Trav had barely put Victoria’s Lexus into park before Jon Cox came vaulting across the hood with a whoop. His jean-clad ass wiped off the thin crust of snow that had accumulated over the four-hour drive. Trav went rigid in the driver’s seat. Jon Cox squeaked off, making the car bounce, and landed with a crunch on the iced-over gravel.
“Watch it,” Erik said, scrambling out of the backseat. “If there’s one scratch on this thing when we get back, Victoria’s gonna murder me.”
I slid out and shut the passenger door behind me. “Rest in peace.”
“What took you so long?” Jon Cox asked, loping after me as I headed to the trunk. “We’ve been here for, like, fifteen minutes.”
I glanced over my shoulder. Trav still sat in the driver’s seat, extracting the keys with the slowness of your average sloth. “Trav drives with one hand on the horn, if that tells you anything.”
“Jesus,” Jon Cox said.
“I know.” I hoisted my fraying suitcase out of the trunk. “But whatever,” I said, yanking Jon Cox’s hat down over his eyes with my other hand. “We got here alive, didn’t we?”
“Being alive is important,” Mama boomed, walking up with a huge duffel slung diagonally across his back. “C’mon, let’s get inside. It’s freezing.”
Once Trav had locked the car, backing away from it as if it might explode, we all trudged up the side steps, two flights of damp, rickety wood, to a sliding-glass door.
“Honey, I’m hoo-ooome,” Jon Cox sang, as he flung the glass door wide. Hearing Jon Cox sing always came with a bit of a shock—he had an operatic baritone, solemn and controlled, like a fifty-year-old’s.
The seven of us trailed into a gleaming kitchen. I tried not to stare and failed spectacularly. A sheen of dust softened marble countertops. Slim windows hugged the pine-beam ceiling. A beaten copper ventilator rose above four shining burners, facing a row of polished cabinets, and the refrigerator looked big enough for about half a dozen people to fit inside, if they got creative.
“Dibs on the master bed,” Mama called, kicking off his shoes. He slid in his socks over the hardwood toward the darkened great room. We trailed after him, and when he hit the lights, my mouth drooped open. Cherry columns propped up a ceiling twenty feet high. Tasseled rugs lay beneath long sofas and chairs whose dark leather was faded under translucent dustcovers. Beneath the dappled stone chimney, the wide fireplace’s iron grate was swept clean.
As the other guys went for the steps to the second floor, I looked down at my beat-up suitcase and felt minuscule. On some level, I felt like I should’ve been seething with envy, but this place was so far removed from everything I’d ever lived that I couldn’t even feel jealous. All I had was a numbing awe: that real families had houses like this, that one of the Sharps had spent his whole childhood in rooms where even the color of the treated floorboards screamed money.
Nihal stopped next to me. “He’s an investment banker,” he said quietly. “Jon Cox’s dad.”
“Got it. Forget theater. Investment banking is my new plan.”
Nihal chuckled. “If you want to never see your kids, go for it.” He followed the others upstairs.
I mulled over the words, chewing on the inside of my cheek. The subtext wasn’t subtle: the huge house Jon’s family didn’t even live in, his beautiful car, everything—it couldn’t substitute for an absent father. I felt like I’d heard this story a thousand times.
Still, I would’ve taken this option any day. Back in San Francisco, I hadn’t exactly been drowning in family time either. Dad worked night shifts as a gas-station cashier, leaving for work before I got home from school and not getting back until I was already asleep. I had years of memories of myself—nine, ten, eleven years old—walking around the back of our apartment building, digging the spare key out of a gravel-filled flowerpot, and letting myself in after school. Mom came home from her part-time job around six, in time to cook up beans or powdery mashed potatoes.
The older I got, the less I saw of her, too. She took more hours. I took care of myself. Rich kids with millionaire dads weren’t the only ones raising themselves.
I never felt like a poor-little-poor-girl, though, some tragic character out of a story—it was mundane. Everything in my life was sketched in the same bland shade of disrepair. Clothes, apartment, furniture: fray and decay. Bulk tins and stained utensils. So normal to me.
Looking around this mansion of a mountain home, I wondered—did Jon Cox think this was normal, too?
“Hey,” said a voice. I startled. Jon had come up from behind me.
“Hi,” I said. After a second, I waved around. “This place is . . .”
Jon Cox shook his head. “Yeah, don’t . . . I don’t know. It is what it is.”
He looked embarrassed. I wanted to cringe, or say, Don’t be embarrassed that your life is a fantasy. But I stayed quiet, my thoughts chasing each other’s tails. After all, if he’d looked smug or satisfied, I would’ve thought, arrogant. Maybe there was no right answer to being born filthy rich, like there was no right answer to being born dirt poor. Maybe everyone was just looking for reasons to think everyone else was ungrateful.
It was so stupid, too, because what were we supposed to do about the Very Wealthy Elephant in the Room, me or Jon Cox? We still had people telling us when to turn out our lights. We still had to ask permission to use the bathroom. Yeah, this boy drove around all ostentatious in his flashy car, with his Ray-Ban sunglasses and his Brooks Brothers jackets, looking like a grade-A assclown. But he’d also bought us that fancy whiskey that night in the field. He was always buying people food, giving rides, self-consciously generous with his time and money. Now we were all here together, living under his roof. Did all that equal out to my vacuum-silence when it came to my family’s situation?
I wanted to talk about it all, but I didn’t know what to say, or whether it would do any good, anyway. Did anyone else even want to talk about it? Why was it such a slippery subject, wriggling its way out of everyone’s grasp?
Maybe I’d figure it out in ten years, or maybe when I was my parents’ age, when I knew what it felt like to lose jobs, skip meals for my kid, scrape the barrel so hard the splinters tore up my fingertips. Maybe then I’d know how to talk about money without feeling like, somehow, the whole thing was imaginary—something human beings had pulled out of thin air without an instruction manual for how to do it all right.
In the uncomfortable silence, Jon Cox took off his glasses, which had fogged up around the edges, and wiped them on his knit sweater. “Do you want to check out the attic?” he said. “It’s, um, it has a view . . .”
“Lead on,” I said, taking the handle of my suitcase.