Coming on the heels of our visit to Bill Penner, my father’s gloating seemed almost sinister. The three of us could put on a good face for only so long.
Just then the wreathed front door opened with a rattle, registering somewhere between festive and frantic.
“Hello?” Elisa’s voice called from the front hall as a gust of freezing wind brought the temperature in the house down several degrees all at once.
“Close the damn door, Elisa!” shouted my father. “Then come on in to the living room. We’re in here.”
The door slammed shut, and a moment later Elisa came in, ruddy-faced and wild-eyed, her glance shifting self-consciously from face to face.
“Look, everyone’s here!” she burst out, giving me a big-breasted hug before turning to shake hands with Bobby and Whitney, who stood up to receive her. She wore lumberjack boots and an oversize down jacket that she absently tossed onto the rug. “How’re things on the other side of the pond?” she said, turning back to me.
“Not bad.” I smiled, pretending, as she was, to be “comradely.” It was going to be a long week out in Jackson, I realized.
“Hey, have the police found out who burgled you?” Before I could even answer, Elisa roared with laughter at her own quip while my father gazed at her admiringly.
The burglary had happened while she and my father were in London, making it an easy conversation topic over several dinners. She’d asked me this same question, and laughed in the same way, a couple of times before.
“Not yet.” I sipped my eggnog. “But, you know, they’re searching high and low.”
We turned the corner onto Lakeland Road, the snowplow just ahead of us spewing salt and snow in all directions. Every door on the street was wreathed. Some had Christmas lights strung across the shrubs, or fixed around doorway arches, that were coming on in the fading light. When we were younger, back on Provencal Road, my mother would drive us to other parts of Grosse Pointe to see the showier displays of Christmas lights and lawn decorations, usually at the “new money” houses along Lakeshore Drive.
“I hate this house,” said Whitney bitterly as we pulled into my mother’s driveway.
His palpable anger needed somewhere to land. I made no effort to correct or appease him.
“You could always stay at Dad’s house,” Bobby answered, deadpan, as he parked the car. “With your lovely stepmother.”
For a few moments we just sat there in the rental car, a bright red Ford Probe, the windshield wipers scraping loudly over the ice that had frozen to the glass. The house looked gloomy, all the rooms dark except for the library, where I knew my mother sat reading. She had no Christmas lights outside, and the lights on the tree in the living room hadn’t yet been turned on. She’d never gone in for frills. When we were kids, on an excursion to buy Whitney a fishing rod, my mother had told him adamantly, “Nothing fancy, just a stick and a string.”
No one made a move to get out of the car. “We haven’t talked about everything that just happened,” I said tentatively.
Bobby turned off the car, and the wipers stopped midscrape. He jingled the keys. “Yeah, didn’t want to be the one to start that conversation.”
“I’ll say it,” Whitney interrupted him. “What a fucking turdfest! I mean, did you even see Elisa bring Dad that cocktail as we were leaving? She’s up to a lot more than getting the money—she’s trying to fucking kill the poor bastard!”
I shared his alarm, although I knew the drink wasn’t Elisa’s fault; nor was hastening my father’s demise the same as causing it, though it felt good for the moment to have a scapegoat. From where we sat, it seemed we’d lost both our father and his legacy, and Elisa was an easy target. I’d often wondered if having money was more of a curse than an asset; and at that moment, money and death seemed hopelessly intertwined “Guess Dad and Charlie are in a race to die first,” I said. “And Elisa’s certainly getting all her ducks in a row.”
“Your father married bar scum, Frances,” said Whitney, as if announcing it officially. “Get used to it. Our family is like a Vanity Fair story on steroids.”
Bobby and I laughed at the absurdity of this. But I felt gutted at the thought of my father drinking regularly again with Elisa. And after everything our family had been through, his getting drunk and eloping without a prenup seemed supremely selfish.
“It’s just . . . very sad, that’s all,” said Bobby. He leaned back into the driver’s seat with a sigh of defeat. “You’re lucky you both live so far away. Watching this up close? It’s going to be torture.”