“I’m sorry, Judith, I—”
“The money,” said Judith, her voice lightly tinted with exasperation. “As I told him, I planned to head right into some investments that make the bulk of it inaccessible. Which I have since done. And I just hope it was the right decision for all of you.” She raised one eyebrow at Eliza. She had always heard that this was a genetic talent. Eliza couldn’t remember if her mother had it. If so, she hadn’t passed it on: Eliza couldn’t do it.
Eliza said, “I’m confused.”
“Oh,” said Judith, and she put the eyebrow back down again and considered Eliza. “Oh, I’m sorry, I thought Rob said the two of you had decided together—”
“Decided what together?”
“My goodness, will you look at the time? Say goodbye to your mother, girls, we’ve got a drive ahead of us, and I want to get on the road.”
And just like that, Eliza was hugged and kissed and left standing all alone in the driveway of her father’s house.
34
LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE
Eliza
Later that day, when Eliza was talking on the phone to Rob, confirming that the girls had made it home safely, she remembered Judith’s cryptic comments about money. “She said that she hoped it was the right decision? What did she mean by that?”
Rob cleared his throat, and said, in a way that caused Eliza to shift uncomfortably in the straight-backed kitchen chair in which she sat, “I don’t know if we have time to go into that right now.”
“I’ve got plenty of time.” Her father had gone upstairs. He was tired again, always tired.
What had Eliza been doing in April, when Charlie was diagnosed? Worrying herself silly over Phineas Tarbox, avoiding signing those stupid papers, shuttling the girls to and from their activities, planning her herb garden? Drinking margaritas at Don Pepe’s with the ladies on Tuesdays? What was she doing in the weeks, maybe months, before that, when the tumor was first forming, the nefarious collection of cells banding together, intent on their evil mission? We will get you, Charlie Sargent. You don’t know we’re here, but we know. We know, and we’re coming, and we’re not going away.
She’d taken the keys to his truck. She’d bring him some supper in a while, see if he felt like eating a little bit, but until then she had nothing to do. She said, “Do you have somewhere to be?”
Rob made a whistling sound, a quick exhalation, which signaled to Eliza that his nerves were on edge, and then he started talking. He told Eliza about the changes he’d experienced right around his fortieth birthday in the spring, about his newborn desire to support his family solely on his income, about his personal declaration of independence from a martini-infused, pre-Pippin Judith one night in Boston. He told Eliza about Judith’s reaction, and about what Judith had told him regarding the money that usually went to Eliza and Rob—that if he was sure, if he was really, really certain, Judith was going to put it in an investment that her financial adviser, Bucky, recommended very highly, and which would make the money completely inaccessible until Judith’s death. He ended by saying, “I should have told you, Eliza.”
“Should have told me? What do you mean, told me? Never mind that you should have told me, shouldn’t we have decided this together?”
Rob hesitated, and then he said, “I wanted to surprise you. I know it’s always bothered you, how much we take from my mother.”
She let the weight of that settle around her: that was true. “Well, of course it’s bothered me,” she said. “You know that. But don’t we need it?”
“As soon as Cabot Lodge is done and I get the next job—”
“Then, what? As soon as that, what?” She felt a rising sense of panic.
“We’ll be fine.”
“We will?” She realized then the extent of her ignorance about their finances. How much would Rob make from Cabot Lodge, and how much from the next job? How much, exactly, did they get from Judith each month? She didn’t know. Stupid, stupid of her: she didn’t know.
“For a while.”
“And then what?”
“And then I’ll get another job after that, and make more money from that job too. Like…well, like a regular person. Like a person without a safety net.”
Eliza was quiet, and Rob hurried to fill the space her silence left. “I will get another job, Eliza. Mrs. Cabot has all of these friends, and they all want houses, and you know how they are, those ladies, each one will want one bigger than the last one. Cabot Lodge will look like a cottage compared to what’s coming. I just have to nail this job first. I have to nail Cabot Lodge, and then I’ll be golden.”
At another time, in another conversation, Eliza might have said, Nail Cabot Lodge. No pun intended, right? But now, in the present circumstances, she whispered the next part, like it was a secret: “But Rob. Our life is really expensive.”
As soon as she said that Eliza sensed a reordering of the conversation, and when Rob spoke she heard a tightening in his voice. “You know what? I’m surprised, Eliza. I thought you’d be on board with this. I thought you’d be…proud.”
“If you thought I’d be on board,” she said, “if you thought I’d be proud, why’d you keep it a secret?”
“I told you! I wanted to surprise you!”
Eliza felt a dread, long latent but still familiar, rise in her throat. How were they going to pay the girls’ school tuition? The club fees, the mooring fees for the Hinckley? Even the electric and gas bills for a house the size of theirs, the grocery bills, the upkeep on the pool—Judith’s money paid for so much of their existence. “Well, mission accomplished,” she said, more nastily than she wanted to. “I’m surprised.”
One great shame that would chase Eliza for a long, long time was not any of those words but the feeling underneath the words: that even with cancer clawing its way through her dad’s brain, and with the past beating on her head like an anvil, and with regret gnawing at her insides, the idea of returning to a place where lack of money was a constant worry, a constant potential source of embarrassment, sat somewhere between dismaying and horrifying.
Rob: “You always said you didn’t care about the money. But from the way you’re reacting I can see that you cared, Eliza. You care now.”
“Not in the way you think.”
“But in some way.”
“Yeah,” she said finally. “In some way.” He had her: it was true. She’d come so far from that girl in her freshman dorm room, counting out how many packages of ramen noodles she had left, pretending she bought her jeans from the vintage clothing store on Federal Hill because it was trendy, not because she needed to, saying no thank you to a night out because she didn’t have even the dollars for dollar-draft night. Not allowing herself to think about the student loans piling up on top of each other.
She didn’t want to go back; she didn’t want to be that girl again.
“Well, I’m sorry I disappointed you.”