Wreathed (12 page)

“So he was trying to fix it up, then,” I said.

“It’s my fault. I told him about all the money I made flipping houses before the recession, and he must have figured he could do it, too. I just can’t believe that he borrowed that much money for a house down here, and then he goes and gives it away to his ex-wife from fifty years ago. That makes zero sense.”

“Again, allow me to apologize, Mr. Lewis,” Mr. Miller said. “If there is any way I can be of assistance to you, let me know.”

“Thanks,” Adam said.

“I have one more item for each of you.” Mr. Miller dug two key rings out of his briefcase. “The first one is for Mr. Lewis; it’s the safe deposit box—the deed for the house is in there, and some other personal items, I believe.”

“What about the key to the house?” Adam asked.

“There are two keys,” Mr. Miller explained. “One is in the safe deposit box, that’s yours. The other is for Ms. Thornhill, and I have that one here.” He handed me the other key.

“Wait a second,” Adam said. “You can’t just give her the key to the house like that. It’s not hers.”

“Those were your uncle’s express wishes, I’m afraid.” Mr. Miller said. “Ideally, I would have put the keys in her hand at the funeral, and given her directions to the house.”

Adam sat straight up in his chair. “That’s ridiculous. The codicil doesn’t give her the right to just take the house. I mean, I’m the executor. I would have to make the transfer. Get her name in the chain of title.”

“That’s all true,” I said. “The house doesn’t pass to my mother until you complete the title transfer. But it doesn’t hurt anything for her to have the key, just to look around.”

“As long as she was just looking around, I don’t think that would be a problem,” Adam said. “But this whole thing is nuts. I mean, totally squirrely. I never figured Uncle Sheldon for this kind of melodrama.”

“Well, we all have our little secrets,” Mr. Miller said. “I know I’ve said it already, several times, but I really do apologize. Unless either of you have any questions, I should be going.”

It took Mr. Miller a while to straighten up, and to repack his black briefcase. We tried to thank him, but he waved us off and headed out the door.

I sat at the kitchen table, waiting for Adam to finish washing out the cups we’d been drinking from and load them back in the truck. It was a nice moment, quiet, almost domestic.

“Do you need me to help with the airplane models?” I asked. “It looks like that’s all you have left to pack.”

“They’re too fragile to throw in the back of the U-Haul. I am going to ask the facility to hold on to them for a few days. They don’t have anybody ready to move in, and now I am going to have to come back here anyway to get into the safe deposit box and look at the mortgage and figure out what is going on here.”

“Not to speak ill of the dead,” I said, “but that was an awful thing for your uncle to do, springing a surprise like that on the day of his funeral. In a way, it’s a good thing that the lawyer couldn’t make it.” My best guess is that my mother would have chewed out poor Mr. Miller something awful if he had been bold enough to serve her with legal papers at the funeral.

“You do this for a living, right?” Adam asked. “Did you ever come across something this weird?”

“Ambushing people at a funeral? That’s a new one on me. You do get clients who ask for odd things in their wills. Most of it’s not that unusual—deciding who gets what family heirlooms, or who has to take care of which pet, that sort of thing. Sometimes people give their money to strangers, or set up gifts to unusual charities. But I frown on putting that in your will, from a legal perspective. If you have something different or unique you want to do, you’re almost always better off doing it while you’re alive rather than trying to control things from beyond the grave.”

“Or from beyond the FedEx box, as it were.”

“Ha,” I said. I still wasn’t ready to forgive him for that.

“Seriously, though. I had no intent to scare you that way. I mean, I never would have said anything if I thought you would run off like that.” He had the most devastating twinkle in his eyes when he said that, as though the idea of me running through a seaside retirement community in sheer panic was one of the funniest things he had ever encountered.

Of course, I hadn’t been that frightened of sitting on a dead man’s bed. That wasn’t why I took off running in my best heels, pell-mell towards Delaware Bay. I had been seriously freaked out about having an explicit sexual fantasy on that bed, one that could have come reasonably close to being an actual sexual experience, or at least it might have if Adam hadn’t been so damn unromantic about the whole thing. I couldn’t very well
tell
him that, of course, because God knows how funny he’d think that would be.

“Let’s just not talk about it, shall we?” I suggested.

“I just want to rewind a little,” he said. “If you don’t mind. I said I had two things to do before I left. One was dropping off the urn, and the other one was asking you if you wanted to go to dinner sometime.”

“Oh,” I said, reverting back to my monosyllabic ways. What
was
it about Adam that made the connection from my brain to my mouth stop working?

“I had been thinking maybe you might want to have dinner somewhere tonight, but I need to head north and you are probably going to want to eat with your mom.”

“Oh. Her.”

“I guess we could all go out together, but that doesn’t strike me as a good idea right now.”

“That’s reasonable enough,” I said. I needed Mother to come with me on a date like I needed a large, seeping, gaping wound in my abdomen.

“I don’t mean this in a bad way, but your mom is a little intimidating.”

“You haven’t gotten to know her very well. She’s a lot intimidating. And you’re changing the subject. We were talking about dinner.”

“Yes. Sorry. Are you free next week? We could meet halfway. I know a nice place in New Brunswick that would be perfect.”

It had been a long day. I had to put up with my mother’s craziness, and gone to a funeral, and eaten one too many dumplings at the wake, and I’d sat on a dead man’s bed. Now a cute guy who was interested in me was asking me out, and the last synapse I had working in my brain right at that moment was the one that said,
say yes.

“Sure,” I said. “That would be nice.”

“Good,” he said, and his features relaxed into a winning smile. “Will Friday at eight be all right?”

“That would be lovely.” I couldn’t make the muscles in my face move. I was simpering, and I knew it, and I couldn’t stop.

“OK then. Deal?” He stuck his hand out, like we were closing a real estate deal, and I shook it.

“Deal,” I said.

I held on to his hand a little longer than I needed to. He didn’t try to disengage, either, but after a long moment he smiled. “Your mother is waiting for you,” he said, “and my uncle is waiting for me to drop him off.”

He let go of my hand and picked up the FedEx box, and we walked out of the apartment together. He got in his U-Haul, and I watched him drive off.
Every time I think he’s said the least romantic thing possible
, I thought,
he comes up with something new.

Chapter 15

I wasn’t in a hurry to check in on my mother, so I drove over to see the house that Sheldon Berkman had left to her in his will. The building on Idaho Street was spacious, imposing, and horribly, aggressively pink. I had no idea whether it had been painted pink when Sheldon had bought it, or if he had painted it that way. If it was his fault, then there was an open question as to whether the Air Force needed to revise its testing procedures for color-blindness.

As bad as the pink was, it clashed with the abominable mint green porch railing and the dark green shutters. The only other color was the white faux-Victorian scrollwork under its dingy gables. Three yucky-looking wicker chairs sat on the porch. The yard was microscopic and badly tended. The house looked altogether dismal, and I decided not to bother going inside just yet—I figured I could always check it out tomorrow, if Mother was interested. I took photos with my phone and got back in the car and headed to the hotel.

I made a quick detour into the liquor store for the necessary supplies for cocktail hour. I got a bottle of vanilla vodka and two bottles of diet orange soda. The creamsicle is not the most complex of mixed drinks, but it is tasty and easy to make if you’re drunk. The cashier gave me an approving look, anyway, so I figured I hadn’t gone too far wrong. I am a person who has tried to mix chocolate vodka with Yoo-hoo, so I am perhaps abnormally sensitive to what cashiers at liquor stores think. (I am, seriously,
not
endorsing mixing chocolate vodka with Yoo-hoo here. The resulting concoction is most vile, although it will get you drunk fairly effectively, and I had a very detailed and intricate dream that night about Willy Wonka.)

I got back to the hotel room and took my shoes off, which was the single best thing I had done all day. I wriggled my way out of the somber dress and slipped into blue jeans and a nice comfy black hooded sweatshirt that said TEMPLE on it. I figured the responsible thing to do was to check on Mother and make sure that she hadn’t jumped out the window or that she wasn’t drunk-dialing old boyfriends or something. I put my ear up to the connecting door and listened for a short moment, just so I could tell what she was up to. I heard something that sounded like snoring, which I interpreted as a positive sign. Taking a nap couldn’t do anything but good for her at this point.

I ducked out of the room and filled my ice bucket, and then settled on the balcony with a liquid refreshment. All I had to drink from was one of the little plastic glasses they put in your room, but that wasn’t an insurmountable barrier for the truly determined drinker. It was still chilly outside, but the sun was shining and I was warm in my sweatshirt.

I had business to take care of before the serious drinking started. I sent a quick e-mail to my boss in Morristown, telling him that I had resolved the situation with Gawker. I said that all they’d wanted was information on my mother’s ex-husband, which was accurate enough, and that I’d be back to work on Monday. I tried to respond to the Facebook messages I had been neglecting. I played WHISTLE on a double-word score in
Words With Friends
to take a commanding lead over the sexist pig I had been playing. After that, I looked at the ocean for a long while.

A wise man once said that human beings were programmed to like boundary conditions—places like tree houses, mountain cabins, or transgressive gay bars. Boundary conditions exist in places where you can stay in one element and look at another different and fascinating element for as long as you wanted. That’s why people like beach towns like Cape May; you can sit and look at the ocean, or go in the ocean and look back at the land, whatever’s more fun.

If that’s true, then maybe that’s why people go to funerals. Funerals are the boundary condition between life and afterlife. Sheldon Berkman had crossed the boundary between living in a tacky, seaside retirement community and trying to flip an old Victorian house to being a pile of ashes in a fancy urn in a U-Haul truck on its way to the FedEx office in Sea Isle City. I didn’t think much of that particular trip, and wasn’t thrilled about having to make it myself one day.

Another wise man said that you should get busy living, or get busy dying. Of course, that was just something Morgan Freeman said in a movie once, but he had a point. I was stuck where I was, and I knew it. I was living a static, lonely life in a nondescript town in North Jersey, handling the paperwork for other people’s deaths. It was slow and safe, and it was paying off my student loan drip by drip, but it wasn’t making me happy and I didn’t know what to do about it, other than to take another nice long frosty smooth sip of creamsicle.

I need a man
, I thought, not for the first time.

But it couldn’t be just any man. I wanted someone stable and devoted. I wanted someone smart and honest. I wanted someone devastatingly handsome but not narcissistic.

But more than that, I wanted someone with a deep romantic streak. Someone who would fall madly in love with me and do great things to earn my love in return. Someone charming, affectionate, and sweet. Someone who would be the great love of my life for today and for all time.

Was that person Adam Lewis?

He was cute. I would give him that. He was drop-dead gorgeous, honestly. Just the right age. Single. Employed. Interested in me, as far as I could tell. All of these things were positive marks in his favor. The one thing wrong with him was the most important thing that could be wrong with him, that he didn’t seem like the type to sweep a woman off her feet. I mean, who asks a girl to help him clean out his dead uncle’s apartment for a first date?

The good news was that he was single and he seemed to be unattached. But there was every reason to think that he was single for a reason. Maybe he didn’t have a romantic bone in his body. Maybe he was an insensitive lout who liked to poke fun at people’s personal weaknesses. Maybe he was bad at sex, although I would have to find that out on my own.

On paper, he seemed like the perfect guy. But there was no way he could be the perfect guy, because the perfect guy doesn’t exist.

Maybe you should stop looking for him, then
, I thought.

I poured myself another creamsicle and watched the ocean slam into the beach for the next hour.

Mother came out onto her balcony before five. She was wearing a shapeless gray wool poncho as protection against the chill wind, and she had a martini glass in her hand. “How long have you been sitting out here drinking?” she asked.

“Not long enough.”

“What revolting concoction is that? It looks orange.”

“Vanilla soda and diet orange vodka,” I said. “No, wait, the other way around.”

“Oh, dear. Will you be up for having dinner?”

“I had enough food at the wake to sink the
Queen Mary
,” I said. “I could eat a little something, though, as long as you don’t ask me to drive you anywhere.”