He and Elise scour the Yellow Pages as they eat.
They come upon Rodion Slavin Flits, Esq., at 199 Neptune Avenue in Brighton Beach. Serving Brooklyn since 1978. A Personal & Empathetic Friend. Specializing in Wills, Family Law & Probate. Mainly they like his name.
“What’s ‘empathetic’?” Elise squints.
“He cares about us.”
That weekend they get a cold front. One evening, they’re walking Buck on Third Avenue and see a sweatshirt on a fence, white with Jordache in gold letters, the stallion in mid-gallop. Elise holds it up to her shoulders.
“I don’t want to know where that thing’s been,” Jamey says, watching her in the lamplight.
“You have this whole plan to be broke, and you can’t handle a sweatshirt on a fence?” she tells him.
At Goodwill, she buys him a red wool sweater (which she washes in the kitchen sink and dries on the radiator), and Isotoner gloves. She finds a wok on the curb. She takes scissors to the coupon section of the paper.
She thinks about Lorena, a diabetic Puerto Rican lady who wore her white hair in a bandanna—her Turnbull apartment spun and glittered with junk. Lorena gardened in the summer on her “patio,” a tiny enclave where she grew herbs and vegetables, watering them from her wheelchair. During August, she’d let Elise pick cherry tomatoes off the plant. Elise can still remember the heat of the fruit as she bit into it. The little seeds were orange tinged with green, the liquid a viscous blob.
“Su-per-ior to store-bought,” Lorena said in an imposing voice. “You best believe that.”
Tuesday morning is one torrential rain, the street gutters carrying beer cans and dead leaves into drains. Right before they leave the apartment, it stops.
The sky is now deafeningly silent.
On the subway, he reads the newspaper while she sits forward, elbows on knees, and he rubs her back with one hand. It’s a long way to where they’re going. The train finally rattles up from the tunnels and into the cityscape. Elise watches graveyards and junk lots and scorched buildings fly by.
“What stop is it again?” Jamey says.
“Ocean Parkway. It’s next.”
They get off to a cheap block. In the barbershop window, neon shears glow. Every house has a different look: new brick or red siding or butterscotch-yellow cement. But this world is tidy. The gates all lock and open, the mailboxes aren’t crooked, the beach chairs in each fenced-in sidewalk front yard are in good shape.
“Here it is,” Elise says, biting her thumb.
A damp American flag hangs from the peaked porch roof. The sign by the metal screen door says: BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.
Jamey rings the bell.
A woman opens the door, offers her hand. “I’m Marianne, Rodie’s wife, we talked on the phone, how you doing.”
Her shirt is zebra-print, and a blond pile of ringlets is bobby-pinned on her head. She has lavender eyes and marionette lines around her smile.
Jamey almost trips, the carpet is so thick.
“You two want coffee? Something stronger? Get the rain out of your bones?”
“Mmmh, coffee,” Elise says.
Turquoise-and-gold-wallpaper hallway, past a dining table stacked with mail, to a tiny office, where Rodion, white-haired, in a velvet jacket, plays a wobbly Haydn record on a turntable. The cave is tangy with European cologne.
“Good afternoon.” He shakes hands, his Brooklyn accent etched with Russian.
When they sit, he lights a brown cigarette.
“Well,” he says. “What does this regard?”
Jamey and Elise look at each other.
“My inheritance—”
“You’re competing with stepsiblings,” Rodion suggests.
“No.”
“You’re worried about the tax.”
“Completely the opposite.”
“There is no opposite,” Rodion says, amused. “You’re not excited by taxes.”
“I don’t want the inheritance.” Jamey looks apologetically at Rodion, because he knows this is a silly thing he’s brought to the man’s doorstep.
Rodie grins, shakes his head at the strangely decent boy sitting in his office, while Marianne delivers dark coffee in bone-china cups. She points to a sugar bowl and creamer, and mouths: sugar and cream, then winks and leaves.
“If whatever incited this decision happened in the past week, we’re not going to discuss anything today,” Rodion says.
“It started the day I was born.”
“What did?”
“They try to own him,” Elise jumps in belligerently. “They use his trusts against him and shit like that.”
“Ah,” says Rodion, and then he offers cigarettes, and Elise takes one. He holds a gold lighter to it while he evaluates the couple.
“It’s called a renunciation,” Rodion says. “Why don’t you give me a sense of where we stand.”
Jamey tells Rodie his net worth. Then he watches Rodie consider that number with operatic drama.
“Who are you, for chrissakes?” asks Rodie quietly.
“James Balthazar Hyde, of Hyde, Moore & Kent. The problem child.”
“James Balthazar Hyde,” Rodie says, sipping black coffee from the delicate cup.
“Yes sir.”
“I fear you’re being idealistic, or vindictive—neither of which are criminal actions—but I want us to consider your best interests here.”
“I have.”
Rodie shuffles papers, and nods his grand head. “What’s harmful in thinking about it some more, James?”
“I’m wasting time.”
“Why not take these millions and do good?”
“When something is poisoned at the root, it won’t flower,” Jamey says.
Rodion smooths his lapels, keeps nodding. Then he sighs: “I don’t feel right about this. But we can do it if you say so.”
While Jamey and Rodion start the carbon-copy forms, talking in that low-voice litigious way, Elise smokes and watches. Whenever Jamey glances up at Rodie, he almost looks like he could kiss the lawyer—his mouth is so pure.
As Rodion adds up numbers, Elise thinks: It is too bad it has to be all or nothing. She realizes her hands are sweaty, and her mind is racing with lost possibilities. She didn’t know she’d harbored a secret dream of buying her mother a house, but she knows it now, as the dream gets extinguished.
“How do you feel about everything, Elise?” Rodion asks, tapping a Waterman pen in his palm.
She shrugs, tosses her braids back. “Got to do what you got to do.”
Rodion stands up to stretch, and asks them to have lunch with the family.
“I insist,” he says.
They wander into the kitchen, where Marianne is cooking beef stroganoff, the window valance making a shadow of lace on her face.
A girl, around five or six, is rolling tiny balls out of Play-Doh at the table. When she looks up, Jamey knows by the hanging mouth and shark teeth, plump cheeks, round eyes, that she has Down syndrome.
“This is Bethany,” Rodion says with tenderness.
“Hi sweetheart,” Elise says.
Elise asks to help make Play-Doh balls, and Bethany grins wetly: “Yeah!”