Breaking the Bank

by Yona Zeldis McDonough

  “Thanks, sister,” he said, putting the bill in his pocket. “Thanks a lot.” He grasped the pail under one arm and used his other hand to give her a thumbs-up. “Much appreciated.”

  Sister. He called her sister. The appellation suddenly seemed to take on great meaning, as if of all the things he had said today, this one word was unique, meant for her alone. She flashed to Stuart, whose sister she, in fact, was, and she suddenly wanted to call him back, to talk to him again, but really talk. She wanted to explain about why she hadn’t made that plane reservation and why she couldn’t possibly make it right now—

  The phone began to vibrate, and she was sure it was Stuart, on her wavelength somehow, feeling a reciprocal urge to connect. She immediately clicked the Talk button without even glancing at the incoming number.

  “Stuart, I was just thinking about you—” Mia began. “It’s not Stuart. It’s Lloyd. I want to know why the police had to search your apartment, Mia.” He sounded angry.

  “Who told you that?” How did he even know about it? She almost dropped the phone.

  “Eden called me. She was very upset. And I don’t blame her. I want to know what’s going on.”

  Eden! Called Lloyd to tell him about the police! Betrayal knifed through her, heedlessly slashing organs and arteries along the way. Her husband, her mother, her brother, her sister-in-law . . . betrayers all. Her so-called best friend, Julie, too, vanishing without a trace, not even calling to say where she was but letting Mia find out secondhand.

  What kind of a friend did that? And now Eden. Eden, whom she loved more than all of them put together.

  “I’m in the street,” she said. “I cannot talk about this now.”

  “Well, we’re going to have to talk about it soon.” There was a momentary blankness, like the call had been dropped, but then Mia heard his cold, clipped voice again. “I’ll be in New York on the twenty-first. That’s the Friday before Christmas.”

  “Eden will be thrilled,” Mia said. The sea of pedestrians eddied and flowed around her; no one was aware of her distress. Paradoxically, their very indifference gave her comfort, and even strength.

  “I want her to spend Christmas with us.” By “us” he meant his parents.

  “But you had her for all the extra time over the summer; you said I could have Thanksgiving and Christmas this year.”

  “That was before.”

  “Before what?”

  “Before the police came storming through your apartment and terrorizing my daughter.”

  “They hardly stormed!”

  “Talk to Eden,” Lloyd said. “I take my cues from her.” There was a blank sound again, as if the call had been dropped, but then she heard Lloyd say, “Just make sure she’s packed and ready when I get there.”

  When the call ended, Mia stared at the phone as if she expected it to offer some form of restitution. When nothing of the kind happened, she impulsively punched in Julie’s number, and, to her amazement, her friend actually picked up.

  “Where are you? Where have you been?” Mia blurted out. She hadn’t expected Julie to answer, and her self-censoring mechanism wasn’t fully in place.

  “Didn’t Fred tell you? I told him to tell you everything,” said Julie. Then she added—to someone else, obviously—”No, not now; would you stop?” She giggled like a thirteen-year-old.

  “Is this a bad time?” But Mia didn’t care if it was; she thought Julie ought to contain her adolescent merriment and focus solely on her. They hadn’t talked in so long.

  “No, this is a great time. Great. How are you?”

  Mia paused. How was she? Somehow, the parameters of this conversation did not seem sufficiently large enough for her to say. A truck roared by, and she ducked down a side street, hoping for a reprieve from the sound.

  “All right . . .” she said after a few seconds. “There’s been so much going on.”

  “I can imagine,” Julie said. “And I’m sorry I’ve been so out of touch. But it’s good to hear your voice!”

  “Well, you could have heard it anytime you wanted,” Mia said, unable to control herself. “It’s not like you couldn’t have called.” Now who was acting like an adolescent? But she really was hurt.

  “I know, and I’ve been meaning to—”

  “What? It just slipped your mind?” Mia supplied. “There’s no need to be bitchy,” Julie said. “Takes one to know one,” said Mia. “I cannot believe how childish you’re acting.”

  “I don’t think I’m the one who’s childish. I’m not the one who disappeared without a word, you know. I’m right here; I’ve always been here, remember?”

  “Yes, I know,” Julie said. “But this . . . this . . . negative reaction of yours is part of the reason I didn’t want to call you, Mia.”

  “Oh, so now you’re blaming your bad behavior on me?”

  “Not blaming—explaining.”

  “Go ahead,” Mia said. “I’m listening.” Seething, too, but she didn’t add that.

  “I just thought you’d be . . . bitter . . . if you heard about Dean and me. That you wouldn’t want to know.”

  “How can you say that? Didn’t you think I’d be happy for you?”

  “You don’t sound like you’re very happy for me now. I’m in love. For real.”

  Real? What was real? What Mia had had with Lloyd? What she was trying to build with Fred? She decided not to address that now.

  “That’s because you vanished,” she said. “But if you’d bothered to tell me what was going on, I would have been happy.” Mia had to raise her voice to be heard over a car alarm; side streets were only marginally less crowded than avenues, and certainly not any quieter.

  “I just didn’t think I could,” Julie said. Then in another giggle-suppressed aside, “I said, not now!”

  “You told Fred.”

  “Fred wasn’t passing judgment.”

  “And I am?”

  There was a pause, during which Mia heard some whispering. A delivery guy on a bicycle nearly collided into her, and she stepped aside at the last second. What was he doing on the sidewalk anyway? Idiot!

  “Yes. And no one likes being judged. It’s just not fun.”

  “Well, the fun seems to have gone out of my life at the moment,” Mia said. “I’m about fresh out of fun.” And with that, she clicked off.

  MIA RETURNED TO the office in a fog and spent the rest of the afternoon shuffling the papers on her desk in an attempt to look purposeful. But it was all a sham. Her mind ping-ponged back and forth between Eden and Julie. How could she, Mia thought, the question applicable to either. She left as early as she dared, speeding back to Brooklyn and actually arriving at afterschool pickup on time for a change. How could she, how could she, the refrain that accompanied her over the Manhattan Bridge, past Dekalb and Atlantic avenues, up the subway steps at the Union Street station. And what about this business about Eden’s boycotting math? How had Mia not even known this? She’d have to talk to her about this; she’d really have to lay down the law about what was and what was not appropriate to say and do in school. As for Julie, she just couldn’t even deal with that now.

  But when Mia arrived at the school and saw Eden—sitting by herself on a stack of torn gym mats, anxiously gnawing at a cuticle—her anger suddenly vanished, replaced by overwhelming sadness. Eden hadn’t betrayed her the way the rest of them had; Eden was her baby, her daughter, her most darling of darling girls. Eden was the one who had been betrayed.

  “Mom!” said Eden, hopping down from the mats when she caught sight of Mia. “You’re early!”

  No, thought Mia, as her heart crumbled quietly, I’m late. Much, much too late.

  SIXTEEN

  LLOYD’S PLAN WAS met with predictable elation on Eden’s part. First, she was going to see her dad. Second, she was going to get to see her dad and spend Christmas with her grandparents Nana and Pops. The elder Prescotts no longer had the place in Maine that Mia remembered; they had sold it years ago, had since relocated to a
tidy if lifeless subdivision not far from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. But Nana had reassured Eden that they would still put up a big Douglas fir, just like they had always done, and that Eden could still decorate it with all the fragile, paint-peeling-in-that-shabby-chic-sort-of-way glass ornaments that once belonged to Nana’s own mother. They would bake pans of gingerbread and batches of sugar cookies and sing Christmas carols, accompanied by Pops on the very same upright black piano that had been in the family since the Prescotts got married.

  The whole scene fairly oozed with a Norman Rockwell–inspired hominess, and thinking about it, Mia felt split right down the middle, like one of those black-and-white cookies that her father used to bring home from Grossman’s bakery on Ninety-sixth Street. She had genuinely enjoyed those holidays spent in Maine with Lloyd’s parents, gentle, reticent people, obviously in thrall to their only grandchild. On the other hand, the way they fawned over Lloyd made her sick. Virginia Prescott still called Lloyd Timmy and she served him tumblers filled with milk and mammoth slices of chocolate cake, fussing over him as if he were four years old. In that house, Lloyd, normally competent in the kitchen and willing to pitch in with domestic chores, wouldn’t lift a plate from the table, hang up his coat, or replace a towel on the hook in the bathroom.

  “Lloyd!” Mia had scolded. “Do the dishes, for Christ’s sake. Chop some firewood. And stop leaving your clothes all over the floor.”

  “Relax, would you?” he’d said. “They hardly ever see me. It gives them a big kick to wait on me.”

  “Are you for real? And anyway, whether they like it or not, you shouldn’t let them. They’re getting old.”

  “Aren’t we all?” he had said.

  MIA DID NOT have the spirit to oppose Lloyd’s plan, not when Eden herself was so excited by it. She decided to go along with it, and in so doing, reap the added benefit of not having to take Eden out west after all. As long as she was being given “a change of scene”—Betty’s words—everyone seemed to feel that was sufficient. At least for the time being.

  MIA TRIED NOT to feel bitter, but she did allow herself to wonder whether Lloyd was bringing Suim, and, if so, how the Prescotts would react to the woman who had supplanted her. The thought of Suim meeting Eden—sitting beside her at the Prescotts’ walnut dining-room table, smiling at something she’d said or responding to a request to pass the mashed potatoes—filled Mia with a primitive, shameful fury. She wanted to curse Suim for stealing her husband, send her an elaborately wrapped and beribboned box containing a dead rat, fly to North Carolina and bitterly denounce her in front of Lloyd’s parents.

  While Mia was busy fantasizing revenge, and Eden with packing and unpacking the same suitcase a half dozen times, the Christmas season arrived in New York. Fragrant wreaths sprouted on doors; bushy trees, packed together as tightly as commuters at rush hour, lined the streets; holiday tunes, some smarmy, some poignant, were piped in everywhere Mia went. Hanukkah, that sad sack, second fiddle of a holiday, trailed behind, apologetic and self-deprecating.

  Even though she was nominally Jewish, the season made Mia morose, as if everyone else had been asked to attend a fabulous party from which she had most pointedly been excluded. So to compensate, she invited Fred and Kyra over for a preholiday dinner on a Saturday night before Eden was scheduled to leave town. Not that this decision was without its attendant anxieties. She really liked Fred. But his ardent pursuit made her nervous. Maybe since Lloyd, the whole idea of romance had been permanently spoiled. Whatever the reason, she had to fight the urge to make fun of Fred, his boundless enthusiasm, his emoticon-filled e-mails, his late-night phone calls that featured such leading questions as “Do you miss me?” and “What are you wearing?” Then she felt guilty for being such a bitch, which in turn made her angry with him for making her feel guilty. It was altogether exhausting.

  Despite her misgivings, though, the preparations for this dinner put her in a cautiously upbeat mood. She and Eden walked down to Ninth Street and Fourth Avenue, where a guy with a gold earring, bristling black beard (“Like a pirate,” said Eden), and Buffalo plaid jacket sold them a small but shapely tree; he was especially happy with the extra twenty bucks that Mia slipped him after he had trussed the thing with twine and made sure it was not too heavy for her to carry home. Eden decided that all the decorations had to be eco-friendly and spent several hours patiently stringing cranberries, which she looped around and around the branches. And to think that those automatons at school were making noises about her having attention deficit disorder. Her attention span was just fine when she had something worth paying attention to, Mia decided.

  Improvising slightly on recipes taken from Power Pizza, the two of them baked three pies—goat cheese and leek; olive and red pepper; fresh tomato, basil, and onion. Eden turned out to be quite good at slicing the vegetables, pounding and stretching the dough with the necessary vigor; Mia wished her teacher could see her now, brushing olive oil on the crust with a delicate, knowing touch. Maybe Eden would skip college altogether and go to culinary school. Mia could envision it all, her daughter a world-class chef, with her own restaurant, TV show, series of bestselling cookbooks—then the buzzer sounded, putting an end to her media-driven fantasies. Mia went to answer it.

  “You’re early,” Mia said to Fred, aware that this was not the most gracious greeting in the world. But she had wanted to take a shower before they arrived; instead, here they were, and she was still in her oil-spotted T-shirt and her oldest, rattiest cords.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll help,” Fred said. He handed her a bag, which Mia saw was filled with several pints of Häagen-Dazs ice cream—she spied pistachio and rum raisin on top—and four glorious white roses, swathed in a dark green paper and tied with a dark red velvet ribbon.

  “Thanks,” she said, taking the flowers. They were real roses, too, fat and fragrant, not those hybrid things you got on every corner that had no smell and went from bud to dead without ever opening. “They’re beautiful.”

  “Merry Christmas,” Fred said, but Mia could see that his expression was clouded. Before she could ask him what was wrong, Eden appeared at her side.

  “Hi, Kyra,” said Eden. She started in with this little half-hopping, half-jumping routine, clearly unable to contain her excitement.

  “Hi, yourself,” Kyra said, tousling Eden’s hair, which had started to grow out into appealingly soft, feathery wisps that framed her face. Mia tensed, knowing that Eden did not like to be touched, but evidently, Kyra—like Lloyd—proved to be the exception to this rule, because Eden grinned like she had been lit from within.

  Fred took over in the kitchen, and the girls set the table while Mia showered. Then they all sat down to an extremely untraditional holiday meal of pizza, green salad, and ice cream in six flavors. Never mind that they were eating at the coffee table, which meant they all had to sit on cushions on the floor. The tree still looked pretty and smelled even better, and the white votive candles that Mia had set around the room softened the apartment’s numerous deficiencies and gave everything a festive air. Or at least festive enough. Fred still seemed a little subdued; he praised the food but ate little. Eden, on the other hand, tried all three pies and had seconds of the goat cheese. Mia resolved to enlist her aid in cooking more often.

  After dinner, Mia expected the girls to disappear to Eden’s room, which they did, this time to anoint each other’s face with skin-enhancing masks—mud, egg, apricot, and honey—squeezed from tubes that Kyra produced from her perennially swollen bag.

  Fred settled down on the love seat, holding his transistor radio in his hand but not making any move to turn it on.

  “We can dance,” Mia prompted. “That was fun, remember?”

  “Yeah, it was,” he said. But he seemed glum.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m okay.”

  Mia was not convinced.

  “I talked to a lawyer,” she said, hoping to arouse his protective instincts; after all, he had been nagging her to do exact
ly that.

  “And?”

  “I liked the way he sounded.” This was actually something of a lie. The guy talked at such a staccato, breakneck speed that he’d given Mia a major headache; she didn’t know if she could keep pace with him. She’d even called her brother to complain. Stuart insisted the guy was an ace, and in the absence of any better alternatives, Mia had decided to go with him.

  “Well, I’m glad for you.” He sounded like she had just told him she had breast cancer. In both breasts.

  “Come on, Fred. What’s wrong?” she asked, sitting down next to him. “You seem so gloomy tonight.”

  “It’s true. I am.” He stared at her with those bluer-than-blue eyes. Maybe he stood in front of the mirror, practicing that puppy-dog look, because he certainly seemed to have perfected it. Then he looked down again, shifting his gaze to the radio in his hands.

  “Well, come on. You can tell me,” she said, giving him a playful little punch in the arm. When he didn’t respond, she said, “I know—you’re getting back together with your wife.”

  He shook his head. “You’ve decided you’re attracted to men?”

  “This isn’t funny.” He glared at her. “Sorry,” she said, and she was. “I just get that way sometimes.”

  “It doesn’t bother me. In fact, I kind of like it—the way I never know what’s going to pop out of your mouth. Living with you would never be dull, that’s for sure.”

  Living with me? she wanted to shout. Who said anything about living with me? But with great effort, she restrained herself and said only, “I really do want to know what’s wrong. So please, whatever it is, just tell me.”