She’d been on this road before: Grandma, Aunt Nanny, Uncle Sid, they were all buried in Beth Moses.
“Life goes by in a second.” Her mother snapped her fingers each time she said those words. “Boom, and you’re gone, yet every minute is so long. Your grandmother taught me that.”
Boom. Phoebe had left Bellevue for a walk. When she returned, her mother had died—not lasting one night after learning of her husband’s death.
Boom.
What had been the lesson? Phoebe should have panned for more nuggets of ancestral wisdom. Maybe Grandma warned them to weather the long pain of the minutes because otherwise joy rushed away? Pay attention? Do good? Love your family? Hold them close before they disappear into the ground?
Phoebe squeezed Jake’s hand, grateful that he had known her parents for so long. He’d become flesh of her flesh, as her parents had with each other. Her mother touched her father often. Despite her sardonic nature and cutting words, she never stinted on showing Daddy love. The knowledge came in a torrent of memories. Squeezing her father’s shoulder as she left the table at Peter Luger Steak House so recently. Leaning over and kissing the bald spot on top of his head, ruffling the bits of red hair remaining, still earning his nickname.
Her parents were gone.
The previous night, she and Deb had sorted through family pictures, making posters for the service and then holding objects you don’t realize are the most precious until death do you part. The small blue and white delft box where her mother put her rings each night. The scrolled brass mail station in the hallway.
Death taught you that souls lived in the ephemera once surrounding the ones you loved. Families fighting over ancient decks of cards and leaking teapots struggled to be keepers of the past. Now she understood. Possessions mattered because they held your history.
They walked slowly from the limousine to the family gravesite, a spectral lawn with room for a hundred graves. Would she and Jake rest someday with her parents, or would he insist on majesty? Phoebe feared a lonely place of grandeur where she’d be alone with him until the children joined them.
Deb reached for her. They walked together clutching embroidered black handkerchiefs from their mother’s drawer. Talismanic bits of her parents shielded them during the finality of burial. Phoebe wore the gold locket, Deb the wedding and engagement rings.
The men’s and boys’ black silk yarmulkes flapped against hairpins in the early December wind. The older women—her aunt Ruth, and many of her mother’s friends—had pinned lace circles on their hair. They clutched black coats close as they huddled, a clutch of widows. Those with living husbands stood straight and a step behind, rejecting death, seeming unwilling to taunt the spirits.
Jake took her hand as they reached the gravesite opened for two boxes. Noah took her other hand. Kate leaned her head on Jake’s shoulder.
Part 4
* * *
It Falls Apart
CHAPTER 22
Jake
September 2008
“How about some cupcakes with your coffee?” Jake faked a grin at the accountants. The two had been sent from the US Securities and Exchange Commission—otherwise known as the SEC—the goddamned federal overlords of money. “The best you’ll ever taste. We bring in a few dozen from the Cupcake Project every day. It’s my wife’s company, by the way.”
“The Cupcake Project belongs to your wife?” This was the young one of the duo, a woman who looked as though cupcake tasting were her second job.
Jake held his hand to his heart. “Love of my life. The softie of the family. All the profits go to Mira House, a community center on the Lower East Side. She’s been working there since college.”
“I read about that business.” The balding accountant’s stern expression broke into a vague look of admiration. “So, your wife started it?”
“Yup. We moved back to Manhattan a few years ago so she could oversee opening the store downtown. Right near Mira House. She’s the bleeding heart, and I’m the head of stone.” Jake leaned forward as though to tell them a secret. “Of course, everyone’s a soft touch for their wife, right? It’s not common knowledge, but I helped with the start-up costs.”
Jake made sure to sound self-deprecating, letting them know he was severely lowballing his contribution to the Cupcake Project. “The connection? It’s not a secret, but I don’t spread that around. Phoebe gets full credit for this one.”
He left the room and called his secretary. “Connie, bring a tray to the conference room. Stat. Pile up enough cupcakes to stun an elephant. Add bagels, coffee, tea, and anything else you can think of.”
He raced up the stairs to the thirty-seventh floor.
The damned SEC had unearthed accusations from years ago, and today he might pay that overdue bill.
Jake might be the only man on Wall Street who’d been helped by 9/11—not something of which he was proud, just a truth. Hell, Jake lost friends. Solomon’s sister died. Jake closed JPE so the entire company could attend the funeral.
Never would he wish that death and destruction on a soul—hell, he’d donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to helping victims’ families—but in a strange shift of historical winds, 9/11 had blown away a sword of Damocles dangling over Jake’s head. Earlier in the year, a small industry publication, Funds Upfront, had called Jake’s lack of volatility almost impossible when paired with his constant incredibly high returns. Unnamed sources in the hedge fund world—and fuck them all roundly—were “baffled by the performance in Jake Pierce’s fund.”
He agreed to meet with the writer after the article had come out, Jake’s avuncular smile showing how little the suppositions of ghosts concerned him. He ticked off his accomplishments: early automation and computerization programs, infrastructure, management, retaining staff—everything but the fucking enamel on his teeth that helped him legally and stunningly second-guess the market.
Two weeks later, a different reporter had written about the issues with a sharper pen. This author—some bitch who couldn’t be more than twenty-five—questioned how his Club accounts returned a steady 15-plus percent for more than a decade, theorizing that the JPE brokerage “eased and supported his under-the-radar Pierce Fund,” and then wove a scenario on how he might have done this.