Twelve Rooms with a View

Also by Theresa Rebeck

Three Girls and Their Brother

For Jess Lynn

I
WAS ACTUALLY STANDING ON THE EDGE OF MY MOTHER’S OPEN
grave when I heard about the house. Some idiot with tattoos and a shovel had tossed a huge wad of dirt at me. I think he was perturbed that everyone else had taken off, the way they’re supposed to, and I was standing there like someone had brained me with a frying pan. It’s not like I was making a scene. But I couldn’t leave. The service in the little chapel had totally blown—all that deacon or whatever he was could talk about was god and his mercy and utter unredeemable nonsense that had nothing to do with her—so I was just standing there, thinking maybe something else could be said while they put her in the earth, something simple but hopefully specific. Which is when Lucy came up and yanked at my arm.

“Come on,” she said. “We have to talk about the house.”

And I’m thinking, what house?

So Lucy dragged me off to talk about this house, which she and Daniel and Alison had clearly been deep in conversation about for a while, even though I had never heard of it. Which maybe I might resent? Especially as Daniel obviously had an interest but no real rights, as he is only Alison’s husband? But I was way too busy trying to catch up.

“The lawyer says it’s completely unencumbered. She died intestate, and that means it’s ours, that’s what the lawyer says.” This from Lucy.

“What lawyer?” I ask.

“Mom’s lawyer.”

“I have a hard time believing that that is true,” Daniel said.

“Why would he lie?” Lucy shot back at him.

“Why would a lawyer lie? I’m sorry, did you just say—”

“Yes I did. He’s
our
lawyer, why would he lie?”

“You just said he was Mom’s lawyer,” I pointed out.

“It’s the same thing,” she said.

“Really? I’ve never even heard of this guy, and I don’t know his name, and he’s my lawyer?”

“Bill left her his
house,”
Lucy told me, like I’m some kind of total moron. “And since she died without a will, that means it’s ours. Mom has left us a house.”

This entire chain of events seemed improbable to me. I’m so chronically broke and lost in an underworld of trouble all the time that a stroke of luck like an actual house dropping out of the sky might be true only if it were literally true and I was about to find myself squashed to death under somebody
else’s
house, like the Wicked Witch of the East. Surely this could not mean that. I continued to repeat things people had just said. “Bill left her his house?”

“Yes! He left her everything!” Lucy snapped.

“Didn’t he have kids?”

“Yes, in fact, he did,” Daniel piped up. “He has two grown sons.”

“Well, did he leave them something?”

“No, he didn’t,” Lucy said, firm. Daniel snorted. “What? It’s true! He didn’t leave them anything!” she repeated, as if they’d been arguing about this for days.

“The lawyer said it wouldn’t matter whether or not they agreed to the terms of their father’s will,” Alison noted, looking at Daniel, trying to be hopeful in the face of his inexplicable pessimism about somebody leaving us a house.

“If the lawyer said that, he’s a complete moron,” Daniel informed her. “I called Ira. He’s going to take a look at the documents and let us know what kind of a mess we’re in.”

“It’s not a mess, it’s a house,” Lucy said, sort of under her breath, in a peevish tone. She doesn’t like Daniel. She thinks he’s too bossy. Which he is, considering that we didn’t
all
marry him, just Alison.

So we took a left out of the cemetery in Daniel’s crummy old beige Honda and went straight into Manhattan to the lawyer’s office. There was no brunch with distant relatives and people standing around saying trivial mournful things about Mom, which I didn’t mind being spared. It would have been hard to find anybody who knew her anyway, but I did think that the four of us would at least stop at a diner
and have some eggs or a bagel. But not the Finns. We get right down to business.

Before noon we were squashed around a really small table in a really small conference room in the saddest Manhattan office you ever saw. The walls were a nasty yellow and only half plastered together; seriously, you could see the dents where the Sheetrock was screwed into the uprights. The tabletop was that kind of Formica that looks vaguely like wood in somebody’s imagination. I was thinking, this is a
lawyer’s
office? What kind of lawyer? The overweight receptionist wore a pale green sloppy shirt, which unfortunately made her look even fatter than she was, and she kept poking her head in, first to ask us if we wanted any coffee and then about seven more times to tell us that Mr. Long would be right with us. Finally the guy showed up. His name was Stuart Long, and he looked like an egg. Seriously, the guy had a really handsome face and a good head of brown hair, but the rest of him looked like an egg. For a moment it was all I could concentrate on, so I was not, frankly, paying full attention when Lucy interrupted him in midsentence and said, “Can you tell us about the house?”

“The house?” said the lawyer, seriously confused for a second. And I thought—of course, they got it wrong, of course there is no house.

“Bill’s house,” Alison explained. “The message you left on our machine said Bill left Mom a house, and the house would be part of the settlement. You left that, didn’t you leave that—”

“Well, I certainly would not have left any details about the settlement on a machine—I spoke to your husband, several times actually. Is that what you mean?”

“Yes, we spoke, and you told me about the house,” Daniel interrupted, all snotty and impatient, like these details were really beneath him. I could see Lucy stiffen up, because Daniel clearly
had
told her and Alison that he had gotten “a message,” when in fact he had been having long conversations with this lawyer that he had no right to have, much less lie about.

“You mean the apartment,” Egg Man insisted.

“Yes, the apartment.” Daniel was still acting above it all, as if he had a right to be annoyed.

“So it’s not a house,” I said.

“No, it’s an apartment. Olivia was living there. Up until her recent death.”

“Recent death—that’s an understatement,” I said.

“Yes, yes, this is I’m sure overwhelming for you,” the lawyer said. He had very good manners, compared to everyone else in the room. “But I take it from your questions that you’ve never seen the apartment?”

“Bill didn’t like us,” I said. “So we weren’t allowed to visit them.”

“He was reclusive,” Alison corrected me. “As I’m sure Mr. Long is aware.”

“Mom told me he didn’t want us to visit because Bill didn’t like us,” I said.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Alison.

“Could we get back to the point?” Lucy said. “What about this place—this apartment? We’re inheriting it, right?”

“Yes, well, the apartment was directly willed to your mother,” Egg Man agreed. “Because her death came so soon after her husband’s, the title was never officially transferred, but that will most likely be considered a technicality.”

“And it was her house,” Daniel reminded him. He was really stuck on this idea that it was a house.

“Technically it is, as I said, specifically included in the estate,” our round lawyer repeated. “Why don’t you let me walk you through this?”

“Why don’t
you
just tell us how much the place is worth?” Lucy threw in.

Mr. Long blinked but otherwise ignored her poor manners. “Obviously it’s not possible to be specific about the worth of the property until we have a professional evaluation,” he informed the room.

“You really don’t know?” Lucy persisted. “Like, it could be worth ten dollars or ten thousand dollars or a million dollars, but you don’t know?”

Before Egg Man could answer, Daniel tried to rip control of the meeting back to his side of the table. “She’s just a little impatient,” he said, smiling. “Sweetie, maybe we should let Mr. Long—”

Lucy rolled her eyes at this. “Just a ballpark, Daniel
sweetie,”
she shot back.

Mr. Long cleared his throat, clearly uncomfortable. “Well, I guess I could—”

“Yes, why don’t you,” I said, trying to be nice, because I was feeling a little embarrassed by the way the others were acting. Also, I really wanted him to give up a number. “Just a ballpark,” I said, smiling brilliantly, because sometimes that’s all a sad, round lawyer needs: a pretty girl smiling at him. I thought Lucy was going to gag, but it did the trick.

“A ballpark. A ballpark,” he said, smiling back at me. “I don’t know—eleven million?”

There was a big fat silence.

“Eleven million?” I said. “Eleven million what?” I know that sounds stupid, but what on earth was he talking about? Eleven million pesos?

“Eleven million dollars,” he clarified. “That of course is almost a random number, there’s really no way of knowing. But it is twelve rooms, with a view of Central Park, on a very good block. I think eleven million would be considered conservative. In terms of estimates.”

So then there was a lot more talk, yelling even, people getting quite heated, worried about things that hadn’t happened and might not happen but maybe were happening or had happened already, and the solution to all these things that no one understood, apparently, was for me, Tina, to move into that big old eleven-million-dollar apartment
right away
. Like that very day.

So it was odd how that happened? But that’s where I ended up.