“Mad props to my dawg Bobby Frost,” Lucas said. “He could flow, no doubt. But he starts with fire.”
“A lot of things start with fire, Luke. The crucial question is how they end.”
Nick debated whether he should join them. He wouldn’t have hesitated in the old days, but Lucas was different now. What was going on was a good thing, yet probably a fragile thing too. Lucas wouldn’t let him help with his homework anymore, and now that he was in the eleventh grade, Nick wasn’t much use anyway. But Cassie had somehow figured out a way to talk to him, and she knew that stuff—she was a natural. A goddamn valedictorian.
Finally, Nick walked past Lucas’s bedroom, which let them know he was home, and made his way to his own room. Removed his clothes, brushed his teeth, took a quick shower. When he came out again, Lucas was alone in his room, sitting at his computer, working.
“Hey, Luke,” he said.
Lucas glanced up with his usual look of annoyance.
Nick wanted to say something like, Did Cassie help? I’m glad you’re focusing on work. But he held back. Any such comment might be resented, taken as intrusive. “Where’s Cassie?” he said.
Lucas shrugged. “Downstairs, I guess.”
He went downstairs to look for Cassie, but she wasn’t in the family room or the kitchen, none of the usual places. He called her name, but there was no answer.
Well, she has the right to snoop around my house, he thought. After she caught me going through her medicine cabinet.
But she wouldn’t do that, would she?
He passed through the kitchen to the back hallway, switched on the alabaster lamp, kept going to his study.
Unlikely she’d be in there.
The door to his study was open, as it almost always was, and the lights were on. Cassie was seated behind his desk.
His heart thumped. He walked faster, the carpet muffling his footsteps so his approach was silent. Not that he was intending to sneak up on her, though.
Several of the desk drawers were ajar, he saw.
All but the bottom one, which he kept locked. They were open just a bit, as if they’d been open and then shut hastily.
And he knew he hadn’t done it. He rarely used the desk drawers, and when he did, he was meticulous about closing them all the way, otherwise the desk looked sloppy.
She was sitting back in his black leather Symbiosis chair, writing on a yellow legal pad.
“Cassie.”
She jumped, let out a shriek. “Oh, my God! Don’t ever do that!” She put a hand across her breasts.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Oh—God. I was in my own world. No, I should apologize—I shouldn’t be in here. I guess I’m just a low-boundaries gal.”
“That’s okay,” he said, trying to sound as if he meant it.
She seemed instantly aware of the drawers that had been left slightly ajar and began pushing them all the way closed. “I was looking for a pad and a pen,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“No,” he said. “It’s fine.”
“I had this idea, and I had to write it down right away—that happens to me.”
“Idea?”
“Just—just something I want to write. Someday, if I ever get my shit together.”
“Fiction?”
“Oh, no. Nonfiction. Too much fiction in my life. I hope you don’t mind my coming over tonight. I did call, you know, but Marta said you were at work, and Lucas and I got to talking, and he said he was busting his head over some poem. Which turns out to be one of the poems I actually know something about. So I…”
“Hey,” Nick said. “You’re doing God’s work. I’m afraid my arrival broke things up.”
“He’s going to write the first few paragraphs of his poetry term paper. See where it’s heading.”
“You’re good with him,” Nick said. You’re amazing, is what he thought.
Maybe that’s all it was. She came over to help him figure out some Robert Frost poem.
“You ever teach?”
“I told you,” Cassie said. “I’ve pretty much done everything.” The pinpoint ceiling lights caught her hair, made it sparkle. She looked waiflike, still, but her skin wasn’t so transparent. She looked healthier. The dark smudges beneath her eyes were gone. “‘He thinks if he could teach him that, he’d be / Some good perhaps to some one in the world.’”
“Come again?”
Cassie shook her head. “It’s just a line from Death of the Hired Man. It’s a poem about home. About family, really.”
“And the true meaning of Christmas?”
“You Conovers,” she said. “What am I going to do with you?”
“I have a few ideas,” Nick said, attempting a leer. “God, you’re good at everything, aren’t you?”
“Coming from you? The alpha male? Jock of all trades?”
“I wish. I may be the most math-challenged CEO in the country.”
“Is there a sport you can’t do?”
He thought a moment. “Never learned to ride a horse.”
“Horseshoes?”
“That’s not a sport.”
“Archery, I bet.”
“I’m okay.”
“Shooting?”
He went dead inside. After a split second, he gave a small shake of his head, looking perplexed. For a second his eyes went out of focus.
“You know,” she said. “Target shooting, whatever it’s called. On the range.”
“Nope,” he said, hearing the studied casualness in his voice as if from a distance. He lowered himself onto a rush-seated Windsor chair that invariably threatened to leave splinters in his backside. Laura had banished his favorite old leather club chair when they moved. Frat house furniture, she called it. He rubbed his eyes, trying to conceal the flush of terror. “Sorry, I’m just wiped out. Long day.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“Not now. Sorry. I mean, thanks, but another time. I’d rather talk about anything else than work.”
“Can I make you dinner?”
“You cook?”
“No,” she admitted with a quick laugh. “You’ve had one of my three specialties. But I’m sure Marta left something for you in that haunted kitchen of yours.”
“Haunted?”
“Oh yeah. I met your contractor right when I got here, and I got the lowdown from him.”
“Like why it’s taking his guys forever to put in a kitchen counter?”
“Don’t blame them. You’re driving them crazy, is what I hear. He can’t get signoffs when they need them. Things like that.”
“Too many goddamn decisions. I don’t really have the time for it. And I don’t want to get it wrong.”
“‘Wrong’ defined as what?”
Nick was quiet for a moment. “Laura had very definite ideas of what she wanted.”
“And you want everything to be just the way she’d planned. Like it’s your memorial to her.”
“Please don’t do the shrink thing.”
“But maybe you’re afraid to finish it too, because when it’s over, something else is over too.”
“Cassie, can we change the subject?”
“So it’s like Penelope, in the Odyssey. She weaves a shroud during the day, and unravels it at night. That way it’s never finished. She staves off the suitors, and honors the departed Odysseus.”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” Nick took a deep breath.
“I think you do.”
“Except, you know, it’s reached a point where I really do want the damn thing finished already. It was her big project, and, okay, maybe as long as it was under way, it was like she was still at work. Which doesn’t make any sense, but still. Thing is, now I just want the plastic draft sheets out of here, and I want the Dumpster gone, and the trucks, and all that. I want this to be a goddamn home. Not a project. Not a thing in process. Just a place where the Conovers live.” A beat. “Whatever’s left of them.”
“I get i
t,” she said. “So why don’t you take me out to dinner somewhere?” A smile hovered around her lips. “A date.”
75
They walked through the Grand Fenwick Hotel parking lot holding hands. It was a cool, cloudless night, and the stars twinkled. Cassie stopped for a moment before they reached the porte cochere and looked up.
“You know, when I was six or seven, my best friend, Marcy Stroup, told me that every star was really the soul of someone who’d died.”
Nick grunted.
“I didn’t believe it either. Then in school we learned that each star is actually a ball of fire, and some of them probably have solar systems of their own. I remember when they taught us in school about how stars die, how in just a few thousandths of a second a star’s core would collapse and the whole star would blow up—a great supernova followed by nothingness. And I started to cry. Right there at my desk in sixth grade. Crazy, huh? That night I was talking to my daddy about it, and he said that was just the way of the universe. That people die, and stars die too—they have to, to make room for new ones.”
“Huh.”
“Daddy said if no one ever died, there’d be no room on the planet for the babies being born. He said if nothing ever came to an end, nothing could ever begin. He said it was the same way in the heavens—that sometimes a world has to come to an end so that new ones can be born.” She squeezed his hand. “Come on, I’m hungry.”
The lobby of the Grand Fenwick was carpeted in what was meant to suggest an old-fashioned English broadloom, with lots of oversized leather furniture arranged in clubby “conversation pits,” like a dozen living rooms stitched together. Velvet ropes on stanchions partitioned the restaurant from the lobby. The menu offered fifties favorites like duck à l’orange and salmon hollandaise, but mainly what it offered were steaks, for old-school types who knew the names for the different cuts: Delmonico, porterhouse, Kansas City strip. The place smelled like cigars, and not especially expensive ones; the smoke had seeped into everything like dressing on a salad.
“They have fish,” Nick said, apologetically, as they were led to a corner table.
“Now why would you say that? You think girls don’t eat red meat?”
“That’s right, I forgot—you do. So long as it isn’t actually red.”
“Exactly.”
Cassie ordered a rib steak well done, Nick a medium-rare sirloin. Both of them ordered salads.
After Nick ate his salad, he looked at Cassie. “Brainstorm. I always order a salad. But I just realized something: I don’t particularly like salad.”
“Not exactly the solution to Fermat’s last theorem,” Cassie said, “but we can work with this. You don’t like salad. Same deal as with tea.”
“Right. I drink tea. Laura would make it and I’d drink it. Same deal. I order salads. But you know, I never liked tea, and I never liked salad.”
“You just realized this.”
“Yeah. It was always true. I just wasn’t conscious of it, somehow. Like…Chinese food. I don’t really like it. I don’t hate it. I just don’t have any liking for it.”
“You’re on a roll, now. What else.”
“What else? Okay. Eggplants. Who the hell decided that eggplants were edible? Nontoxic, I get. But is everything that’s nontoxic a food? If I were some cave man, and I weren’t starving, and I bit into an eggplant, cooked or not, I wouldn’t say, wow, a new taste sensation—I’ve discovered a foodstuff. I’d say, well, this definitely won’t kill you. Don’t bother to dip your arrowhead in it. It’s like—I don’t know—maple leaves. You could probably eat them, but why would you?”
Cassie looked at him.
“You’re the one who was complaining I was a stranger to myself,” Nick said, tugging on the table linen absently.
“That wasn’t really what I meant.”
“Gotta start somewhere.”
She laughed. He felt her hand stroking his thigh under the tablecloth. Affectionately, not sexually. “Forget eggplant. Give yourself credit—you know what’s most precious to you. Not everyone does. Your kids. Your family. They’re everything to you, aren’t they?”
Nick nodded. There was a lump of sadness in his throat. “When I was playing hockey, I could convince myself that the harder I worked, the harder I trained, the harder I played, the better I’d do. It was true, or true enough. True of a lot of things. You work harder, and you do better. In hockey, they talk about playing with a lot of ‘heart’—giving it your all. Not true of family, though. Not true of being a father. The harder I try to get through to Lucas, the harder he fights me. You got through the force field. I can’t.”
“That’s because you always argue with him, Nick. You’re always trying to make a case, and he doesn’t want to hear it.”
“The way he looks at me, I think he couldn’t care less whether I lived or died.”
“That’s not what’s going on here. Has Lucas ever talked to you about Laura’s death?”
“Never. The Conover men don’t really do feelings, okay?” Nick looked around the darkened room, and was surprised to see Scott McNally being seated a few tables away. Their eyes met, and Scott waved a hand. He was with a tall, gangly man with a narrow face and a prominent chin. Nick saw Scott talking to his dinner companion hurriedly, gesturing toward him. It looked like Scott was deciding whether to do the dessert visit, or to get it over with, and had decided that it would be better to get it over with. The two men stood up and came over to Nick’s table.
“Fancy seeing you here,” Scott said, patting Nick’s shoulder. “I had no idea this was one of your hangouts.”
“It’s not,” Nick said. “Scott, I’d like you to meet my friend Cassie.”
“Pleasure to meet you, Cassie,” Scott said. “And this is Randall Enright.” He paused. “Randall’s just helping me understand some of the legal aspects of financial restructuring. Boring technical stuff. Unless you’re me, of course, in which case it’s like Conan the Barbarian with spreadsheets.”
“Nice to meet you, Randall,” said Nick.
“Pleased to meet you,” the tall man said pleasantly. His suit jacket was unbuttoned, and he put his glasses in his breast pocket before shaking hands.
“We get that contract with the Fisher Group analyzed?” Nick said.
“Not sure that’s something we want to rush into, actually,” said Scott.
“Sooner the better, I’d say.”
“Well,” said Scott, fidgeting with a lock of hair above his left ear, glancing away. “You’re the boss.”
“Enjoy Fenwick,” Cassie said to the lawyer. “When are you heading back to Chicago?”
The tall man exchanged a glance with Scott. “Not until tomorrow,” he said.
“Enjoy your dinner,” Nick said, with a hint of dismissal.
Soon, heavy white plates arrived with their steaks, each accompanied by a scoop of pureed spinach and a potato. Nick looked at Cassie. “How did you know he was heading back to Chicago?”
“The Hart Schaffner and Marx label inside his jacket. The obvious fact that he’s got to be some sort of hot-shot lawyer if he’s having a working dinner with your CFO.” She saw the question in his eyes and said, “He put his glasses away because they were reading glasses. And they hadn’t been given their menus yet. We’re definitely looking at a working dinner.”
“I see.”
“And Scott wasn’t happy about introducing him. He did it strategically, but the fact is, he chose to have dinner here for the same reason you did. Because it’s a perfectly okay place where you don’t expect to see anyone you know.”
Nick grinned, unable to deny it.
“And then there’s the ‘You’re the boss’ stuff. Resent-o-rama. A line like that always comes with an asterisk. ‘You’re the boss.’ Asterisk says, ‘For now.’”
“You’re being a little melodramatic. Don’t you think you might be over-interpreting?”
“Don’t you think you might not be seeing what’s right in front of your face?�
��
“You may have a point,” Nick admitted. He told her about Scott’s secret trip to China, the way he tried to cover it up with a lie about going to a dude ranch in Arizona.
“There you go,” she said with a shrug. “He’s fucking with you.”
“Sure seems that way.”
“But you like him, don’t you?”
“Yeah. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say, I did. He’s funny, he’s a whiz with numbers. We’re friends.”
“That’s your problem—it’s blinding you. Your alleged ‘friendship’ with Scott didn’t exactly keep him from stabbing you in the back, did it?”
“True.”
“He’s not scared of you.”
“Should he be?”
“Most definitely. Scared of you, not of what’s-his-name, the Yale guy from Boston.”
“Todd Muldaur. Todd’s really calling the shots, and Scott knows it. Truth is, I’m surprised by him. I brought him in here, I would have expected a modicum of loyalty.”
“You’re a problem for Scott. A speed bump. An impediment. He’s decided you’re part of the problem, not part of the solution. His deal is all about Scott Incorporated.”
“I’m not sure you’re right, there—there’s actually nothing greedy or materialistic about him.”
“People like Scott McNally—it’s not about making a life, or attaining a certain level of comfort. You told me he wears the same shirts he’s probably worn since he was a student, right?”
“So whatever he’s about, it’s not exactly money. I get it.”
“Wrong. You don’t get it. He’s a type. People like him don’t care about enjoying the things money can buy. They’re not into rare Bordeaux or Lamborghini muscle cars. At the same time, they’re incredibly competitive. And here’s the thing. Money is how they keep score.”
Nick thought about Michael Milken, Sam Walton, those other billionaire-next-door types. They lived in little split-level ranch houses and were completely fixated on adding to their Scrooge McDuck vaults, day after day. He remembered hearing about how Warren Buffett lived like a miser in the same little suburban house in Omaha he bought for thirty thousand bucks in 1958. He thought about Scott’s nothing-special house and how much money he had. Maybe she was right.
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