Wreathed (19 page)

“I know this sucks for you, Adam. Take a deep breath. Calm down. Even if you go through with this lawsuit, which I am not recommending that you do, this is just a temporary situation. One way or another, it will be resolved, and then we will be free to do whatever we want.”

“I know how I feel already,” he said. “I don’t need to wait. I very much don’t need to wait until this nonsense with the will is cleared up, because I feel like that’s going to take forever. I want to be with you. I don’t want to break up with you, and I don’t understand why you feel you have to break up with me.”

“It’s basic legal ethics,” I explained. “You can’t sleep with an adverse party. And as long as you insist on treating my mother like an adverse party, that means we can’t be together, no matter how much we would like to be.”

“It’s not about ethics for me,” he said. “It’s about financial survival at this point. You don’t know how messed up the estate is.”

I tried to keep my voice calm and level and deal with this in an analytical way. “The best thing to do at this point,” I said, “is for all of us to sit down, wearing proper clothes, in a conference room, and hash things out, before this goes to court and you have to convince a probate judge that your dear uncle was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Once we do that, and settle this like reasonable human beings, we can pick up where we left off. Preferably in a room with a nice hot fireplace and a cushy bathrobe.”

“You’re unbelievable. Did you know that? You want to stop seeing me, over, basically,
money
, and then you sit there and tease me like that. Unbelievable.” He stopped pacing and started running his hands through his hair. “I can’t deal with this right now. I can’t. On top of everything else, I can’t deal with this particular form of anxiety. You want us to stop seeing each other? Fine. Let’s stop. Now.”

“I don’t
want
to stop seeing you,” I said. “I want us to be together at least long enough so we can figure out how we feel about each other. But we can’t do that until we get the house issue resolved. And if we can all be reasonable, we can manage that.”

“I have to leave,” he said. “I can’t stay in this room any longer. I need to be somewhere where I can get some fresh air and wrap my head around everything that’s going on. I need to stop talking to you before I say something I can’t take back.”

“Maybe you should do that,” I said. “Maybe we both should. Give me a minute to gather my things and I’ll go downstairs with you. We both need a little time to process this, I think.”

I folded up my dress and put it in the red plastic bag with the paperwork Adam had given me. We went downstairs and I tossed the bag in the back seat of my Audi. I opened the driver’s side door, but I didn’t get in right away.

“Are you going to leave, or what?” he asked.

“I want to stay. I wish I could. I feel terrible about this. You have to understand that.”

“My Uncle Sheldon had a saying about airplanes,” he said. “He said, at thirty-five thousand feet over the Arctic Ocean, the pilot of the B-52 doesn’t care what you know, or what you think, or how you feel. He only cares whether you did your job or not when the airplane was on the ground.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked. “We’re not in an airplane. Feelings matter. Your feelings matter. My feelings matter.”

“But they don’t matter enough,” he said.

“So what did you do?” Pacey asked.

We were sitting on a bench at a playground in her development, where her sons were working up their courage for an assault on the monkey bars. I was still wearing my itchy black fleece and ridiculous high heels.

“I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, not even goodbye.”

“But what did you do?” she asked. “Did you just get in your car and drive over here?”

“I thought I would just drive home and lock myself in with some sad movies and a bottle of wine. But there was a Dunkin’ Donuts right on the highway, and I hadn’t had any breakfast.”

“Oh, don’t tell me. You got the white chocolate latte?”

I nodded my head. “And half a dozen French crullers to go. And a bag of Munchkins for the road.”

“Oh, sweetie,” she said. “I didn’t know you were
that
stuck on him. I guess it’s a good thing there wasn’t a liquor store right there, or else I would have had to come get you.”

“I don’t have any self-control issues with alcohol,” I said. It wasn’t strictly true but I said it anyway. “Donuts are another matter altogether.”

“I just don’t want to see you taking it to the next level and developing an expensive Viennese pastry habit,” she said. “Benjy! Stop pushing your brother.”

“I’m not Benjy,” the child who had pushed the other one said. “I’m Simon.”

“Whoever you are, quit it. What was I saying? OK, so you’re stuck on this guy that you can’t sleep with right now because... why was this, again?”

“Legal ethics.”

“Well, that’s impressive,” she said. “You may have invented a brand-new way to dump a guy. I mean, I think very highly of legal ethics, but they don’t often intrude in the romantic sphere.”

“What do I do?” I asked. “I like him. I really do. I don’t like anybody else enough to eat half a dozen French crullers over.”

“And a bag of Munchkins.”

“And a bag of Munchkins. I can’t believe how much I have screwed this up.”

“Pull yourself together, sweetie. This is Day One. Everything else will look better and brighter from here. I promise.”

“Time heals all wounds?” I asked.

“Nothing of the sort,” she said. “Benjy! Get that
out of your mouth
. God, I wish they had put in a different surface than these wood chips.”

“You were saying?”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “You did exactly what I told you to do. You did it in exactly the wrong way, mind you, but you came up with exactly the right outcome, which is maximum sexual frustration.”

“You don’t have to tell me about sexual frustration right now,” I said. “Believe me.”

“You were supposed to just give him a tease, right? Instead, you gave him a taste.”

“Maybe a little more than a taste.”
More like a banquet.

“You gave him a taste, and then you yanked it right out of his mouth. That’s a recipe for sexual frustration.”

“On both sides,” I said.

“Yes. But you can cope better than he can. You’ll see. All you have to do is stay away from him and control your carbohydrate intake. Sooner or later, he’s going to realize what he’s missing, and he’ll do something terribly romantic that will melt your heart.”

“I don’t know about that, Pacey. You didn’t see how ticked off he was at me.”

“He’s feeling a lot of different emotions,” she said. “They will pass. Eventually, he will end up thinking about you and hormones will win out over emotion.”

“And what if they don’t?” I asked.

“Then you know he wasn’t the right guy. If he’s not willing to take that understandable frustration he’s feeling right now and turn that into something romantic, then he’s not worth wasting your time over. But if he’s the kind of guy you want him to be, then he will. You just have to have faith that it will work out.”

“‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,’” I quoted.

“Just be patient, sweetie. If it’s supposed to work out, it will. You’ve done everything you can. Just wait and see how it works out. Are you thinking of staying for dinner?”

“What are you having?”

“Fish sticks and macaroni and cheese. A real gourmet meal. I’ll even put panko crumbs on the macaroni if you like.”

“I’ll pass,” I said.

“Suit yourself. Simon! We do
not
go up the slide the wrong way!”

I hugged my nephews and my sister and got back in my car and headed north towards Morristown. I knew there was a Starbucks not that far from her house, but I drove right past it. There was a Dunkin’ Donuts on the other side of town, and I drove past it, too, although I took a longing look out the window. But just at the edge of town, there was another, newer Dunkin’ Donuts, and this one had a drive-thru. I got another white chocolate latte and two bags of Munchkins—one for the drive home and one for in the morning. I didn’t bother to dust the powdered sugar off my tacky sweatshirt.

Chapter 23

I see no reason to describe the drunken debauch that I fell into over the next thirty-six hours, except to say that I managed to get through it without calling Adam (or any other old boyfriends, for that matter), doing anything unforgivably stupid on social media, or setting fire to my apartment. By those standards, it was a complete success. I even managed to make room in my makeshift liquor cabinet by draining the last of the random bottles of brandy and gin and Kahlua. The result was a cocktail so epically awful that I christened it the “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” because it was a no-win situation either way: either you drank it, or you stayed sober.

Right before I fell into bed Sunday night, I set my alarm to go off an hour early. I hated to do it, but I knew I would need the extra time for my body to soak in the hot water from the shower and for my brain to soak in caffeine. I got out of bed and took three ibuprofen tablets, and after a shower and coffee and the last couple of remaining Munchkins, I felt almost sentient. I wasn’t planning on doing any higher-order thinking, but I would be able to stumble my way to work and answer e-mail and smile when senior partners walked by my door, which was my average level of functioning on Monday mornings anyway. I poured myself another slug of coffee in my travel mug.

I was about halfway through putting my office back in order when my cell phone rang. It was my mother, which meant that something else horrible had happened again. I figured that it was already Monday, so whatever catastrophe she was calling about couldn’t make things that much worse.

“I have a caveat,” Mother said.

“About what?”

“No, I mean, I have a caveat. In my hand. A nice young man delivered it to me at breakfast.”

“Who did what now?” I asked.

“He said he was a process server, and handed me this very thick envelope, and inside, there was a caveat. Or that’s what it says on the front page. I haven’t bothered to look through the whole thing yet, not without legal assistance close at hand.”

I dimly remembered that, in New Jersey, the document that you use to file an initial will contest was called, for some archaic reason, a caveat. “Let me guess,” I said. “It says that Sheldon Berkman was off his rocker when he signed the codicil.”

“If that’s what they mean by ‘diminished capacity,’ quite possibly,” she said. “What does it mean if he was crazy?”

“It means that if the court finds Sheldon was legally crazy, the codicil goes away, and you don’t inherit anything.”

“Would there be any disadvantages in doing that? Just having the codicil go away?”

“As it happens,” I explained, “there is an offer on the table from Adam. He is willing to give you twenty-five thousand dollars if you will sign away your rights to the house.”

“Where do I sign?” she asked.

“I could get something drafted and sent to you by close of business today,” I said. “But if you did that, you’d be walking away from the quarter of a million dollars of equity locked up in that ugly house.”

It was the first time in as long as I could remember that I had been able to say anything to my mother that left her speechless for any length of time.

“Are you still there?” I asked.

“That beautiful house,” she said. “With so many precious memories. It would be such a shame to let it go. For anything less than full market value, that is.”

“That’s the spirit,” I said.

“So what do we do?” Mother asked.

“I think it’s time to see exactly what it is that you may have inherited. Sometime this weekend, I’ll drive down there and take a look. If it’s a wreck, or if it’s burned down in the last week, you might want to consider taking the offer. But if it’s in nice shape, and there’s a good chance of you getting back a significant return, then we can go to court and see if we can show that Sheldon wasn’t as crazy as he seemed.”

“I will leave it in your capable hands, dear daughter.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence,” I said.

“Why, Gwendolyn Rose,” she said. “You always have my complete confidence.”

“Thank you, Mother.”

“As long as it’s something that doesn’t involve men. Ta-ta, dear.”

I had a roommate in college who was a psychology student, and she was doing research on the link between depression and obesity. She said that Americans were depressed because they were obese and obese because they were depressed, and that the important thing to do to get out of the vicious cycle was to avoid standard American junk food when you get depressed. So I decided to follow her advice and walk across the courthouse square to get Thai for lunch. I got the grilled shrimp salad and some unsweetened green tea and tried to think healthy thoughts. The sun came out just as I left the restaurant, and I walked back to my office tower feeling as though I had accomplished something important. I was ready to tackle the rest of my day and not think about Adam and be productive and useful to my firm and the legal community at large.

I opened the glass doors and walked into the reception area. I noticed a young man sitting on one of the couches, but he was on his phone playing a game and didn’t notice me come in. I walked towards my office, and was surprised to see Tim Curlin standing in my doorway.

“You’re back,” he said. “Long lunch break?”

“Not any longer than usual,” I said. “What’s going on?” I heard a quaver in my voice that I couldn’t control. Curlin had no reason to be standing there, arms folded, blocking me from getting into my office, unless he was trying to keep me out.

“Did you talk to the young man in reception?” he asked. “He’s been waiting on you.”

“I wasn’t expecting anyone,” I said. “And he didn’t talk to me, so I don’t have any idea why he’s here.”

“He’s a process server,” Curlin explained.