Three weeks later, on a Thursday, she took the last flight out of JFK to LAX, and she spent much of it working, reviewing a stack of cases she’d printed out from Westlaw and Lexis. She arrived after one a.m., flying in a cab over wide stretches of freeway to arrive at Sarah’s house long after she and Angela had turned in for the night. Lizzie’s body was jangly, buzzing with restlessness, in full-throttle protest. The next thing she knew, Sarah was standing over her, already dressed. “It’s almost ten,” she said. “We need to go.”
Lizzie’s left cheek felt as if someone had jabbed it with a stapler. She had fallen asleep on her laptop. “Okay,” she said, rubbing her cheek, running her fingers through her knotty hair. “Just give me a few minutes and I’ll be ready.”
Sarah assessed her. “You look exhausted. You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine!” Lizzie said loudly, which did nothing so much as prove Sarah’s point.
Max ran his own small law office from a Spanish stucco overlooking the thin ribbon of park on Ocean Avenue. For years, their father’s friend had focused on criminal defense, but his current practice mostly consisted of longtime clients, many for whom he now settled business disputes, the occasional DUI, and even rarer, estate planning. Inside his office, Lizzie downed her second cup of coffee and picked at a cranberry muffin as Max went over the steps in painfully simple detail—filing the will with probate court, making an inventory of the estate’s assets, paying off the estate’s debts and taxes—yes, yes, she knew all this.
“Everything okay?” Max asked, as if sensing her impatience.
Lizzie felt chagrined. “Yes,” she said, “of course.”
“You know, your father chose me to be the executor because the laws in California differ significantly from those in New York, and more important: he knew it would be burdensome. He didn’t want you—either of you—to have to deal with this.”
“I’m so glad,” Sarah said.
“Me too,” Lizzie said, a lie. She didn’t know why she cared about being executor. She didn’t want to deal with Joseph’s estate. It was likely a mess. And she wasn’t expecting much. Joseph mocked cushions, 401(k)s, Roth IRAs, most fiscal plans that smacked of—well—planning. He had made a small fortune with his surgical eye practice, but the Joseph she knew was a spender through and through; he lived off the money’s exhaust.
Still: when Max spoke about the second mortgage on the house (taken out, Lizzie realized as he went over the details, when she was in law school), she felt a flicker of unease. Then Max mentioned a real estate deal Joseph had made years earlier, a shopping mall in the Central Valley that had gone belly-up. The value had taken a nose dive when Joseph needed the cash the most, so he had to unload it with the mortgage underwater. It went into foreclosure. Max said there was little in terms of liquid assets.
How were his finances really that bad?
“There’s still the house,” Sarah was saying. “We can pay off what we need to with the profit from the sale.”
“Yes,” Max said as Lizzie looked at her sister anew. They would sell the house? Of course they would. Still, the thought of it gone made Lizzie feel hollowed out. She glanced out the window. A stone fountain dominated the courtyard, four muscular fish holding up a conch shell. Even the fishes’ mouths looked parched.
She thought of all that money he had made through the years, so much earned and blown. Why hadn’t he said anything? She could have helped. At least she should have pushed him harder to sock some away for himself (and yes, maybe a little for her and Sarah too). Lizzie had chosen to become a lawyer in part so that she could take care of herself. She did not suffer from want. Still, she sat in Max’s office, feeling bereft, and thinking: There wasn’t anything? She asked: “And the insurance money from the paintings?”
“That was quite a while ago,” Max said, but his light-colored eyes settled on her face. There was sympathy in his gaze, an odd intimacy. She flushed, looked away.
Max went on to say that Joseph had requested that his possessions be split evenly between the two girls, with a few exceptions: He wanted Max to have the Ortiz collage; Lizzie the Julius Shulman photograph (he remembered how much she loved it, and this thought brought her back to herself, gave her a shot of pleasure); Sarah the Sugimoto seascape; and the West African funeral masks to Rose Downes.
“Rose?” Lizzie echoed.
“Who?” Sarah asked.
“The older woman I told you about, from the memorial?” Lizzie turned to Max and said, “I don’t understand. They weren’t close. Why give her the masks?”
Max shrugged. “Perhaps because of The Bellhop. It was stolen under his watch, after all.”
“My watch, actually,” Lizzie muttered. And after that, she didn’t ask any questions.
In February, they put the house on the market. In less than a week, during a snowstorm that pummeled New York, they got an offer. The buyer was a Paramount exec around Lizzie’s age—ob-gyn wife, two young kids—with the sort of swaggering verve that Joseph would have admired and made Lizzie annoyed. (“I want this house, I love this house,” their broker reported him as saying. “I’ll pay ask, all cash. The offer’s good for forty-eight hours. After that, it goes down twenty-five thousand each day.”)
A month later, she was flying out again. She and Sarah had to do a final cleaning to empty out the house. It made Lizzie feel queasy to contemplate, but she tried to remain pragmatic. Max had recommended an estate sales firm and she and Sarah lined it up. “Trust me, everything has value,” Miller Perkins, the head of the firm, had said. “There’s a buyer for it all.”
At work, Lizzie learned that a similar case to Clarke’s was being argued in front of the Third Circuit. Oral arguments were scheduled for the day after next. “You should go down to Philadelphia,” Marc said. “Hop on the Acela and turn around the same day.”
“I’m supposed to leave for L.A. tomorrow.”
“Ah,” he said, considering. Then he brightened. “Well, Kathleen can go instead.” Kathleen was a hard-charging associate three years behind Lizzie. She was supposed to report to Lizzie on cases, but Lizzie often found her talking to Marc instead.
“Kathleen can go to L.A.?” Lizzie offered sweetly.
“She probably would, if we told her to,” Marc said. “She’ll be fine in Philly. She can be your ears.”
“I don’t need extra ears. Let me figure it out. There might be some wiggle room.”
When Sarah picked up, Lizzie plunged forward: “I’m really sorry, but I can’t come out tomorrow.”
“What? Why?”
“Work.” Lizzie let out a big exhale. “My boss is insisting that I go hear a case being argued in Philadelphia.” Sarah didn’t respond, and Lizzie added: “An important case. I don’t really have a choice.”