"Naturally I'll give her the apartment," Joe said. "It seems only right. We've lived in it all our lives. She's put so much work into it. It's her baby."
Felicity had seen the apartment. In a magazine. It sparkled and gleamed with a comforting Old World charm. Or so the magazine said. To Felicity, it just looked big and luscious, though the various shades of cream could do with a little splash of color, and some of the furniture seemed a bit rickety, antique or no antique. She would like to live in such an apartment. But she said, "Naturally." Then she looked thoughtfully at Joe, who sat on her own sofa in her own living room, a perfectly respectable place in Lincoln Towers that had once had a view of the Hudson River. She stood up and peered out the window at the Trump Towers that now blocked that view. "You bought that place for a song, didn't you?" she asked.
Joe smiled. "We did. We never missed a mortgage payment, either."
"You never missed a mortgage payment," Felicity corrected him.
"Yes, of course. That's true."
"Paid it from your salary?"
"Well, who else's salary would there be?" he asked. "Betty never worked a day in her life. Never had to. You know that."
Felicity did know that. She, on the other hand, had worked many days in her life.
"But it was her money that made the down payment," Joe added. He thought of himself as a fair man.
"A mere song," Felicity said. "You said so yourself."
Joe considered this. "Yes. Five thousand dollars down. Can you imagine?"
"And now the apartment is worth--what? Three million?"
"Oh, at least."
Felicity was silent, letting the implication sink in.
"That's quite a return on a five-thousand-dollar investment, isn't it?" he said.
"I suppose the upkeep is very high these days."
Joe nodded.
"It's really a burden, that big old place," Felicity said. "Poor Betty. I don't envy her. At her age."
"She ought to downsize," Joe said. "We should sell the place, and she can take her share and buy something a little more realistic."
"Joe, you really are a generous man," Felicity said. "And self-sacrificing, too."
He looked at her blankly. He knew he was generous and self-sacrificing, but just for a moment he could not quite make out how this act of taking half the proceeds, rather than none, fit that description. Then Felicity said, with some alarm, "But what about the taxes? There will be hardly anything left from the sale after taxes. Poor Betty." She saw it was six o'clock and made him his drink. "It really will be a burden on her, much more than on you. You have so many deductions. She doesn't. Not having a business."
Joe was not a stupid man, and he liked to think of himself as a generous man; but he loved the big, airy apartment Betty had made so comfortable for him, and he loved Felicity. Obviously the apartment would be too much for Betty to handle, he told himself. How could he have been so thoughtless, so insensitive?
"At her age," Felcity murmured again, as if reading his thoughts.
The apartment was far more suitable for him and Felicity. She was young and energetic. He was neither, but he was so used to the place. Was it fair that he should be thrown out of his own home just to pay good money to the government? It would be very bad judgment. It would bankrupt Betty with taxes. It would be cruel.
And so it was decided. Joe would be generous and keep the apartment.
Betty had been married before she met Joseph Weissmann. Her first husband had died suddenly and young in an automobile accident, leaving her with two little girls, Annie, age three, and Miranda, two months. Joseph came into their lives not quite a year after the accident. He married Betty, and though they ate dinner in the kitchen before he came home from work and never saw him on the Saturdays when he went to the office, the girls took his last name, called him Josie, considered him their father, and loved him as if he were.
When Annie got the phone call from her mother announcing Joseph's discovery of irreconcilable differences after almost fifty years, she immediately urged a visit to a neurologist. Had Josie been complaining of headaches? Erratic behavior, headaches, dizziness: Of course it was a brain tumor. Did her mother remember her friend Oliver from graduate school? He died just like that. Betty had better get him to a doctor that day. Poor Josie.
"It's not a brain tumor," her mother said. Joseph was feeling better than he had in years. "And you know what that means."
Annie grudgingly accepted what her sister, Miranda, understood immediately.
"He is in love," Miranda said when Betty called her to tell her the news.
"I'm afraid he must be," Betty said.
The two women were silent. They were both believers in love. This love was heresy.
"What does Annie say?"
"She's going to speak to him. And she suggested I get a lawyer."
"A lawyer?" Miranda's voice was disapproving. "What does Josie say about that?"
"He suggested we use a mediator."
"This is not really happening," Miranda said.