’re a little bit loose, I might be able to—” He faltered audibly, looked at his brother. “Anyway, yeah,” he concluded. “I definitely want to get back for that.”

Miles’s hand twitched toward the phone in his pocket but then tightened instead around the steering wheel. Lauren called this—the type of work people like Theo did in places like Brooklyn, which no amount of description could clarify to outsiders—alternawork.

“Unlike Lee,” Theo continued, “I can’t just leave money on the table. I think about those checks she never cashed, and I just—man.” He whistled, a low, pensive sound.

Miles sensed, in the shifts of Theo’s upper body, that some familiar, troubled presence had joined them in the car. The mishandling of money had always offended Theo deeply; as a boy, he’d been brought to tears many times by Lee’s fretful comments about bills. And from amid the high-piled detritus of the many chintzy apartments Lee had occupied over the years, Theo had somehow sniffed out, and pilfered, MacHale’s forgotten child-support checks. There was something so pathetic in it that Miles was almost, almost moved to touch his brother’s shoulder and to apologize for it, for all of it, on Lee’s behalf. 21

For years the brothers had been inseparable everywhere but at school, where they were two grades apart. Living the other two-thirds of their lives in symbiosis, Miles the mouthpiece for both of them. From playing like the best of friends to fighting savagely at the drop of a hat, their feet and elbows always in each other’s faces, a constant bodily closeness like nothing Miles would ever experience again. Like a first marriage.

Among other things, MacHale and his wife had argued about this, whether brothers should be together so much, immersing themselves so fully in their two-person games. Lee had discouraged it, having gotten it into her mind that Miles’s engineer brain was stifling Theo’s fanciful imagination, or that they were conspiring daily to rearrange the carefully curated array of crystals and candles on her dresser into an unintelligible mess. She wanted them to be apart sometimes, at least long enough for Miles to complete his homework assignments without Theo’s scribbles winding up all over them. She believed fiercely in the importance of regular aloneness, shutting herself into the bedroom with the crystals for occasional twenty-minute stretches while both boys pawed at the door, indignant.

But in those days she had left them to their own devices for hours while she worked—sometimes impossibly long shifts at the Macy’s makeup counter; other times sorting garments at the consignment shop in Northeast, using her pretty face and her honeyed words to sell them to their second owners. Each day, after she was out the door, her long skirts trailing behind her like plumage, MacHale had gathered both boys, not giving a fuck about their aloneness, and sat them before the bass in his practice room to listen while he did his finger warm-ups, his spiderlike scales and arpeggios. 22

He would play a song or two at a time, then go fix himself a Sazerac, and then do another few songs, delighting the boys by weaving made-up lyrics about Lee into the classics. Into “I Cover the Waterfront” he worked lines about how Lee left all her men home alone too much; “So What” became a song about her big butt and how she wore those skirts to show it off to the men at Macy’s.

MacHale gave the boys little nips of his Sazeracs (nasty, and then gradually less nasty) and told them jokes he’d heard at the clubs where sometimes he still played jazz. He disliked television but every so often let them watch episodes of The Cosby Show; he sneaked them out to two Spike Lee movies in the space of a year. He said no to buying them a Nintendo, no and no and no again, each of thirty thousand times they asked; but in the afternoons before his gigs, he let them sit on his back to watch cartoons while he snoozed on the couch.

And yes, sometimes he sent them into the master bedroom to swap any two of Lee’s crystals, laughing riotously and giving them double high-fives when they returned triumphant.

And then Lee, returning late at night from doing inventory at the consignment shop, was a wild card who often shattered the consistent peace of daytime. She might be happy and pull out her tambourine, shaking it and her hips when the whole family was laughing. But she might just as readily make a beeline for the stove and wordlessly slam a pan onto it, storm clouds nearly visible over her slick copper-colored bun as she began to stir-fry chicken and peppers. MacHale making the boys laugh by mimicking her cooking posture with exaggerated flourishes or pretending to bite the nape of her bare neck like a vampire. 23

Her high drama, her hysterical turns of phrase. Tell it to the devil, you piece of shit, Miles once heard her scream on the front porch under his bedroom window, the words slicing their way into his dream and waking him up. Her idea of a welcome-home as MacHale returned from one of the many gigs that didn’t end till well past midnight. She ranted with wild passion, her words otherwise shrill and indistinct, while MacHale responded at a blessedly normal volume, his low, moody murmur so comforting that before Miles knew it he had drifted back to sleep. In the morning it was as though nothing had happened. Lee served the boys their eggs and toast with a wide artificial smile, pretty as ever with a purple ribbon braided into her hair.

At one of these gigs, MacHale broke his left tibia and fibula and landed himself in the hospital for a stay that dragged on like a prison sentence, forcing Lee to quit the Macy’s job and surrender several of her shifts at the consignment shop. (Are we going to be poor? Theo asked, again in tears; and Lee laughed one of her untamed, destabilizing laughs. You thought we were rich before this?)

After that MacHale was on the couch, suffering the television he so disliked with his leg stretched stiff before him, eating half of what Lee offered him and rejecting the rest, irritable each time she reminded him he could not drink whiskey—not even in cocktail form—on meds as strong as the ones he’d been prescribed.

She was moving more slowly than usual, in the first bloom of visible pregnancy with the girls, and she complained often about her aching back and feet in a way that seemed to Miles to be wildly insensitive, considering. MacHale called the boys to him 24on a Saturday morning. We need eggs and sausage and green onions, he said, making eye contact first with Miles, then with Theo, looking back and forth between them; nothing he had ever told them had seemed so important. But I don’t like your mama swishing around in the streets like she does. You boys go with Lee to Safeway and you don’t let nothing happen to her. Nobody looking funny at her, nothing. You understand?

The boys, with their small chests puffed out, gangly Theo actually walking on tiptoe to appear taller, flanked her dutifully on the walk to Safeway.

The eggs were found easily, but in an aisle full of loitering men; so Theo stayed behind with Lee while Miles darted ahead and grabbed a carton, checking the contents for cracks as he’d been shown to do. Aren’t you helpful, said Lee.

She forgot her purse in the aisle with the sausages but realized it only once they’d reached the green onions five aisles over; Miles, able to see in his memory’s eye the maroon felt satchel slung over one of the shelves, deployed Theo back to that aisle, holding Lee in place with produce-related questions till his brother reappeared with the purse.

In the checkout line they stood behind Lee, shoulder to shoulder between her and the other customers, because she was wearing one of those skirts and it just seemed like the thing to do.

At home, their chests puffed out ever farther, they each received praise and a kiss on the forehead from MacHale, and pride nearly overpowered Miles’s eight-year-old body.

A week later, wobbling a bit on his new crutches, MacHale took his sons to the toy store and led them straight up to the checkout counter, behind which was kept all the costliest merchandise. With 25each hand palming one of his sons’ flocked heads, MacHale got the cashier’s attention and nodded up to the top shelf. A—what do you call it, Miles? A Super Nintendo Entertainment System, please. We’ll take one of those for these good, good boys.

Happiness hummed between Miles and Theo, their feelings in perfect alignment, one of the last moments in which this would ever occur.

Some weeks after that, MacHale recovered the ability to walk without crutches, and then he was gone, finally driven away by Lee’s whims and her nattering.

Thirteen years later, Miles would break his left tibia and fibula playing college football and find himself bedridden for too long and slowed by a cast for even longer, a total of six idle weeks during which he thought he might scratch out his eyeballs from boredom. When the cast came off, he would feel as though he’d been fired from a cannon, an unstoppable projectile who ran instead of walked whenever possible and, through this experience, would finally come to understand why, after surviving all those years with Lee, his father nonetheless could not survive a single solitary second with her post-crutches.

And so when MacHale’s letter, five dense handwritten pages addressed To my firstborn on his 21st birthday arrived—only a few weeks late—to confirm the projectile theory, Miles would find that he felt satisfied with this explanation. Not that he had ever felt particularly otherwise. 26

But in the immediate, MacHale’s abrupt exit ripped a hole in their little house in Northeast, all its inhabitants left at Lee’s mercy. What outcome could MacHale possibly have foreseen but pandemonium? Before anything else, there was Lee unilaterally scrapping Ella and Pearl, the very good names MacHale had chosen for his daughters-to-be, replacing them with absurdities she’d dreamed up through God only knew what nutty numerology. There was an intolerable glut of visitors, relatives of Lee’s come out of the woodwork to rock the babies and distract Miles and Theo from their grief with nonsensical questions about school. There were foods served that MacHale never would have tolerated, the delicious staples replaced with eggplant and tofu and loaves of bread with pea-sized seeds in them.

There was the unceremonious discarding of the double bass, which MacHale had said he would come back for but which instead became the property of a disadvantaged District high school’s music department. MacHale’s left-behind shirts and pants, the ones he wore to gigs, a spare collection of twenty or so all-black garments, were swept from the master closet and sent to the Salvation Army. MacHale’s Copper Pony went down the toilet and the bottles into the trash can, leaving the bar cart empty. For a short time they lived as if in a sanitarium, every word anyone spoke echoing disconcertingly off the bare walls.

It did not last. Soon enough Lee filled the closet with more clothes of her own. The extra space seemed to give her the feeling that she could now acquire as many impractical garments as she wanted, new things from department stores and the leftover inventory from the consignment shop. Bolts of cloth found all over the place, wrapped around her body in ridiculous ways but 27still drawing street whistles that burned her sons’ ears. She began wearing her turquoise Afro pick again, sometimes in her hair, sometimes tied to a length of cord and worn above her cleavage as a statement necklace. She spray-painted the bar cart magenta and gold and filled the top half with the priciest of each kind of spirit, the bottom with bottles of wine brought to the house by her consignment shop employees and other friends when they visited.

She collected stacks of papers that nearly reached the ceilings. Recipes torn from health magazines; drawings the girls did that she could not bear to throw away; Miles’s and Theo’s schoolwork, which miraculously had not lapsed. When mail arrived bearing MacHale’s name, she quickly spirited it away, envelopes and all, to places unseen, sometimes returning the most boring contents—old invoices, typewritten correspondence from the city—to her stacks of papers. Lee’s treatment of MacHale’s more personal mail infuriated Miles: sometimes he’d see the scraps of ripped-up letters in the trash can and find himself consumed with thoughts of vengeance, wanting to take scissors to her precious clothes, wondering how she’d like finding the silken garments shredded similarly.

Once, Lee opened a check from MacHale and laughed aloud as she crumpled it into a ball before Miles’s horrified eyes. If I threw this on the ground, it would bounce right through the ceiling, she said with a cackle, dropping it into the pocket of her carnelian skirt.

There was no more jazz; she played terrible music on the tape player and then on the CD player, and cheered the children through their homework with that imbecilic tambourine. Look what I found! she crowed one day, and to Miles’s horror she pulled from her satchel two sets of hand cymbals to give to her 28daughters. Their small hands barely fit into the straps, but they screamed with happiness anyway, filling the room with noise.

She gave MacHale’s entire vinyl collection to a man she met at work, and for the first time in a while Miles and Theo had something to talk about.

She gave Daddy’s records to that guy, said Miles, barging into Theo’s room and finding him there with his head in a textbook. I think they might be dating or something.

Theo lifted his head, looking sick. Oh, that’s nasty, he said.

A silence hung between them. After a time, Miles cleared his throat. Do you ever, he asked carefully, think about that one time when Daddy sent us with her to Safeway?

And then bought us the Nintendo.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Miles had decided immediately upon receipt of MacHale’s only letter to him that he would neither mention nor show it to Theo. It went on for five pages and did not once mention MacHale’s younger son, nor either of his daughters. The return address, to which Miles sent multiple overeager replies, had turned over to another renter mere days earlier, with no hints as to where MacHale might have gone. Anyway, the letter itself was more than good enough, and even the revelation of seeing MacHale’s quirky handwriting up close was an unexpected joy. Whatever unease he had felt seeing it inked on Theo’s arm just now was 29repaired by knowing its less-than-honorable origins. Miles sat a little taller now, reassured that his was the only letter. Not that Theo hadn’t deserved one of his own, of course.

Their exit loomed. “Will Lauren and I see you again soon, then?” asked Miles, flicking on his turn signal.

“Don’t know,” said Theo.

Miles thought of Mariolive, who by Lauren’s report was holding on to her shithead college boyfriend even though she should know better by now, all those letters after her name. Maybe they’d be hitting Safeway again soon, for her.

Into the shabby, wire-crossed neighborhood he steered the car. Beside him, Theo was silent but alert, scanning the boxy little houses of Lee’s neighbors, his phone for once inert in his pocket.

The grass was freshly cut, a touch that struck Miles as the work of a much craftier adversary than all the sloppy past boyfriends. A dog, chained to Lee’s wrought-iron fence and unsurprisingly not wolf-sized, slept under Mister Signet Ring’s black sedan. Its collar was turquoise and spattered with glitter, and seemed to have sprouted a number of multicolored feathers.

They retrieved the cardboard boxes from the trunk and walked shoulder to shoulder up the walkway, Theo hunching just the tiniest, barely perceptible bit, which Miles appreciated. A hideous summer foliage wreath hung from the front door, and the faintest four-on-the-floor seemed to pulse through a downstairs window.

Both brothers lifted their fists. Theo dropped his, and Miles knocked.

Lee opened the door, a fuchsia scarf tied around her silver-and-copper hair. The synthesized sounds of disco music flooded out into the front yard, rousing the dog. Shades of excitement 30and then concern passed over her expressive face in an instant. “Boys?”

Behind her, sitting on the couch in veritable purple jeans, the Post spread out before him, his ringed little finger keeping time against the edge of the newspaper, sat Mister Signet Ring himself, looking at the brothers with only mild curiosity.

“You,” said Theo, maintaining eye contact with the boyfriend as he stepped around his mother, while Miles began the work of containing her in the foyer. “We need to talk to you.”

31

BIRD OF PARADISE

Evening fell and up came the automated glow of the citronella torches. Cassandra had noticed them as she first stepped into her boss’s backyard, a dozen earthen obelisks discreetly lining the patio and the outer reaches of the lawn, and registered them as a particularly un-Jon-like aspect of his Takoma Park home. Difficult to imagine the university president—who dressed each day as if for a press conference, fleurs-de-lis flashing at his jacket cuffs and the school colors shining in the satiny threads of one bow tie from his bottomless reserve—strutting into a Lowe’s in search of these garden lights that looked like mud sculptures. Now, though, the darkness-activated torches turned majestic, their steely basins emanating scent and showy little flames. This was Jon: drama, spectacle, pomp and circumstance, and so forth. Presidential!

However, while the torches gave off a warmly flattering aura, performing small mercies on the zits and crow’s-feet of the faces in the assembled crowd, they didn’t provide nearly enough light if one happened to be looking for someone, which Cassandra was. “Sorry, just a minute,” she told the group clustered around her. She touched the arm of the person before her—some young hanger-on from Student Affairs—and the seas parted; she pushed through. 32

She needed her nieces for a photo, quickly. They’d only just been here, gathered with the crowd on the patio to hear Jon’s end-of-evening remarks, and then seemed to disperse as Cassandra was swept up in toasts and congratulations. She thought now that she saw one by the koi pond, a high-piled puff of hair above a shadowed young face, a lissome body in black. She headed that way, gathering the skirt of her dress in one hand and clutching her glass of Opus One in the other, careful, so careful not to trip.

“Beautiful dress,” murmured a woman named Janet as their shoulders grazed each other in passing. Janet would start the upcoming semester as the new dean of diversity and inclusion, once Cassandra ascended to the role of provost. Passing Cassandra the name of her favorite fashion rental service had been Janet’s first act of solidarity with her predecessor.

“A little birdie helped me find it,” said Cassandra, winking, and hustled past.

For Jon, for this, Cassandra had chosen a dress called the Zofia by a designer well outside her ken, a magenta cocktail number with a plume of shirring for a shoulder strap. She had done so, understanding that it would draw even more than the usual share of Michelle Obama comparisons so many of her colleagues seemed dead set on making, suggestive as it was of last year’s inaugural ballgown. That was all right; one could see that as a sort of compliment. The Zofia had been a nod to Jon’s preference for sartorial regality. Cassandra had had her hairstylist put in a bronze rinse and take off an extra inch to dilute the Michelle-ness of the overall look, and—it was all fine. But the structure of the dress, its constrictive boning and the flare of tulle at the hip, made hurrying difficult. Especially now that 33night had fallen. And by the time she reached the koi pond, the phantom niece had disappeared behind a wall of party guests.

Of the eightyish guests, Cassandra supposed that half—including Jon, hence the party, the heavy hors d’oeuvres, the unending cases of upper-midlist French wines—were sincerely happy for her appointment. Twenty-eight or so had openly backed Neil Margolis, the other apparent front-runner. Another nine were utterly goddamn inscrutable, their faces sealed in neutrality all evening as they burbled their congratulations and clinked Cassandra’s wineglass. Fine. They had their own aspirational reasons. But of course it left her to twist in the winds of uncertainty, both tonight and once they were all back in the hallowed halls.

And so—operating on such a slim margin of confirmed support—how grateful she had been all evening for the true agnostics! The catering staffers passing bacon-wrapped scallops on trays. Jon’s cleaning ladies, two lithe brown figures clad in black, clandestinely collecting dropped napkins and left-behind plastic flatware, sweeping them into the wide mouth of a garbage bag for what Cassandra suspected must be double overtime. The photographer, someone’s earnest nephew, wielding a gifted Nikon DSLR. When one needed a break from the bullshit—and one often did—one could reach for a scallop or duck into a dim corner and supplant university small talk with, for example, a comment about the mosquitoes that despite the citronella seemed sent straight from hell to swarm Jon’s backyard. God, the relief of it, these few blessed souls present who truly didn’t care one way or the other.

Except that now the photographer, worried about the dying light and the party guests’ accelerating drunkenness, was beginning 34to reckon with a preordained list of hoped-for shots, photos that would likely punctuate the next university bulletin and perhaps a local culture magazine or two. Half an hour earlier, he had accosted Cassandra by the fruit display. Dr. Collins, could we get one of you with your family?

Family. When Jon had put this thing together, he’d floated a possible date by her, and she in turn floated the date by her husband during their bi-nightly phone call.

“I don’t know, Sandy,” Charles had said after a moment, not concealing his distraction or the clattering of his fingers on a keyboard. Down in Atlanta, he was sorting out the details of an acquisition turned nasty, managing trips up to DC only as absolutely necessary. “This is instead of the other thing?”

He meant the official do that would take place once the semester ended, a gargantuan gala the likes of which Jon was famous for. Tuxes and gowns. “In addition to,” Cassandra clarified, though she understood already that this was the groundwork for a no. “This is a more intimate gathering at Jon’s house. You could wear a sport jacket. It’s not a big show.”

Charles huffed a little at that.

“Not a big donor show,” Cassandra clarified, cradling the phone between her ear and shoulder as she parted the curtains and peered down at the cacophonous Saturday nighters below. The window in the living room of her condominium overlooked the corner of Eighteenth and M, a triangle of bars and restaurants. On weekends after dark, the block teemed with under-thirties, interns from the Hill and students of nearby institutions, their 35dance music throbbing from the windows. Cassandra let her eyes wander over the crowd without focusing on any particular tearaway, careful as always not to positively identify some drunken student from her university.

“I don’t know, Sandy,” Charles said again, this time in a tone that effectively ended the conversation. “The other thing, though, I’ll be there, absolutely. Spit-shined and suited up.”

It wasn’t such a disappointment. The handful of times she’d gotten Jon and Charles in a room together, Cassandra had found herself physically disoriented, as if the hemispheres of her brain had switched sides without warning.

Her daughter, Cecilia, didn’t answer the phone. This stung but didn’t surprise Cassandra. Compiling recent data, she realized there was, at any given moment, a better than 65 percent chance that Cecilia wasn’t speaking to her.

Her son, Cyrus, answered midway through the second ring. Though she’d meant to launch right into the question of the garden party, first she couldn’t stop herself from bitching for a full fifteen minutes about Cecilia, to Cy’s gentle clucks of validation. His patience persisted even as noise swelled behind him, collegiate debauchery not unlike what went on outside Cassandra’s window, and finally Cassandra forced herself to come to her point: “Anyway—could you get here for the party, by any chance? On the tenth?”

“I have a dance final,” said Cy, not without tenderness. “But you know I would, if not.”

She did know, and after they hung up she sat motionless for a minute or two, picturing her dismay as a small gray stone, turning it over in her mind, painting it a bright white with wide, 36forceful brushstrokes of gratitude. She took a few deep breaths, and then she called her sister Lela.

“Can I bring somebody?” asked Lela. Of course.

“No,” said Cassandra. “Bring who?”

“I’m seeing someone,” said Lela.

“I know,” said Cassandra. “But—”

“You don’t know. This isn’t that guy. This one’s name is Irving and he’s been saying he wants to meet you.”

“This isn’t the time for that, though,” said Cassandra, pinching the bridge of her nose. “For this, just family is best.”

Lela exhaled theatrically. “Worrying we’ll make you look bad,” she murmured, as if to herself. “You already have the job, don’t you?”

“Listen, Lee,” said Cassandra. “It’s a yes or a no. I’ll get you a ride from Southeast if you need one. Jon always has good wine.”