Thomas wondered which angle to dance around first: his somewhat-reciprocated love for an unstable person who had cultivated a little false universe on the top floor, the deconstruction of which would mean a swift blow to her sanity, or his belief that the old woman with a bittersweet fever in her brain shouldn’t lose her last years to a son who didn’t care about how she lived them.
He chose the second, hoping that the people who shared the decaying staircase possessed the decency he suspected. He mentioned Owen and the loveless way he looked at Edith, reminded them of the open-door policy she kept for her tenants, how she had welcomed all of them for a bit of conversation or understanding silence, depending on what their lives were lacking. Did they remember that six-day blizzard, how on the fourth day she’d been the only one with groceries left and brought them all downstairs for dinner? Hadn’t they all relaxed in the circle of her generosity, the jingle of bells she’d hung on the door, the forgiving wave of her hand when rent was late?
“Listen,” interrupted Edward. “I’m not going to sit here and say that the old lady deserves to die in some home, playing nonsensical checkers with incontinent zombies. Or that her son’s a fantastic guy for rooting for her bucket to kick so he can put in granite countertops and make a cool several million. Clearly the man has a Laundromat for a soul. But I don’t see what we can possibly do besides put our little tchotchkes in little box-kes.”
Claudia, who had been hiding her red face in her dry hands, laughed loudly, and Thomas watched as any control he had over the conversation faded like the sounds of ambulances passing nearby, the urgency that turned to a whine before disappearing.
She sighed and spoke up with ironic brightness. “Paulie doesn’t own much but a set of coasters shaped like bugs and a couple cookies, anyway. Won’t be hard to pack.”
Edward snorted and brought his hands together, brushed them in two opposing up-down motions, the gesture that signified Our work here is done. The crags of his face, the sharp hook of his nose and the protrusion of his brow, were softened with the remaining light. Claudia leaned her head on his forearm and sniffed.
“We could fight him,” said Thomas. “We could—” He felt the acidic tension in his body dissolve. The defeat felt like the ten minutes after swimming, the leaking of warm water from the ears and the adjusting of limbs to a different way of moving.
Edward announced that he needed a beer. He got up and Claudia followed. Thomas watched them make their way down the street until they turned, wondered at how quickly he had failed to sway them. There was no one else on the street, no sounds save the ticking of the watch he still wore as though he were a man who didn’t let hours pass like the endless parade of cars on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
IT HAD BEEN EASY for Thomas to overlook the resemblance: only three photos of Declan as a young man gripped Edith’s walls, obscured by hanging plants that fell down from the ceiling in curls.
One showed their wedding, Edith shy on grand stone steps and Declan leaning in as though to prop her up, and another a tinseled Christmas, the grinning father supervising his son’s solemn assembly of a train track. The third photo, skewed somehow, showed the building freshly painted, the sky diluted, and Declan. Settled on the stoop, his slacks high on his waist and his white shirt crisp and his hair combed back, his cigarette between left thumb and forefinger like he learned in the war, his eyes met the camera as if in a brief nod of acknowledgment, decent but curt, eager to get back to a thought.
Thomas’s jaw, he saw now, was shaped like Declan’s, the soft lines leading to a broad dimple; his lashes similarly long and feminine; their eyes the same scratched brown, like a worn belt. They both carried all their strength in the shoulders, pursed their lips slightly instead of smiling with their teeth.
He could feel the tips of the plants brushing his shoulder blades as he lingered by the photos, as he waited for her while she fussed with something in the kitchen. She had denied his offers of help several times, and the apartment filled with sounds of cabinets opening and closing and her outbursts, spit from her mouth like cherry pits—“Curses!” and “I’ll be!” and “Jiminy Christmas!” Finally, she emerged with a dull silver tray, on which sat two jagged pieces of chocolate-dipped biscuits, four unevenly cut slices of cheese, one bruised apple, and two cups of iced coffee adorned with faded blue curly straws.
She had insisted on feeding him. He had arrived, for the third time that week, with a brown-bagged selection of art supplies, and he had promised himself that this time he would pin down a sustained conversation: about her will, her son, and possibly her daughter. Each time he had tried, he’d instead fallen quiet at the sweet cyan and maroon watercolored circles she was fond of making, and only reached out to pat the pale back of her neck. On the last occasion he had laid out brushes and acrylics and the paper to receive them, and Edith had painted a hammock suspended from a telephone wire on which four little birds sat singing to one another. Behind them, a pink sky relinquished its blush as it moved towards the edge of the page.