The Book of Speculation: A Novel

The house will be declared uninhabitable and I’ll be forced out. “Why would you do that?”


“You’ve got no money. You’re borrowing off me and I’ve got to move fast or we’ll lose her. I didn’t know how much you’d let her go. Every day work’s not done is a day closer to her collapsing. The town will condemn her and force a rehab. You’ll have to leave, and then Pelewski can start on the structural work right away.” Her, like the house is a woman. He surveys the room, the subtle bulge of buckling walls, the loose floorboards. “It’s dangerous, too. You shouldn’t be here,” he says, but he’s staring past me. There is no mention of when I could come back or if I ever could. His eyes are wet. Good god, is he crying?

“I won’t take your money. I’ll figure it out.”

“I want you out of here,” he says, his voice flat and even.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. If they need to, Enola and that Doyle kid can stay with us a few days.” He rubs his forehead. He is crying, actually crying. “But I want you all out. Nobody stays here. It isn’t safe.”

“What gives you the fucking right?”

There should be silence or a moment of apology. There isn’t.

“I’ve got the right.” He scratches his splotchy neck. “I’ve got the right,” he repeats. His eyes dart to the ceiling, the kitchen, the floor. “It’s my house as much as it is yours. I bought this house for Paulina.”

Through a thousand feet of water I ask, “What?”

“I bought this house for your mother.”

It isn’t true. Why would he lie? Dad promised my mother a house, this house, that’s why we never left, never sold. It was his love letter. “Why?”

He moves to the couch, by the arm Enola picked bare. “I loved her.” It’s sincere, awful, like hearing she’s dead all over again. He presses the heels of his hands to his eyes.

“You what?”

“I loved her. You don’t remember, you were too young, but Paulina was so, so beautiful.”

“Shut up.” I remember.

“It’s nothing you could understand. I just—” He coughs. “I met her first.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” I don’t recognize my voice.

“I brought him back to meet her. Had I known,” he laughs bitterly. “Had I known. The night I met Paulina she read my cards. She read my palm, too. She held my hand.”

Mom’s thin fingers held in those square hands, those carpenter paws—her fingers that messed my hair—her fingernail tracing across his lifeline. “Stop it.”

“Maybe you don’t know because you’re a quiet kid, but when a woman takes your hand like that and looks you in the eye, something changes inside you. I brought Dan with me because I had to show my best friend the woman I was going to be with.”

My foot bounces, sending rhythmic stabbing pain up my leg. I can’t stop it.

“I told her to come see me, that I was up early and she could find me at the dockmaster’s in the harbor. She came by in the morning. The day after, too. She kept coming by, even after he saw her. Even after he told me he loved her, she kept coming by. I never should have brought him. You can’t know what it is to stand in the middle of a crowd, watching the woman you love, watching your best friend fall in love with her.” He talks to the floor, to his feet, unable to meet my eye.

“Did she know?”

“That I loved her?” He rubs his bulldog jowls and sad man splotches. “Yes.”

“Dad bought her the house. He promised it to her.”

“My grandfather left me money. Paulina wanted to settle down. She was sick of traveling; she’d been on the road her whole life, hadn’t ever lived in a house. Maybe she didn’t want me then, but I could give her that. So I gave him the money.”

“He took it.”

“I didn’t want to lose him, either. He’d have followed her anywhere. She was like that; she could do that to a man.”

I remember my father manning a folding grill, Leah and my mother sitting in beach chairs. Frank telling a story about kids running aground on a sandbar. Would anyone have noticed if his eyes lingered? “No. You don’t buy a house for a friend.”

“No,” he says. “You don’t.”

There is the other half of the story, and he tells it like a drunken man. Mornings at the dockmaster’s came with quick touches, kisses, things they’d meant to stop. That they did stop, eventually. “After a time,” he says. He is kind in that he’s not explicit. “She loved your dad, I know she did. I loved him too.” So he began dating Leah, a teaching student at St. Joseph’s, and married her. They all became friends. Of a sort.

“You slept with my mother.”