The Family Fortune

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The Family Fortune Page 19

by Laurie Horowitz


  “Who do they think cares?” Isabelle asked.

  “Society at large,” I said in an overblown voice.

  She laughed. “A family that believes they are living in a Henry James novel. How picturesque. So, Jane, what brings you here in the dead of winter? Not that we aren’t delighted to have you.”

  Both Isabelle and Jimmy looked at me with the same expression. Jimmy was a handsome kid, dark hair, olive skin, dark eyes. He had Isabelle’s coloring, but otherwise he didn’t look much like her. I had wondered, at times, who his father was, but it wasn’t the kind of question I’d ever ask, even of a close friend like Isabelle.

  “Could you picture me in Palm Beach?” I asked. “Lime green is not exactly my color. I don’t play golf. Besides, I’m sure they rented a nice apartment, but still, we’d be on top of each other.”

  There was one more important reason, a reason I hadn’t even admitted to myself—and that was that they hadn’t asked me. Miranda had replaced me with Dolores as easily as she might have replaced a Gucci loafer with a Jack Purcell sneaker.

  I had built what little self-concept I had on certain bricks, and one of them was that I was essential to my father and sister. Essential? I wasn’t even necessary.

  In my little gingerbread house I had time to think—too much time. I had never lived alone. I spent time alone, but Miranda and Teddy were always coming and going and just having them in the house changed the quality of the solitude.

  Every morning I went to Isabelle’s bakery for coffee and muffins. Once a week I received a package from Tad. Even though we had chosen the winner of the fellowship, we still had to fill the Review. Mornings, I sat at my desk on the second floor of my little house looking out onto the other cottages, most of which were empty in winter, and read the stories, made the choices, and sent them back. I also took care of other foundation business—wrote checks and personal rejection letters for the stories we wouldn’t be using. Several weeks passed this way and I still hadn’t heard from Hope Bliss. She said it wasn’t going to be difficult to find Jack Reilly. He couldn’t be that hard to find.

  I grieved for Max as if the loss were new. I don’t think I was grieving just for him, but for a past I might have spent better. Was my life going to end like this? The Review twice a year, the contest, the business of the foundation? I could do it all with my eyes closed. I wasn’t even forty. And stories like Jack Reilly’s, the ones that really excited me, were so few and far between. Maybe Basil Funk was right. I should incorporate more art into the foundation’s work. Somehow, though, I didn’t feel that was the answer.

  And while I had made my retreat to the island, what had been happening up in Vermont? My source of information was Winnie, who unfortunately had no idea what really interested me.

  Lindsay still wasn’t supposed to travel long distances, so she had moved in with the Franklins. Her prognosis was good, though according to Winnie, she seemed a bit odd.

  “At least she remembers everyone now. We were really worried there for a while. But I don’t understand Max,” Winnie said on the phone. “I would have thought that he wouldn’t leave her side, but he only stayed until just after she woke up. Then he left on a book tour. I hope he’s not one of those guys who will get a girl’s hopes up only to drop her flat.”

  “I don’t think he’s one of those guys,” I said, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Maybe he had gone back to the girl who had called him that night on his cell phone. Who knew what he was thinking? He was a different man from the one I had first fallen in love with.

  But I, too, was surprised that Max had left so soon. He might have canceled a few dates of his tour. I had always thought that he was unlikely to leave the woman he loved in a precarious condition.

  Charlie lifted up the extension. “Basil’s been asking about you,” he said.

  Winnie said, “What are you talking about, Charlie? I didn’t hear Basil say a thing about Jane.”

  “You weren’t there,” Charlie said.

  “When wasn’t I there? I’m always there,” Winnie said.

  “Well, you weren’t.”

  Charlie hung up.

  Winnie called every week. She complained of the sniffles during each call and the boys were always misbehaving.

  “Anyway, Jane, you’re so lucky to be on the island by yourself. No responsibilities. You could have stayed with us for the winter, you know. We liked having you. Charlie and I fight even more when you’re not here.”

  Considering how much they fought when I was there, this wasn’t a good sign.

  One morning in mid-February I arrived at Isabelle’s, as usual, and she said she had a message for me. A Hope Bliss—what kind of name was that—had called her house looking for me. I remembered that I’d given Hope Isabelle’s number because at the time I didn’t have one.

  I ate my cranberry muffin quickly and rushed back to the house to call Hope.

  “Did you find him?” I asked as soon as she picked up the phone.

  “Are you sure there is only a story involved here?” Hope asked.

  “It’s a very good story,” I said.

  “It was one of the strangest cases I’ve had lately,” she said. “Sorry it took me so long, but I had to do it the old-fashioned way. I trekked around all over the Boston area from one person to another to find anyone who had known him, or seen him. You want to know where I found him?”

  “Of course I do.” What was she talking about—why would I have hired her if I didn’t want to know?

  “He’s been under your nose the whole time.”

  “Is he here on the Vineyard?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Oak Bluffs.”

  “I’m in Oak Bluffs.”

  “I know.”

  “He’s in a gingerbread cottage four doors down from yours.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Isn’t it? You want to hear the craziest part?” I didn’t say anything so she continued. “He’s squatting.”

  “What?”

  “He found an empty house, got it open, and moved into it. He’s squatting.”

  “That’s not too honest,” I said. I had seen Jack Reilly as an outlaw, even hoped he would be one, but the reality didn’t excite me as much as I thought it would. I was basically an honest person and expected other people to be honest. I’d imagined a bad boy, not a parasite.

  “Damn straight. It’s stealing,” Hope said. “Anyway, that’s why he was so hard to find. He has a post office box in Lynn, but other than that it doesn’t look like he pays taxes, or has a bank account, or even has a telephone.”

  When I told Isabelle about Jack Reilly, she said I should call the police, but I didn’t want to get the police involved. What if—and I was beginning to doubt it—Jack Reilly was all I’d dreamed him to be. What if when I opened the door, love hit me like a bucket of water from an upstairs window? Would I want the police shifting around at the bottom of the front walk waiting to drag him away?

  It may have been ridiculous to put myself in jeopardy in pursuit of something I couldn’t even name, but I was determined to do it because if I didn’t, if I let the police go in and haul Jack Reilly away, I’d never know if, despite his antisocial behavior, he was the one.

  Chapter 28

  Jack Reilly: squatter

  I wasn’t sure how to approach Jack Reilly. At first, all I did was watch his house, but I never saw anyone come out or go in. Since the house was on the same side as mine, it was harder to keep an eye on it than it would have been if he had lived across from me. I decided that if I didn’t see anyone go in or out in three days, I’d go and knock on the door.

  The day my surveillance would have ended, I was going out for a walk, and as I locked my door, I turned and there was a man coming out of the house where Jack Reilly was squatting. This man was almost bald, with a scrawny chicken neck. He held a notebook in his hand and he was wearing a lumberjack jacket and the type of black-and-white
-checked pants chefs wear.

  Since I was only going for a walk and had no special destination, I didn’t see any harm in following him. He wasn’t the Jack Reilly I’d pictured, but maybe he was a friend of Jack’s. Maybe he, too, was squatting in the neighbor’s house. Perhaps I could find something out about Jack Reilly from him.

  The man huddled against the wind and walked toward the center of town, where he went into a seaside restaurant and sat at the bar. I followed him in and took a booth. I wished I had brought something to read so I wouldn’t look conspicuous. I would have made a terrible detective, and every time I tried anything remotely related to detection, I appreciated Hope Bliss more.

  I ordered a beer for stamina and worked up the nerve to send one over to the man at the bar who was now scribbling in his notebook with a cheap ballpoint pen.

  The man took the beer, looked at the bartender, then turned toward me. The look he gave me was both wolfish and questioning, which may be the appropriate look to give a strange woman in a virtually empty restaurant who buys you a beer.

  He got up and came over. He held his beer up in a toast and thanked me. I bowed my head and smiled shyly. I didn’t know if I was feeling shy or if I felt that this was the look I must produce, like some misguided Nancy Drew. I was proud of myself for tracking him to a public place so there’d be less chance for trouble. And I was still hoping that this man wasn’t Jack Reilly, that the whole thing was some mistake.

  “Would you like to sit down?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said, and slipped into the booth across from me.

  “I’m…” And then, of course, I paused. He had applied to the foundation. He’d know my name. “Lindsay Maple.”

  “JR,” he said.

  “JR what?”

  “Just JR,” he said. “Like Cher or Madonna.”

  I nodded and sipped my beer. Where to go from here? Now I was stuck with an unattractive squatter who was wearing two different patterns—plaid on top and checks on the bottom. At least if this JR wasn’t my Jack Reilly, there was still hope.

  “I see you’re writing,” I said, and pointed to his notebook.

  “I’m a writer,” he said.

  “What kinds of things do you write?” I asked.

  “Stories.”

  “You living here for the winter?”

  “It’s quiet here.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Gingerbread cottages.”

  “Amazing, me too,” I said. His teeth, when he smiled, were nicotine-stained, and he pulled out a packet of Nicorette gum. “Look, I have to ask you something. I heard that a guy named Jack Reilly lived near us in the gingerbread houses. Ever heard of him?”

  He looked up, pressed his lips together, then smiled.

  “I’m Jack Reilly,” he said.

  “You said you were JR,” I said.

  “JR, Jack Reilly.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “And you’re Jane Fortune,” he said. “You make a terrible sleuth if that’s what you were trying to do.”

  I blushed.

  “How do you know me?” I asked.

  “How do you know me?” he answered.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” I said. “You submitted a story to the Review.”

  “And that’s how I know you. I saw your picture on the Internet.”

  “There’s a picture of me on the Internet?”

  “Several. I knew you were living a few doors down. I knew who you were when you followed me in here and bought me this drink.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “I thought I’d let you play out your game. Didn’t want to disappoint. Why were you playing it anyway?”

  “I thought you might be dangerous.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re squatting in that house.”

  He nodded. “It wouldn’t be the first time. I believe that empty out-of-season homes should be used by the people who need them. Doesn’t make me dangerous.”

  “But it’s stealing,” I said.

  “Depends how you look at it.”

  “I look at it as stealing.”

  He smiled. I could see how the woman at the Butterfly Museum might have been taken in by him. He had a way of talking that made you feel like you were a precious stone sitting in the palm of his hand.

  “I have some of your things,” I said.

  “What things?”

  “A letter from a nice lady at the Butterfly Museum, a couple of books, and a notebook.”

  “My notebook. I’ve been looking everywhere for it.”

  “The woman in Lynn gave it to me.”

  “She’s a piece of work, isn’t she?” Then he paused and his brows came together. “Why were you there?”

  “I told you. I’ve been looking all over for you,” I said.

  “Why?”

  And then I said it, though it didn’t come out the way I wanted it to: it wasn’t the grand announcement I had planned. Grand announcements didn’t feel right with this Jack Reilly.

  “You won the damn contest—you won the fellowship,” I said.

  “That’s great,” he said as if it came as no surprise. “But why didn’t you contact me at my post office box?”

  “Believe me, if you’d put it on your story I would have. I wouldn’t have spent the winter tracking you all over New England.”

  He hit the side of his head with the flat of his hand.

  “We artists,” he said as if this were some sort of excuse for being a flake. “You gonna turn me in for squatting?” he asked.

  “It’s none of my business, I guess, but I already told my friend Isabelle, and she’s not so forgiving about things like this. She’s a year-round resident, and I think she feels personally responsible for the entire island.”

  “I’m screwed,” he said.

  “Maybe not. The fellowship doesn’t usually start until June, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t start earlier. It is for the struggling artist.”

  “That would be me,” he said.

  Jack Reilly packed up his stuff that afternoon and came over to say goodbye. So it hadn’t been love at first sight. The hope I’d been holding broke into shards and I spent the afternoon walking carefully around them to keep from getting cut.

  Maybe he wasn’t going to be my next big thing, but that wouldn’t keep him from being the next big thing in literature. I could help him. Wasn’t that my job?

  By the time he walked away to the ferry with his battered backpack, I was feeling better. My Jack Reilly fantasy was gone and now I could get on with my life, whatever that meant.

  Life on the Vineyard, if I were to admit it, was too quiet for me, and without my fantasy for company, lonely. When I walked down the street I looked with longing at “Help Wanted” signs and tried to picture myself answering phones in an insurance company or slinging scrambled eggs across a counter in a diner. I imagined myself as a bookseller or a salesclerk in a gift shop that sold scrimshaw.

  One afternoon I went down to Isabelle’s bakery and asked for a job.

  Isabelle wiped her palms against the front of her apron. She had a dusting of flour across her cheek.

  “I need a job,” I said.

  “You have a job, Jane,” she said.

  “What job?”

  “The foundation. You have the foundation. You don’t need to work in a bakery.”

  “But you’re wrong. I do. I need to get my hands dirty.”

  “Maybe you should try to write. You’re so good with words. There would be no Max Wellman without you—and how many others—Jessica Lowe, Marylou Patter, Axel Bonner.”

  “They all would have made it without me,” I said.

  She shrugged. “We’ll never know for sure, will we, because they had you.”

  “Please, I want a job.”

  “I think you’ve lost your mind.”

  “That’s okay with me. I’m tired of my mind.”

  “I can’t pay you much.”<
br />
  “Don’t pay me at all.”

  “I have to pay you something.”

  “When do I start?”

  “Tomorrow, I guess.” She looked skeptical. “We start at four, but you can come in at five.”

  “Five?”

  “In the morning.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said. I was somewhat deflated, but no matter. I could wake up early. If Isabelle had done it all these years, then so could I.

  It was dark when I woke for my first day on the job, and I questioned my earlier impulse. I felt groggy and headachy. I bundled up against the cold and walked through the dimly lit streets until I saw the lights of the bakery. When I arrived, Isabelle was already there with her workers, Doris and Salvador. The ovens were burning and the kitchen smelled of brown sugar and cinnamon. It was all so warm and cozy, I could have nodded out right there, but Isabelle set me to work filling muffin tins. Most of the jobs I did at the bakery were monotonous, but after a few weeks I got used to the work and began to like it. I’d let my mind wander. Sometimes stories would come to me from things I saw in the shop. I imagined a relationship between Doris and Salvador. As far as I knew, they were barely acquainted, but in my mind I created a love story of passion mixed with impediments. Poor Doris in her hairnet and Salvador with his stormy eyebrows—I doubt they would have liked it if they’d known what I was thinking.

  I established a routine. I woke up at four and got to the bakery at five. I worked at the bakery until noon, covered the morning rush, then walked the island all afternoon. At first, one mile of walking in the cold wind made my throat feel like tin and I’d rush home to a warm fire and woolly socks. After a while, though, I was hiking all over the island, mile after mile. Between that and my work in the bakery I could feel my body getting firmer, trimmer, stronger. I wouldn’t need to cover anything this summer.

  Early evenings I worked on foundation business, and when everything was finished for the day, I took out the journal Max had given me and I wrote. Yes, it was my dirty secret. At first, I wrote only journal entries, but then I started writing this story.

  Jack Reilly kept in touch. He had fixed the front steps of the house in Hull. He was building some bookshelves and he was writing. He said his book was going to be great. Sometimes he sent me pieces through the mail, pieces typed on an old manual typewriter, even though there was a computer in the house. Jack asked for advice, but he rarely took it. I envied Jack Reilly his unrestrained confidence. He was so sure of his greatness. Did that make him greater?

 

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