The Book of Speculation: A Novel

“You could.”


“I won’t,” she says. She fills the percolator and plugs it in, and then she’s beside me, her back to the window. “Because I’ve known you my whole life, and there are things you don’t do to people you’ve known your whole life. Keep that in mind.” The sides of our hands touch, the little fingers lining up in a row. “If you take his money, it’s because I let you.”

“I don’t want to hurt you. I really am sorry.”

“I’m not hurt,” she says. “And I wish you wouldn’t say that.”

Her presence is like a heartbeat. I feel her skin on mine, electrons and molecules glance each other until pieces of her become me. I wish I could do dinner at La Mer again and not have picked up Enola’s call. I wish I hadn’t taken the books, that we’d never left her apartment, that I’d said something years ago. “You sat behind me in French class,” I say. “Whenever I try to remember French I can hear you conjugating verbs. I hear you all the time.” Her accent had been good. Madame Fournier used to make her recite in front of the class. “Je suis. Tu es. Il est. Elle est. Nous sommes.”

“Stop,” she says, shaking her head. “I like you, Simon, but I’d rather not look at you right now.”

I pull my hand back from the counter. “Sorry. I just—”

“You’re taking advantage of my father. He’s never gotten over your parents. You have no idea of the years of stories I’ve listened to about Paulie and Dan, Dan and Paulie. You think about how they haunt your life; it never occurred to you that they haunt mine.”

For the first time since we began talking, Alice looks at me. She’s calm, matter of fact. “So when you take his money—because you will—just know that you’re taking it from an old man who’s fixated on his dead friends. You’re asking a lot from me.”

“I don’t have a choice.”

“You do. You can leave.” She takes a deep breath. “I think maybe you should leave. Maybe I should. I thought—forget it.”

The bubbling of the percolator fills the silence. I stare at the column of her neck; she holds herself so straight that she makes me feel warped.

“I’d like you to leave me alone now.” She says it sweetly and that makes it worse.

I slink back to the dining room, where Enola is telling Leah about the animal tents at the Florida State Fair and Doyle, thankfully, is using his fork. Alice returns with the coffee as though nothing happened and the rest of the meal is unremarkable, except for my shame. Dinner is over when Leah sighs and clears the coffee cups. Alice rises to help and Doyle and Enola scoot for the door.

“Simon, stay,” Frank says before I can leave. “Have a beer with me.”

“No, no. I need to get back.” I say, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” yet I wind up on the porch, holding a beer. Our shadows are framed by the silhouettes of horseshoe crabs drying on the railing.

“I don’t feel right about taking your money, Frank.”

“What else are you going to do? Can’t let the place fall in.” He takes a pull from his bottle. “You can pay it off like a loan.”

I don’t want to talk about money anymore. “Enola said you gave her my mom’s tarot cards.”

“Did I?” He scratches his head.

“Right before she left. You gave them to her.”

“Ah, I remember. They weren’t the sort of thing you’d expressed interest in. Enola came by, said she was traveling like your mom did.” He drinks. I do the same. “It felt like giving them back to your mother.”

“Why didn’t my dad have them?”

“Paulina and I were close, I was just as much her friend as his. I knew her one day longer than your dad. I’m the reason they met.” He taps his foot, tap, tap, tap, twitching out the story. “It was the hottest damned summer and nobody was taking boats out because the sun would bake you until your skin split. Her show was in town, I forget the name of it.”

“Carnival Lareille.”

“Lareille, that’s right. Don’t get old—you hit my age and you’ve forgotten more than you’ve ever learned.” He drains his beer and looks across the street to where lights pulse in the front room of my house. Doyle at play. “I figured I’d have a drink, cool off on some of the rides, maybe meet a girl. I saw a line outside this tent where you could get your fortune told. I thought what the hell, and there she was. Prettiest girl I’d ever seen. Your mom, she was striking.”

I’ve heard my father’s side, how Frank had taken him to the show the next night, how that night Mom had been a mermaid in a glass tank, holding her breath for impossible lengths of time, how he loved her at first sight.

“What did she tell you?”