People who buy you dinner want something. Alexis knew that much. The more expensive the dinner, the more they want. That was basic math. But what did Uncle Burr want? He wasn’t leering at her in a sleazy-uncle way, which would have been almost reassuring, since Alexis knew how to deal with that kind of problem: Kick it in the nuts and run.
No, this problem required a detective. In Alexis’s favorite mysteries, the breakthrough in the case always came in one of two ways. Either the detective would question the suspect until she broke down, starting off with easy questions, circling around the matter of the murder, or the—well, it was always murder. Then, suddenly, without understanding how it happened, the suspect would admit everything. “Yes, yes, I killed him! I couldn’t stand his snoring anymore!”
Or the detective would sift through case files. She’d put photos up on a wall and connect them with string (actually, Alexis realized, this was something they did on TV, not in books, and she had no idea why they did it). She’d read through the files and study the photo of the crime scene. “Something isn’t right here,” the detective would say.
Since there had been no murder and Alexis doubted her powers of cross-examination, she searched her memory like it was a cold case. When had her mother last crossed paths with Uncle Burr?
She shivered. Her mother was never at her best in the presence of Uncle Burr. Mostly, her memory served up a tape loop of Mom shouting into the phone. Details? None. It was funny how memories melted into ingots of pure feeling over time. Alexis was a perceptive child and knew she’d paid attention to her mother’s words, not just her tone, but now, it was like watching someone pick up the phone and shout, “I’m angry! Are you angry? Then we are both angry!” Not helpful.
“Dessert, miss?” asked the waiter, who had appeared stealthily at Alexis’s elbow. This made her want to sneak up and surprise him, just to see if she could do it. She did want dessert, although she didn’t want Burr to pay for more expensive food, especially not after she’d been caught enjoying the salad. But she ordered the tarte tatin, even though it was twelve dollars, because she was hungry and someone had once ordered it in a book. She wasn’t sure what it was, other than some kind of tart, but because it was on the dessert menu, it probably didn’t contain crickets. Probably.
It was about the house, of course. That’s what they were always fighting about. It was very simple, according to LJ: Burr wanted to sell the house. Mom didn’t. The rich get richer. An old story, and not very interesting even when you’re the poor-get-poorer part. Why would a guy rich enough to spend hundreds of dollars on dinner need even more money? Alexis didn’t know, but it seemed like the sort of thing rich people did all the time, just out of habit, like the way they ate a fifty-dollar steak without even noticing that they’d done so.
Alexis was sure of one thing: if Uncle Burr asked her to sign something, she wasn’t going to sign it.
“Alexis,” said Burr, “I’m happy to buy you dinner, but it’s very important that I speak with your mother.”
“I need to go to the bathroom.” She excused herself, spotted their waiter across the room, and sidled up to him. “Pardon me,” she said loudly, and the waiter jumped. Success! “Where is the restroom?”
When she returned to the table, Alexis found her napkin neatly folded, and this made her feel like crying. Great, crying over a napkin, she thought, biting her lip. Very mature. The waiter appeared, raised his eyebrows at Alexis to acknowledge that they now shared a joke, and set down the apple tart.
Please, don’t be as good as the salad.
It was—thick with caramel and not too sweet. Damn. If Burr had passed a contract across the table asking her to sign over the deed to the Angeline, her mother’s body, and the few dollars in her purse, she would have signed it. She ate faster. Burr drank some sticky-looking wine from a small glass.
“I hate to be dramatic, Alexis,” said Burr, “but if I can’t speak with your mother soon, we’re going to have a serious problem. She is not an easy woman to reach. Never has been.” When he saw Alexis’s glare, he softened. “Never mind, that’s between her and me. Now, do you like to play cards?”
“Cards? Like poker?”
“I’m not trying to induce you to gamble, if that’s what you’re getting at. When your mother and I were young, we used to play this card game. If you’ll come with me to the lounge, I’ll teach you, and then, if Edith is truly unavailable, you and I will have to speak about certain pressing matters. Did you get enough to eat? Good, then please follow me.”
On the way to the lounge, Alexis elbowed the waiter. “Hey,” she whispered. “This place may be full of rich jackasses, but the food is good.”
“I know. Todd, by the way.”
“Alexis. Get used to me; when I hit it big, I’m going to eat here a lot.”
“Hit it big doing what?”
“I don’t know. Rap. Roller derby. Chef.”
“Then best of luck in all three.” Todd crept silently off to surprise another table, and Alexis found Uncle Burr sitting in the lounge, shuffling a deck of cards. With his narrow eyes and soft features, he looked like a seal, Alexis thought. She laughed again. What could be less threatening? But he handled the cards deftly, like he could swindle you. Maybe this was how he’d made his money, cheating people at cards.
“It’s a solitaire game,” said Burr, “but I find it works as well for two as for one. Watch what I do.” He built several columns of cards, then arranged and rearranged them. At first it looked random, a game with no rules, like watching a baseball game, but with hoops and soccer goals and horses. Then the detective in Alexis’s mind woke up, and it assembled Burr’s moves into a list of rules, and she knew how to play.
“Deal me in,” she said.
“You’ve played this before,” said Burr, once she’d beaten him. “Your mother taught you.” His way of posing questions as accusations infuriated her.
“She didn’t,” said Alexis, and promptly beat him again.
“Then I’m impressed. Here, try this.” He laid out a sequence of cards. “What’s the next card in the series?”
“I’ve already been to school today, thank you.”
“We can start off with an easier one, if you’d like.”
“I didn’t say it was too hard. Queen of diamonds.”
“Very good.”
“Here’s one for you.” She laid out a two, three, five, and seven.
“Jack. Any suit.” Alexis frowned; she’d thought that was a tough one. She was thinking in patterns when Uncle Burr said, “As much as I enjoy mathematical puzzles, we have some business to attend to.”
CHAPTER 10
ED SKOOG
OFTEN THE THING YOU’RE LOOKING at becomes the lens through which you see the world. She’d heard that somewhere, somewhere good—not school, she didn’t think—maybe on the radio that afternoon they cleaned the high gutters of the Angeline, all that muck coming out in handfuls, tar-black goo to her elbows, streaking her clothes, clotting in her hair, and her mother holding the ladder below. She’d looked out of proportion down there, distorted, and not very good at holding the ladder steady, more intent on the radio propped in the window for the duration of the task—the lens through which you see the world—though it may have been another radio, or not a radio, and anyway hadn’t she fallen from the ladder that afternoon? Not all the way down, but a slight misstep as Edith turned away to watch a stray cat cross the street into the park? Now she would have to clean the gutters herself, of course, all the work of the Angeline, grim and meaningful.
She did not want to play cards, but she would rather play cards than talk about the house, because cards were a real thing she could shuffle, examine, move, hide, restore. You could count them, you could fold cards back into their pack and carry them in your hip pocket. You could leave them behind. She didn’t know what to do with the invisible. Business, love, grief, algebra II: this was not accustomed terrain, and she resented not having her mother there to hold steady
this complicated set of gestures.
“Yes,” she said. “Let’s get down to it.”
Burr took an envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket—egg-colored, she noticed, like the skirt she’d worn that uncomfortable Christmas Day when Burr had picked her and her mother up in his BMW and they’d gone to dinner. He had been stuffy and pompous then, too. “How are you faring?” Faring. She’d known even then what he meant, what was unsaid in that antique phrase about the difference between Edith and what a mother was supposed to be, according to some gingham sentimentality. He slid the envelope across the table and did this thing with his eyes.
“There’s a check in there, so take care of it. It’s for your mother,” he said. “She’ll know what it’s for.”
It was just another card, she thought, and he was playing it. Then he went on with the caring-uncle bit, asking about her college plans, what did she want to do when she grew up, things he wanted to be when he grew up, the names of the colleges he attended and how he’d be happy to “be a resource” in a few years when it was time to think about the future. “Not just financially,” he said, “but someone who’s been around the world a bit and has some idea how things work.”
“And my mother’s not?”
“Your mother is . . . Your mother is your mother.”
And she almost lost it there, half from hate, half from hope.
“Go to hell,” she said, and threw the check and the cards in the fireplace. She got up, her lamé shirt glittering righteously. The Sorrento lounge fell quiet except for a few couples talking at the far end, and crackling fire.
“I’m trying to help!” Burr shouted from his chair. She was surprised and almost deterred by his frustration, which was the closest thing she’d ever seen to emotion from him, but all it resulted in was a hurried, apologetic smirk as she turned and walked away.
“One way or another, this thing will be resolved at the hearing next week.”
“Can you hear this?” she shouted back, flipping him the finger.
“Alexis,” he shouted back, and shambled up out of his chair, nodding assurance to the hotel staff, who were beginning to gather.
She paused by the concierge stand. A limousine idled just outside the door.
“Alexis,” he said, his face softening to a conciliatory sadness, one she’d seen pass across her mother’s face at certain times.
“What?” she demanded.
“Your mother has to be at the hearing next week. Even if she’s still sick, even if she hates me, even if you hate me, she has, has, has to be there.”
Alexis was blocks away before her fury began to ebb back in to the numb grief she’d been carrying around like a child. It wasn’t like she’d read, this feeling about her mother—nothing beautiful or bittersweet or fond or even human. No, more human than she’d ever felt before, but not in a good way. It was grotesque, an unasked-for carnival ride that kept going past the thing that was no longer her mother in the basement, and then the plunge.
She looked around. Freeway Park, a complex of landscaped concrete, forms shaped well for skateboards and seclusion, a no-place place right in the center of the city. She used to love the park, had taken her first steps there, played with nameless other children, then had her first drink there, at twelve, a little bit of someone’s stolen peppermint schnapps mixed with grape juice. One time she found a stack of unemployment checks from the State of Washington, all made out to different names, in a Safeway bag along with a perfectly good tangelo. Only last year she found a bullfrog in the weeds and made three wishes before she noticed it was made of plastic, an Archie McPhee novelty.
But now she couldn’t avoid the emotional information the park was showing her—an industrial vista, a dead afterthought, an abandoned idea. It was a park, but there was nothing below it, nothing to hold it steady. What had seemed novel and unconventional now looked like a bad joke. It was the bottom of the world.
“I am the Regent of Freeway Park!” she shouted to nobody. She looked off the edge into an apartment all decked out for Halloween, with a big-screen television showing a blizzard. She thought she felt an out-of-season snowflake on her cheek, but when she looked up, the sky was dark and uncommunicative.
It would be good to see LJ, regardless of whatever perfumed complications he would bring to bear. He would be a secret fellow mourner, as he was the only person who would miss Edith remotely as much as she would.
She needed to talk to Linda. Although the rest of her life had disintegrated, and not only her past but also her future—there would be no more cleaning the gutters of the Angeline when her uncle stole it and sold it, as he certainly would after the hearing next week, and turned it into whatever mean people turn good things into—maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe she could be turned into something new as well. She and Linda could hop a bus to anywhere, change their names, find some cabin, some garret, and be together always. Perhaps take Habib, crowing into the broad sky. It was a comforting story to tell herself, and it gave her peace to think about it as she walked toward Linda’s place, not realizing at first that she was heading there, further and deeper downtown, using the spire of Smith Tower as a guide, keeping her eye out for landmarks that she increasingly needed as usual bearings and safety of workday hours were long since rolled up, darkened, shuttered, disappeared. During the day Seattle seemed like a pony—safe, humorous, miniature, its hair braided and everyone laughing. At night Seattle grew into an unpredictable crocodile, and now it was walking alongside her. No pet. Alexis didn’t know all the details, but what she gathered from Linda was that her stepdad was as restless as he was rich, and that since her mom had hooked up with him they’d moved every couple of years from one ostentatious domicile to another, usually just after Linda had formed attachments to neighbor kids and came to terms with the creaks and corners. Alexis tried to understand, but felt only sympathy, unable to fathom having to divide her sense of self from the building she lived in. She and the Angeline were one. Leave the Angeline? Sooner die. Or at least dying was as hard to imagine as leaving. Linda’s current bedroom window faced out directly on the Alaska Way Viaduct. From the bed one could see the faces of inbound passengers, drivers on cell phones, whole families eating dinner, the flashing lights of the Seattle Police. The police were always around her apartment, making the homeless move from one slight comfort to another. Linda said she heard gunshots from time to time. “Drug dealers?” Alexis had asked during a late-night phone call.
“No, that’s the cops. It’s some sort of ethnic cleansing going on down here.”
“I’d better be careful, then.”
They had the top floor of an old building slightly damaged by the Nisqually earthquake, which is how Linda’s dad got it for a steal, and planned to develop and sell it for a bazillion dollars, once the viaduct came down and the view would become the grandest in the city.
No one answered the buzzer. Alexis craned her neck to see the windows dark. Hadn’t Linda said she was going to be home tonight? Or was that yesterday? Hadn’t she said to come by? Wasn’t there some exciting promise in those two syllables? Come by. Come by.
What did it mean that Linda wasn’t home, Alexis wondered. The way things were going, it wouldn’t surprise her if Linda abandoned her, too. Alexis would understand. Forgive her, probably thank her for proving that her worst thoughts of the world were true.
She sighed. She had been hoping to fold some laundry. She stood under the viaduct and waited for the bus. All around her people seemed bound for great nights, romance, adventure, richness. Even the homeless guy dozing against the facade of the old OK Hotel seemed to be having amusing, clever thoughts.
CHAPTER 11
DAVID LASKY AND GREG STUMP
CHAPTER 12
KEVIN O’BRIEN
WITH A WHOOSH, THE DOOR closed behind her as she stepped off the bus. Alexis felt the October night air whipping through her long, curly hair. The feathered skirt ruffled around her legs. On the street corner, a huge, seven-to
n statue of Lenin towered over her, watching the traffic on Fremont Avenue like a stern crossing guard.
The bus started to pull away. Alexis glanced up at the window and saw a woman and her daughter in one of the seats. The mother fussed with the little girl’s dark, wavy hair and smoothed it back.
For a moment, Alexis remembered when she was a child, riding on the bus with her mom. Every Christmas, they took a trip downtown to the Bon Marche and gazed at the decorations in the store windows. She remembered her mother telling her, “You need to thank the bus driver for taking you this far, sweetie.”
Watching the bus churn down Fremont Avenue, Alexis felt tears stinging her eyes. She’d forgotten to thank the driver.
In fact, she’d forgotten to thank her mother. She should have sat down with her sometime in those last few weeks and told her how grateful she was—to have such a cool mom who had taken her this far.
But it was too late. Right now, more than anything, she needed to talk with LJ.
Alexis gazed down the street. She’d been to LJ’s perfume “factory” in Fremont only once. She’d gotten off the bus too soon. “Oh, shit,” she murmured. “Smooth move, Alexis. . . .”
Clutching at the top of her shirt, she shuddered and then headed down Fremont Avenue toward Leary Way. She had at least eight blocks to go.
Her cell phone rang, and she dug into her purse to retrieve it. She checked the lighted screen, but didn’t recognize the number. She clicked on the phone. “Hello?”
There was no response. It sounded like someone breathing on the other end.
“Hello? Who is this? Hello?”
She waited to hear a response on the other end, but there was nothing. Then a sigh.
“Warmongering, Establishment sons of bitches,” she heard LJ mutter. At least she thought it was LJ. Sure sounded like him. “They’ll never know what hit them. . . .”