Jackpot Summer, page 26
“I took a stroll next door yesterday,” Leo said, choosing not to elaborate on the kitchen upgrade. “The new owner was meeting with the pool company. Dick really is a nice fellow.”
“The new owner’s name is Dick? You’ve got to be kidding me. And they’re putting in a pool?” Noah gestured toward the ocean.
“Yes. And his wife, Sheila, is pregnant. I think you’ll be happy having them as neighbors. They really love the property.”
“Not enough to keep the house,” Noah said.
“Well, the house wasn’t going to last forever without a major renovation. If it wasn’t going to be a new owner doing the place in, it would have been a termite infestation. Right?”
The apple slipped from Noah’s sweaty palm.
“Noah, I know what you did. Your exterminator friend isn’t exactly discreet. After you won the lottery, he started blabbing that story all over town.”
“Dad, I’m sorry, I don’t know why I—”
Leo put out his hand to stop Noah from blathering.
“Noah, I have something to tell you as well. Something even bigger.”
“Yes?”
“We didn’t have to sell the house. You know your mother and I lived very modestly. Even with four kids, we managed to carve out a decent-size nest egg for ourselves.”
Heat was climbing up the back of Noah’s neck. If his father could have maintained the house, then why was he living in Stanley Archer’s hideous place watching his family home get demolished? “So, why the—”
“Your mother insisted we sell. She thought it was important for all of us that we not live in the past and—” Leo hesitated and looked at his mug. “She thought the house had become something of a crutch for you.”
A crutch. He thought of finding Matthew’s old crutch in the attic. Noah had used it for a few days after his bike accident, barely hobbling around since it was meant for a shorter person. To think the house was a larger, metaphorical crutch didn’t seem that outlandish.
“Your mother had all sorts of ideas of how things should go after she went. She said I should refuse to let you kids hire movers. She wanted you to have the experience of packing up together.”
Noah guffawed. “We assumed that was because you were cheap.”
“Well, that too.” Leo’s face softened. He reached a hand across the kitchen table and rested it on Noah’s. “Son, I’m going back to Florida at the end of the week.”
He had known this moment was coming. The temperature had dropped to below ten degrees and Leo had taken a nasty spill on the icy front steps. There was an upcoming pickleball tournament and Leo was captaining the Boca Breezes team when they faced off against Turnberry Terraces.
“I appreciate you coming, Dad,” Noah said. “Maybe I should go with you? Move to Boca Breezes. Whaddya think?”
“I think,” Leo said, “that we both need to move on to the next phase of our lives. Why don’t you show me your bank statement?” Leo tapped his head. “I still have my marbles, so take advantage while you can.”
Noah groaned, realizing it was time to face reality. He might as well do it with his accountant father at his side. After retrieving his laptop, he logged into his account and turned the screen toward Leo.
“Well, it’s not all gone,” Leo said. “I was imagining worse. Get me a pen and paper. We’re going to make you an old-fashioned budget, invest what’s left, and get you back on track.”
For the next two hours, Leo and Noah sat together, creating a financial plan that would ensure a comfortable lifestyle for Noah so long as he didn’t keep giving away his money to every Tom, Dick and Harry who asked. “And for God’s sake, make sure you deduct your charitable donations or you’re going to give me a heart attack.”
“I will, I promise,” Noah said.
“Now that we’ve tackled the worst of it, have you given any thought to what you want to do next? It’s fine to coast for a while, but no one can sit alone in a beach house forever.”
Some of the weight Noah had felt lifted from his shoulders returned.
“What do you like to do? Why don’t we start there?” Leo asked.
Noah thought for a moment. “I like what I used to do. The tech repair. Seriously, you recover someone’s iPhone photos, you might as well have performed an organ transplant. You can’t imagine the gratitude.”
“It’s nice to feel needed,” Leo said. “Your mother fed off that. I did too, when it came to work. I understand the tax code, which looks like gibberish to most people. Tax season may have crushed my schedule, but it sure was nice to hear all those thank-yous.”
“I get that. I really want to hear ‘thank you’ again,” Noah said. “Speaking of, thanks for coming, Pops.”
Leo leaned back and folded his arms across his chest. “To be honest, I should have been here sooner. I should have put off the Florida move the minute you kids won the lotto. Parenting isn’t over when your kids turn eighteen, or twenty-one, or get a job, or get married or have a child of their own. Your mother knew that. She was parent enough for both of us and I happily slid into the background. But it’s my turn to step up.”
“To be fair, Mom took up a lot of space. It was hard to get a word in sometimes.”
“Loudest librarian on the East Coast. And she coddled you too much and then wondered why you weren’t acting more like an adult,” Leo said.
“She told Sophie that if she wasn’t married by thirty-five, nobody would want her,” Noah added.
“And, yet. Sophie listened. She’s making it just in time,” Leo said. “That’s your mother’s hand at work, I’m telling you. She was a force.”
“Of nature,” Noah said. “Even if she hated bugs and dirt.”
“A force to be reckoned with,” Leo suggested.
“A tour de force,” Noah said.
“A force feeder,” Leo added.
“Speaking of, I’m hungry,” Noah said. “Let’s eat some of this incredible food that mysteriously appeared at my house. I still want an explanation, Dad.”
“And I want my knees not to wobble and my back not to ache after pickleball, but we can’t always get what we want.”
FANTASTIC FOURSOME
LAURA
Do you like this dress for me?
SOPHIE
Meh. U look better in bright colors.
LAURA
This one?
SOPHIE
I’d prefer if you didn’t also wear white to my wedding
LAURA
Oops. Sent wrong version. It comes in pink
SOPHIE
K, send that one
NOAH
Unsubscribe
MATTHEW
Can you guys include Beth in the shopping stuff? She would like that
SOPHIE
Definitely
LAURA
I have a call with her about Austin’s BM later
NOAH
His sh*t?
LAURA
BM = bar mitzvah
NOAH
Oh. I met the neighbors
MATTHEW
And?
NOAH
We r better looking
SOPHIE
Ha! Maybe u r
NOAH
They r nice—as is their decorator…
LAURA
ooooh…deets pls
NOAH
Patience
12
Matthew
Beth leaned across the table so dramatically it was as though she was contouring her body into a tablecloth. One more inch and she’d become the dinner napkin on Arnold Peterson’s lap.
“So you were saying, Arnold, that you got on a plane to the CDC headquarters on March tenth and didn’t return to New York for a year? That is just wild,” Beth said, turning to Celine, Arnold’s wife. “And you held down the fort at home while having your entire caseload moved online. Extraordinary.”
Celine Watson, a federal judge of some renown, smiled politely. She had a regal bearing and ramrod posture. “There really was no choice,” she said. “The real hero is Arnold, of course. I don’t think my husband slept more than two hours a night until the vaccine was ready.”
Dr. Peterson nodded. “That part is true. But a lot of credit goes to my team. It was a group effort.”
“Modest too!” Beth exclaimed.
Good grief. Did his wife think she was at risk of drowning? Why else was she clinging to every word that Arnold Peterson and Celine Watson said like a life preserver? If Dr. Peterson wasn’t pushing seventy and a good five inches shorter than Beth—a differential obvious even when they were seated—Matthew would think his wife was flirting.
“Boy, was my arm sore after getting the vax,” Matthew said. “Not that I minded. Gave me an excuse to skip my workout.”
“Matthew! That sounds awfully ungrateful,” Beth said. The point of her stiletto jammed into his calf. He remembered her warning to be on his best behavior with these two.
“These two” were the power couple Beth had set her sights on from the moment Austin stepped into his kindergarten classroom at Dalton and was put at the triangle table with their son Theo. When Arnold was tapped to head the COVID vaccine effort, Beth proclaimed, “I told you they were winners.”
“Of course I’m grateful. Watching Austin go to school online broke my heart. The kids need socialization, even more than we adults do. How did Theo handle lockdown?” Matthew looked from Celine to Arnold. He could feel Beth relaxing as he redeemed himself.
“Oh, it was rough. For all three of our children, actually. Theo probably handled it the best. Betsy had to evacuate her Harvard dorm during her freshman year and Sally was at that terrible preteen age where any setback is monumental,” Celine said. “How about Austin? I know he and Theo were on FaceTime every day.”
The boys were such close friends that Matthew had asked Beth if they should tell Theo’s parents about the marijuana gummies. If Austin was mixed up in something, there was a good chance Theo was too. Beth immediately shot him down, looking at Matthew as though he were a two-headed monster. “We are not advertising Austin’s mistakes,” she’d hissed. “Besides, we have that under control.”
Matthew hoped she was right. They had spent the rest of Thanksgiving weekend drilling Austin. He swore up and down that he’d only just started making the gummies. He wouldn’t give up any of his friends who were involved. Matthew respected his son wasn’t a narc, Beth less so. They searched his room, his backpack and his pockets for a month. He seemed so shaken up and embarrassed by the episode at the Thanksgiving table that they believed he would stay away from pot, at least for a while. The statistics about marijuana’s effects on brain cells that Beth culled from the Internet scared the living daylights out of him. With a quivering lip, he’d asked how many cells they thought he’d lost from the six gummies he’d consumed in his lifetime.
“FaceTiming with Theo definitely saved Austin during lockdown,” Beth said. “I always forget you have three children. You two make it seem so effortless.”
Matthew suppressed a guffaw. Beth didn’t forget anything about the Petersons.
Arnold waved off the compliment. “So Austin told Theo that you’re no longer at the law firm, Matthew. How’s that been?”
It had been two months since Matthew surrendered his ID badge, and the adjustment had been more or less a smooth one, for him at least. Matthew took Austin to school in the mornings and was home when he returned in the afternoons. They still had their au pair, but her contract was up in just two months. While Austin did homework at the kitchen table, Matthew peppered him with questions about his day, experimenting with different approaches to elicit the most detailed answer. The boy seemed to open up most when Matthew wasn’t looking directly at him, so he busied himself rinsing fruit at the sink or flipping through the mail while he mined information. He also learned that nothing valuable could be gleaned from Austin until he’d had a large snack. As for the hours while Austin was at school, Matthew kept busy attending to projects that he never had time for before. Organizing the family photos into folders on his Mac. Filling bags of clothing for Goodwill. He had a pile of nearly identical navy suits, starched white dress shirts and patterned ties that he would have enjoyed incinerating, but knew they ought to be put to better use. He fixed the printer in the family room (with Noah’s help on FaceTime) and collected all the unread New Yorkers around the apartment and dumped them into recycling. There was still the occasional call or email from a colleague asking for help deciphering his notes. He knew the tasks around the house and the work calls would eventually dry up, but for now he was sufficiently occupied.
For Beth, the change was another story. Moments after she returned from work, before she even set down her bag, she would ask him what he’d done during the day. “Done” really meant “accomplished.” After every item he listed, she would respond, “And then what?”
“Yes, tell us how stay-at-home-dad life is treating you?” Celine asked, but looked at both Matthew and Beth to indicate she meant “you” plural.
Matthew put down the forkful of fish that was en route to his mouth. He wasn’t enjoying the sole meunière (seventy-six dollars!) all that much anyway. Based on how much Beth was oohing and ahhing over the food and ambience, he suspected Celine had chosen the restaurant. “It’s been wonderful to have more time with Austin. There were days when I was at work before he woke up and home after he was asleep. The biggest adjustment so far has been trying to stop myself from chunking my time into six-minute increments and reporting it on a timesheet.”
Arnold chortled. “Boy, if we got paid by the hour for creating the vaccine, I’d be a very rich man. Like you folks. Austin told Theo you were cut in on the lottery winnings. Must be nice to relax.”
Matthew filed talking to Austin about not repeating everything he heard at home to the list of father-son conversations that had to take place.
“It’s been—” Matthew started to say, but Beth cut him off.
“Matthew’s not a stay-at-home dad. He’s just taking some time to plot his next steps. He has many interesting opportunities and it’s important he explores them all before he commits to anything,” she said.
“Ahh, well then you’ll need to soak up all that time with Austin now before you get back to the grind,” Celine said.
“I don’t—” Matthew tried again foolishly.
“He will, of course. We both spend plenty of time with Austin,” Beth said. “That child is probably sick of us,” she added with a laugh Matthew detected as nervous but that probably sounded genuine to those who didn’t know her like he did.
Somehow, Matthew managed to get through the main course by feigning interest in his companions’ “grueling” apartment renovation and their charity boards.
“Can I interest you in dessert?” Their waiter reappeared holding four small, leather-bound menus. “We have an excellent souffle but it takes twenty minutes to prepare.”
“Celine? Arnold?” Beth said at the same time Matthew said, “I think we’ll just take the check.”
“That was very rude,” Beth snapped after they had air-kissed the Watson-Petersons goodbye outside the restaurant. “You can’t decide unilaterally for the table whether we’re getting dessert.”
Matthew stopped walking even as the harsh February wind whipped his face. “And you can’t decide unilaterally for me how I’m going to live my life.”
Beth’s face paled in the moonlight. He had struck the blow he set out to, but when it landed, Matthew didn’t feel satisfaction. Being honest and converting his thoughts into words wasn’t cathartic. The only difference was that now two people knew instead of just one.
“Is that what you think?” Beth said. A look of disgust slowly moved across her face, shifting her expression like a developing Polaroid. “Do I need to remind you that you were a straight B student when we met with zero plans for the future? You grew up so coddled, so entitled, with your nice house in East Brunswick and your beach house at the shore. The irony of this whole lottery thing is the talk of your siblings becoming rich—you were already rich! All of you. You went to summer camp and had new clothes every year and fresh backpacks and tennis lessons and SAT tutors. So your sister needed to work a day job to pay her rent? Laura and Doug’s house needed a new roof. Noah, who worked maybe an hour a day, still had a place to crash rent-free every night on the ocean. I helped you reach your potential. To make something of yourself. Because guess what? It feels good to be rewarded for hard work. Are any of your siblings happy? They had comfortable lives before the lottery. Now things are even cushier, but are they happier?”
Beth let the question dangle for a beat before continuing. “I want our son to have direction in his life. Structure helps—just look at Noah to see what happens without it. I really hope you don’t plan on loosening up his extracurriculars just because you’re home more. Listen, I’ve said my piece. It’s late and I—”
Matthew’s eyes watered, and not from the cold. “I’m sorry, let’s go home. It’s freezing.” He pulled off his wool scarf and handed it to Beth, who had left the house with only a thin, silk one draped over her coat. She wrapped it around her delicate neck. He deemed the scarf an olive branch and her wearing it as acceptance. But then she turned in the opposite direction, calling over her shoulder, “I’m going out. And I forgot to mention this earlier but Polly got out of her cage and shed all over the rug. You need to clean it up.”
Matthew watched his wife’s retreating figure, her small waist cinched by the belt of her coat, her gait even sexier in high heels, one end of his scarf flapping in the wind.
