"Can't you see I'm soaking wet?"
He took her coat and held it away from him. "Towel?" he said, walking toward the bathroom. He wondered if he would always be supplying towels for hysterical women. At least Felicity had not thrown a glass of good whiskey at him the way Betty had. He had just phoned Miranda. He called every day. She hung up on him every day. The girls did not bother to hide their contempt for him. But he had to find out how Betty was. Meningitis. Betty rarely got even a cold. How had she gotten this terrible infection? Somehow he knew it was his fault. Miranda and Annie obviously felt the same way. At least she was out of the hospital now. They never let him speak to her. He was sure Betty would want to talk to him if they let her. After all these years together. But they were no longer together, Annie had reminded him. She has cut the cord, Annie had said. She's recuperating physically and emotionally. Do you want to make her feel worse? Are you that selfish and self-centered? I don't care how guilty you feel, she had said, you are not going to upset my mother.
"It's Frederick," Felicity was saying, squelching behind him.
He pulled an enormous white bath towel from a shelf. "Here, darling."
"I'm speaking to you! Didn't you hear me? Frederick!"
The wet coat hung heavily at the end of his outstretched arm, dripping. He dropped it in the bathtub, half expecting damp revengeful minks to rise up from its folds. He hated that coat. Why was she wearing it in April anyway? If Miranda had ever seen it, she would have been furious. Of course, she was furious anyway. He threw the towel around Felicity's shoulders. "What about Frederick, darling?"
"He's marrying her. That . . . girl."
Joe put a smaller towel on Felicity's head. She looked like an angry nun. "Which girl? The one who was here? Which one? I couldn't really tell them apart. Are you sure? Neither one of them seems at all like Frederick's type. And they're just children."
"Hah!" said Felicity. "There you have it. Children."
"Well, it's better that he's marrying a girl than a boy, isn't it?"
"No, don't you see, they're going to have one. She's pregnant, or so she claims. I don't believe a word of it. She's not showing at all. Of course, how could you tell, she's always going to some gym. I told him to demand a paternity test. Gwen is beside herself. Think how she feels! After all she's done for that girl. And me! I let her live here!"
Joseph held the glass of Scotch to his lips. He could see Betty on the couch in her crumpled bathrobe, a fury. The glass had hurtled through the air. The perfume of the Scotch had hung around him like a cloud. The apartment had been a battleground. Now it was just an apartment. Felicity shuffled ahead of him, draped in terry cloth. He would have to tell her soon, he knew.
"And Frederick!" she said, her words drifting back to him, muffled by the towel around her head. "How he could do that to his own daughter. Is he from Alaska? That's where they'll move, no doubt. That's what they'll tell us next. And don't even ask about Evan--he's beside himself. He's furious. It's so humiliating for the family. I mean, Frederick is a public figure. Everyone will know. I'm so upset, I walked home. But when it rains it pours, and it poured, and I'm soaked. Thank you," she added, turning into the kitchen, rubbing her hair with the towel. "That little golddigger."
"Where is she, anyway?" Joseph said, glad to be able to postpone his own news. "She didn't come home with you?"
"Oh, she'll never set her scheming little foot in this apartment again."
He put the kettle on and poured some whiskey and sugar in a mug. "Sit down," he said gently. He took a lemon out of the refrigerator, cut it, squeezed it in the mug. When the water boiled, he poured it into the mug and handed the concoction to Felicity.
She breathed in the fumes. "Just what the doctor ordered. We'll have to change all the locks."
"Yes," Joseph said. "We will definitely need to do that. Or someone will."
At his tone, Felicity stopped sipping from the mug. "What?"
"I just got the final word from the lawyers."
Felicity stood up, very straight within her nun's habit of towels. "Yes?"
"The apartment is Betty's."
Felicity took a moment, then said, "Fine."
She sat back down, drank a little more of her toddy.
This was the part of her Joseph loved, he realized. The hard part. The unyielding part. Felicity was strong. She was not always entirely human, he had discovered. But she was always strong.
"I've always wanted to live downtown anyway," she said. "The West Side is so over."
In the Museum of Natural History, beneath the dinosaur, where she and Crystal had taken refuge from the rain, Amber held her cell phone in one hand. With the other she pinched her sister's arm as punctuation to every other word. "It's all her fault, Frederick. Everything was going so well," she said into the phone, administering three pinches.