“Not even in my dreams. Thank God.”
Franklin turns back to the statements from Morty’s investment funds. “I mentioned the life insurance, yes? Payable to Soren Kelly, in the beginning, but then to you. Five hundred K. On top of this property, of course, which he didn’t want you to feel you’d have to sell.”
Tommy is growing weary of the figures. She wasn’t hired to handle figures, shift beads on an abacus. She was hired to handle art and words and people and travel plans and prize ceremonies; in the end, to keep an aging man company, deflect his fear of death by leaving her bedroom door ajar at night.
“I don’t know how I’m going to make all this happen,” she says.
“You won’t. Not by yourself. We’ll get through probate, pay the taxes, sell whatever you decide to sell. We’ll find the people to make the rest happen. They can fund-raise their hearts out if Morty underestimated the grandeur of his plans.”
“Franklin, you sound like a therapist.”
“The best lawyers are therapists. We just charge more.”
“I thought you told me that assessing mental fitness wasn’t in your job description.”
“No diagnosis. Just a lot of constructive listening.”
“Which you’re awfully good at.” Is she flirting with Franklin? How long has it been since Tommy’s flirted with anyone?
“Friday the actor’s coming,” she says after an awkward silence. “Again.”
“Greene?”
“I’m letting him stay for the weekend.”
Franklin whistles. “A weekend tryst with Nicholas Greene?”
“I’m old enough to be his mother. And you know what? He’s very well mannered. Or he’s fooled me into thinking so. I suppose the best actors, like the best lawyers, are therapists of a sort as well.”
“Do you want me to stop in and check up?”
“I’ve got you on speed dial now. Speed text.”
“Use me as needed.” Franklin tips his glass back, draining the last bit of liquid from the ice. He gets up and puts it in the sink.
She might have asked him to stay for dinner, but she is planning on watching the actor’s latest movie, the one that raked in the awards. Tommy feels illogically sheepish, as if it’s obsequious to “study up” on Nicholas Greene.
She walks Franklin to his car. From behind the wheel, he says, “Maybe I’ll stop over anyway. Do a little stargazing. Who gets to meet movie stars here in the Connecticut boonies?”
“Plenty of movie stars live in the Connecticut boonies.”
“Must wear camo. Or come out after dark.”
After he drives off, Tommy walks toward the studio. She is drawn there, unavoidably, several times a day. She realizes that she hasn’t been filling Morty’s bird feeders, which stand outside the window that provided the view from his drafting table. At least it’s spring; nobody’s starving in the snow. She goes back to the shed and takes down the two kinds of seed: thistle for the finches; for the rest, what Morty called aviatrix—short for “avian trail mix.” The shed is stunningly hot inside. It smells of terra-cotta and the fancy brand of seaweed compost Morty liked for the gardens. The shelves are dusty, fragments of broken flowerpots strewn on the floor; he refused to hire any professionals. He mowed while Tommy weeded. Together, they planted and pruned.
It strikes her only now as obvious—or is it?—why he never wanted to hire a gardener. To most people, gardeners are nurturers, growers, experts on how to keep the planet photosynthesizing at a healthy clip. Not to Morty.
Will she have the nerve to ask Nicholas Greene about the script? About how they plan to “handle” that material? She’s no fool: that’s why they optioned the magazine piece. It wasn’t for Morty’s reminiscences about how he discovered his talent or how he got famous or even, at least not primarily, how he fell in love with a beguiling, opportunistic man like Soren Kelly. However unkindly, Tommy will never really think of Soren as a man. Looking back at 1991, the year Soren made his entrance, Tommy sees it like a spike on an EKG, but at the time it felt like an accrual of crises, unfolding one small drama at a time.
Morty had just won a second Caldecott, for Rumple Crumple Engine Foot, in which a small boy, playing on the floor beside his writer-father’s desk, pulls discarded wads of typescript out of the wastebasket and holds them up to the light from a window, imagining each one as a different object. The boy crafts an entire story of his own from the balled-up waste of the story his father is failing to write. (The reader sees only the father’s feet, on the floor beneath the desk, side by side in wing-tip shoes. Every so often, the top margin of the book exudes brief, child-friendly cursing and noises of adult frustration.)
In the same week, however—almost literally overnight—Morty’s mother stopped recognizing him. Her Alzheimer’s had been progressing at a dismally steady rate, and Morty had less and less time to get to Brooklyn, where, for several years, he had paid for Frieda to live in the best transitional home he could find near the places she knew. During those years, however, her friends had died or simply stopped visiting, and the places she knew became places she no longer knew. So what was the point, Morty felt, of keeping her there?
That week, he had moved her to a new place, just ten minutes from the Connecticut house. It was a superficially elegant (and breathtakingly expensive) “memory-care haven,” with a staff better equipped to care for Frieda, but her Brooklyn doctor had warned Morty that taking her to live somewhere entirely new was risky. It might drive her further into the darkness.