9
Fix was still alive the Christmas after Teresa Cousins died. Impossible but true. It would be his last Christmas, but then the last two Christmases had been his last Christmas, as this past Thanksgiving was his last Thanksgiving. Franny didn’t want to leave Kumar and the boys again for the holidays, nor did she want to bring them with her to Santa Monica. It was too depressing. Franny and Caroline also considered the question of their mother who had been increasingly neglected in every year it was taking their father to die.
“Dad’s not the only one to worry about,” Caroline said, thinking of their mother’s husband. Their mother confided in Caroline now, maybe more than she did in Franny. This was the pleasure of a long life: the way some things worked themselves out. Caroline and her mother had become very close.
“I’m flipping a coin,” Caroline said over the phone. “You’re just going to have to trust me.”
“I trust you,” Franny said. There was no one she trusted more than Caroline.
“Heads you go to Dad’s for Christmas, tails I go to Dad’s.” This was what they’d come to, an instant of anticipatory silence and then the clatter of a quarter coming to rest on Caroline’s kitchen table in San Jose.
The plane had circled in a holding pattern for forty-five minutes before delivering Franny, Kumar, and the boys to Dulles in harrowing weather—snow and pitch-black dark. Ravi, fourteen, and Amit, twelve, sat in the back of the rental car, earbuds stuffed deep into their ears, their heads bobbing gently in discordant time. The boys had been untroubled by the icy skid of the landing gear against the runway, just as they were untroubled by the interstate to Arlington, which was a soup of accidents and ice, cars crawling back to the suburbs like beaten dogs, holiday travelers anxious to arrive on time, holiday travelers desperate to flee. Franny called her mother to tell her not to hold dinner. There was no saying how late they’d be.
“Be as late as you need to be,” her mother said. “If things get bad we’ll eat the onion dip.” She always made onion dip for Ravi, who liked things salted, and a caramel cake for Amit, who liked things sweet.
“As if my mother has ever eaten onion dip,” Franny said to Kumar after hanging up her phone. She was inching the car forward while Kumar attended to the last of his work e-mails. Kumar worked in the mergers and acquisitions department in the behemoth Martin and Fox. He was making plans to defend his client from a hostile takeover even as his wife drove through the blinding snow. It was only fair. Had they been going to see his mother in Bombay she would not have been driving.
“I’ve never seen your mother eat anything,” Kumar said, his thumbs burning up the screen on his phone. “Which is my best proof that she is a goddess.”
Beverly and Jack Dine were both in their sixties when they married: hers early, his late. Kumar had only known Franny’s mother as Jack Dine’s wife, the empress of the Arlington car dealerships, and so he regarded her as happy and powerful, a source of bejeweled splendor. Kumar believed his mother-in-law to be the person she was in this present moment, free from history, and in return for that gift Beverly loved him like a son.
Jack Dine’s house had once been owned by a four-term senator from Pennsylvania. It had a wall and a gate, but they kept the gate open and for Christmas draped the wall in swags of pine punctuated by oversized wreaths. The great circular driveway was parked up with cars. Every light in every window was on, the lights pinned to the high branches of the trees were on, and the snow threw back the light and illuminated the world. From the car they could see all the people through the long front windows packed together like dolls in an enormous dollhouse.
“Is she having a party for us?” Amit asked from the backseat. At their grandmother’s house anything was possible. There were only a few parking spots left down at the end of the driveway, and so they wrestled their bags from the back and made their way through the snow.
“Merry Christmas!” Beverly said when she threw the door open. She hugged Amit first, then Ravi, then hugged them both together, each in one arm. Beverly’s seventy-eight could rival anyone else’s sixty-five. She had stayed slim and blond while having the sense to never push things too far. A life spent as a great beauty was still clearly in evidence. Behind her the house was full and overflowing, lights and pine and glasses of champagne. The Christmas tree in the living room brushed the ceiling with its highest branches and seemed to have been encrusted with diamonds and pink sapphires. Somewhere on the other side of the house someone was playing the piano. Women were laughing.
“You didn’t tell us you were having a party,” Franny said.
“We always have a Christmas Eve party,” Beverly said. She was wearing a smart red dress, three ropes of pearls. “Now would you please come in the house and not stand on the porch like a bunch of Jehovah’s Witnesses?”
Kumar and Franny pulled in their luggage and brushed the snow off their shoulders and hair. At least Kumar was wearing a suit. They had picked him up from the office on the way to the airport. But Franny and the boys looked like nothing but the disheveled travelers they were. The boys had seen guests walking around with plates heaped with food and so they dropped their bags and headed for the dining room to find the buffet. The boys were always starving.
“It isn’t Christmas Eve,” Franny said.
“Matthew’s family is going skiing in Vail for Christmas so I moved the party up. It was easier for everyone this way. Really, I think I’ll always have it on the twenty-second.”
“But you didn’t tell us.”
Kumar leaned in and kissed Beverly on the cheek. “You look beautiful,” he said, changing the subject.
“Franny!” A heavyset man past middle age wearing a red houndstooth button-up vest came and swept her up in too zealous a hug, shaking her back and forth while making growling sounds. “How’s my favorite sister?”
“That’s only because Caroline isn’t here,” Beverly said. “You should see the way he makes over Caroline.”
“Caroline gives me free legal advice,” Pete said.
“If you get sued over the holidays I’d be happy to help,” Kumar said.
Pete turned and looked at Kumar, trying to place him. His face lit up with pleasure when finally he was able to put it all together. “That’s right,” he said to Franny. “I forgot he was a lawyer too.”
“Merry Christmas, Pete,” Franny said. Surely she would burst into tears at some point in the evening. It was only a question of how long she could hold off.
“Pete and his family are going to New York to see Katie and the new baby,” Beverly said. “Did I tell you Katie had her baby?”
“Christmas in New York.” Pete smiled and his teeth made Franny think of ivory, like elephant’s tusks carved down to the size of human teeth. He was drinking eggnog from a small crystal cup. “Can you imagine that? Sure you can. You’re a city girl. Are you still in Chicago?”
“Let them go upstairs and settle in,” Beverly said to Pete. “They’ll be back in a minute. They just got off the plane.”
But then Jack Dine was there, wearing a needlepoint vest, a leaping stag rendered convincingly in small stitches. Jack had always been such a big man, tall and broad, though now he seemed no larger than his wife. “Who’s the pretty girl?” he asked, pointing to Franny.
Beverly put her arm around her husband. “Jack, this is Franny, my Franny. You remember.”
“She looks like you,” Jack said.
“And Kumar. Do you remember him?”
“He can get the bags,” Jack said, waving him away. “Go on now. Take them upstairs.”
Kumar smiled, though it would be hard to say how. He was a generous man, and the boys weren’t there to bear witness.