The Summer We Fell Apart Page 26

  “To what, Finn? I thought your friend’s girlfriend wanted you off his couch? It doesn’t sound like you have many options.”

  “Thanks for pointing that out to me.”

  Immediately, Kate felt bad. What was she doing? “Listen,” she said, “I need you here. Do you feel like eating? If you do, maybe we could go out and you could show me where some of these stores are—we can pick up some of the stuff you need? I know it’s not much, but you can start, maybe?”

  Finn pulled a wadded-up sheet of paper out of his pocket, smoothed it out, and held it up for Kate to read. It was the directions to the store. “I’m not hungry,” he said as he headed for the door.

  Kate turned back to the wall. Was she supposed to pick one of these before they left? She was transfixed by how many shades of yellow there were, and she began to feel an unreasonable sense of panic. “Wait,” she yelled at Finn.

  When he looked at her, she pointed to the wall of chips. “What do I do?”

  Finn sighed, clearly impatient. “Those are the yellows with the blue undertones—they are going to be cooler.” He looked at her to see if she was getting it, before he said, “And those are the yellows with a red undertone. Those are warmer.”

  “How do you know all this? I mean, the warm and cold stuff. Is that how you knew what to say about Shelley’s husband’s paintings?”

  “I had a girlfriend once who was into modern art.”

  “Really?” Kate had no clue who that girl might have been and she didn’t ask. When they were in high school, there had always been girls, although as far as she knew, they never lasted very long and Finn could have cared less about their interests.

  The set of Finn’s lips told Kate he wasn’t about to elaborate. He pointed at the wall again. “Pick a color, let’s go.”

  “Wait,” she called again. “Am I ready for this?”

  In response, Finn rolled his eyes.

  Kate turned to the wall again and chose the palest yellow on the warm side. It reminded her of the scooped-out flesh of a lemon rind. It seemed the safest choice but one, she saw when she handed Finn the chip, that her brother definitely wouldn’t have made.

  eight

  DREAMS WE MISS WHILE WE’RE SLEEPING

  By Thanksgiving, Finn had been working on the little house for a month and their father had been dead for just over a year, something that neither Kate nor Finn ever mentioned. The rotted wood had been replaced, the skylight and windows cleaned, the walls painted a pale gold (Kate’s third choice), and the floors buffed. The stainless steel refrigerator and microwave had been delivered the day before, just as Finn completed the installation of the new porcelain sink and maple countertops.

  The little house was as finished as Kate wanted it to be—good enough for her to leave the hotel and start living in it. Finn and Kate were going to be sharing the space for a while longer—at least until a bed and bath could be made livable in the other house; that meant they would need furniture. She had been planning on taking the long weekend to do the shopping and so she was surprised when she returned home on Wednesday evening to find Shelley’s truck in the driveway, the flatbed filled to capacity with furniture that looked very much like the mismatched hand-me-down crap they’d grown up with as children.

  Finn and Shelley were setting up a round maple table and chairs when Kate walked into the house. They were so involved in setting the hideously ugly furniture just so that they didn’t see Kate standing in the doorway until she said, “What is that?”

  Finn looked up, surprised. “Shelley and I went to a yard sale.”

  Kate was speechless. She had opened accounts for Finn at several of the home improvement stores as well as the lumberyard and the tile guy. She’d also given him a cell phone and was surprised the few times she had heard the phone ring, realizing that he must have someone he had wanted to give his number to, but she respected his privacy and never asked. Along with the cell phone, she had given him a weekly wage that he had tried to argue against. She reasoned he couldn’t go around without money, and besides, he earned every penny as laborer and contractor. Purchases for the house were what she intended him to use the accounts for, the cash was his to do with as he wished. Certainly they had never talked about buying stuff like this, but Finn was clearly pleased with himself.

  “A yard sale?” Kate echoed as she took in the colonial-stylized turnings of the chair. The set looked like Sears catalog circa 1977. She thought about the furniture from her apartment in D.C., still in storage until the main house was ready. How long it had taken her to find each and every piece. How careful she had been before she made a purchase. She would rather have gone without than settle for something less than what she wanted. “But why?”

  Shelley stepped between Kate and Finn. Today she had on a deep purple caftan over jeans. Since Kate was able to get her stepson to drop his lawsuit based upon the findings in his father’s diary, and appease the MOMA board of directors with a projected timetable for the arrival of the artist’s endowment, Shelley was around even more. The only piece Kate had left to negotiate were the details of the retrospective along with the few paintings Shelley and her stepson had agreed to sell for profit. Ben had been so pleased that Kate was taking such a protective interest in Shelley that he practically called her partner outright. Still, there had yet to be anything official.

  Although the added burden of Shelley made Kate almost wish that the diary had yielded no usable information. She wondered why Shelley’s son, Ben’s friend, couldn’t hightail his ass here to spend some time with his mother so that Shelley would have other things besides Finn and Kate on her mind. But it seemed that apart from her weekly yoga classes and her volunteer activities at the food co-op, Shelley had nothing to do. Right now, Kate was kicking herself for not insisting that the museum hire Shelley to assist in cataloging the contents of her husband’s studio.

  “Don’t worry, Kate,” Shelley said, wrinkling her nose like she smelled something bad. “I can tell what you’re thinking by the look on your face; we didn’t buy anything upholstered.”

  “Yeah,” Finn said as he stepped around Kate. “We got this.” He pointed to the table. “A couple of twin bed frames that Shelley said you can turn into couches during the day, some end tables, a coffee table…I know you want to save money in here, and they sold me the lot of stuff for a hundred bucks, so I figured, why not?” He stopped, shrugged, and reached around back to scratch his shoulder blade while he thought. “Oh and I got you a desk.”

  There was something so earnest in the way that Finn announced he got Kate a desk that she could almost forgive him for the truckload of dreadful furniture. And he was right about the money. Kate was adamant that the main house was where the most dollars should be spent. So what did it matter about the furniture, she supposed, as long as it was functional? Still it was horribly ugly and used. She shot Finn a weak smile and retreated to the kitchen for a glass of water. As Finn had predicted, the lemon tree outside the window was definitely ailing. What fruit Kate hadn’t picked and used was covered with huge black spots, like bruises only fuzzy, that crept from the trunk of the tree to the branches, leaves, and now the fruit. While she and Finn had worked together outside attacking the eucalyptus and the ferns, pruning branches, mulching bushes, and bagging debris, he asked her repeatedly to let him hack it down. But she couldn’t do it. Not yet. She allowed herself to indulge in the fantasy that Eli would get to see it one day.

  “Hey, do you want to tell me where you want some of this so I don’t break my back?” Finn called to Kate.

  She broke away from the lemon tree and followed him outside to Shelley’s truck. Once they had everything in the house—the twin bed frames at right angles to each other, an end table at either end, the coffee table in the middle, and the little maple student desk for Kate in the corner near the bookshelves—Finn and Shelley left to purchase mattresses for the new beds/couches but not before Shelley made them promise they would come to her house for Thanksgiving din
ner the next day. Kate had been planning on staying in and doing work, clearing out some miscellaneous files now that the house had wireless. But Finn had accepted eagerly and so she reluctantly agreed to go along.

  Alone in the house, Kate took a long, hot shower, changed into sweats and a T-shirt, piled her wet hair on top of her head, and covered it turban-style with a towel. She walked around, turning on lights against the dusk; everything was still so new and it was hard to believe that Finn had actually made this little house into something livable.

  Kate set her laptop on top of the desk, along with a stack of files and a handful of pens. The pens kept rolling, so she got a mug from the kitchen to contain them. She took the lamp she bought that first night and plugged it into the outlet next to the desk so that she had a functional workspace. When Finn and Shelley returned, she was so immersed in her reading that she didn’t even hear them until they were halfway in the door with a plastic-covered mattress.

  It occurred to Kate that she shouldn’t allow Shelley to carry the mattress and she protested and started to get up, but Shelley, without even a labored breath or red face from effort, told her to sit back down amid claims that yoga had made her strong beyond her years. And, shamefully, Kate complied.

  They set up the mattresses on the old frames and Shelley left and finally Finn and Kate were alone. He ripped the plastic off a mattress and then threw himself upon it, bouncing up and down. “Hey, this is nice.”

  Kate smiled. “No more running out of air.”

  Finn rolled back and forth. “I forgot sheets.”

  “You can just tuck in the other ones,” Kate said as she finished reviewing a document before she hit SEND.

  “Oh,” Finn said as he sat up. “I didn’t think about that. Okay.”

  She could tell Finn was watching her and so she finally looked up. “What?” she asked.

  He nodded toward the computer. “Why do you like it so much?”

  “What?”

  “That—your work.”

  Kate took a deep breath. How would she put into words the beauty of law? Finally, she shrugged and said, “At its best, the order of law eliminates chaos.”

  Finn stared at her a moment. He appeared to be digesting her comment. She imagined the concept might be difficult for someone who had never followed the rules his entire life.

  So she was surprised when he said, “Would you mind if I took the car? Went out for a while?” Finn was casual but wide-eyed and twitchy all over when he asked, as if he expected her to say no.

  Kate felt a twinge, a funny, hollowed-out feeling in her stomach that her brother was asking her for permission to go out. Or, if not exactly permission, he was asking for her car. Should she? Finn seemed to be exiled since he got here. And he never went anywhere without Shelley or Kate accompanying him. Was that part of their unspoken arrangement?

  She tossed him the keys in what she hoped would appear to be a light response. She wanted to be careful not to make too much of it. He took a shower and pulled on a pair of old jeans and a dark sweater with a hole in the right elbow. She was surprised that his hair had grown so much in the time he was here that it looked like the softer end of a thick-bristled brush and actually reached the top of his ears. He still wasn’t eating that much and had been sick two more times while refusing to see a doctor; but he looked better than he did the day Kate picked him up at the airport.

  After Finn left, Kate worked bent over her little desk until midnight. When her eyes blurred and she felt the stirrings of a migraine at the base of her skull, she turned off the computer and went to find sheets to make up the bed. She made Finn’s bed as well, even turned down the blanket for him before she finally crawled into her bed beneath the thick duvet. She closed her eyes, expecting sleep to be imminent, but it wasn’t. Instead, she lay in the dark, staring at the unfamiliar shadows cast by the new furniture. Finally, she stretched out on her back and tried to isolate and relax each part of her body from the tips of her toes to the top of her head. But the concept eluded her because Kate simply could not turn off her brain.

  She reached for her cell phone on the coffee table and hit Eli’s number. Of course it went to voicemail and she hung up. To torture herself, she called three more times just to hear his voice requesting her to leave a message, which she couldn’t, no matter how badly she wanted it, bring herself to do.

  When Finn came in, she was drowsy, having dozed on and off for the last hour. She didn’t open her eyes, but she heard him drop his jeans and get into his bed with a grunt followed by a long sigh. When she whispered his name into her pillow, she was surprised that he answered.

  “Kate?” Finn’s voice sounded thick and unfamiliar when he said her name.

  “Hey,” Kate said softly.

  Kate waited but Finn didn’t respond, so she said, “I was dreaming. I saw Dad. I tried to talk to him, but I don’t think I ever got the words out.” She rubbed her eyes. “Now I can’t remember.”

  There was still no response from Finn.

  “Maybe it’s because of this furniture.” She paused. “Remember when you said this place reminded you of when Dad moved into the barn?”

  Finn snorted.

  “Did you ever get inside there, Finn? I mean, when he was still living in there. Did he ever ask you in?”

  “All the time,” Finn mumbled.

  Kate felt the tears at the corners of her eye. She had waited all that fall and into the spring, but she had never received an invitation from him, never seen what he was working on, even though he had promised more than once. By her high school graduation, he had moved back into the house, but the furniture he had taken, the couch and the tables and the lamp, remained in the barn. A part of her hoped it was still there when the new people bought the house and tore everything down. There was immense satisfaction in believing that every single thing from her past had been obliterated.

  For the first time in a long time, Kate woke the next morning without benefit of an alarm. Instead, she heard Finn on the phone repeatedly asking someone why. His voice carried a plaintive tone, tired and ragged. When she woke again a little before noon, Finn was huddled under the blankets, an immovable lump even when she called his name, and so Kate imagined that Finn on the phone must have been another dream.

  Her head felt heavy, dreams and reality tangled. She hated that she slept so late, that they were expected at Shelley’s for dinner. She made a pot of coffee and carried her mug outside. She walked around the circumference of the old pool, mug in hand, the moist earth beneath her feet, marveling that it was late November and things were still green and she was wearing only a sweatshirt and shorts.

  Her thoughts ran to Eli. She imagined him and his wife, the chef, having gotten up early to make the stuffing and prepare the bird for the oven. Their kitchen probably smelled like onions and butter and sage, their son and daughter chattering in the background. Would there be music? Would it be snowing? Would he kiss the sheen of butter off her chin, left over from when she tasted the stuffing?

  “Kate!”

  Kate looked up. Finn called to her from the doorway of the house, wrapped in his blanket. He was holding her cell phone out to her and he looked pissed. “Kate!” he called again, the hand holding the phone shaking with agitation.

  She took the phone from him with trepidation. Eli? “Hello?”

  It was Ben. It was business. In spite of Ben’s wife and children and most likely a huge Thanksgiving dinner about to be consumed, he had received the files Kate sent him the night before and he just wanted to confirm a few things.

  Kate moved back inside and sat at her desk, which looked even uglier in the daylight. She flipped open the lid of her computer and sighed, grateful for something to do other than her current hobby of self-flagellation.

  Finn was churlish all the way to Shelley’s and his mood improved only slightly once they got there, but Shelley didn’t seem to notice. On the way over, Kate asked repeatedly what was bothering him until he told her to shut the f
uck up. She complied because she was tired of hearing her own voice—although she was sure Finn thought the victory was his—but not before she reminded him that going to Shelley’s had been his idea and that he’d better not screw things up because Shelley was still a client and it certainly had not been her need to encourage this peculiar little threesome.

  At her use of the word threesome, Finn had raised an eyebrow but didn’t reply.

  Shelley had decorated the top of the white piano with paper turkeys and carnations; a stark contrast to her husband’s paintings that were soon to depart to MOMA. Shelley’s taste made Kate wonder if the paintings would be replaced by those black-velvet paintings she had seen for sale at the abandoned gas station right before the freeway entrance. Black velvet, Kate had noticed on more than one occasion as she sat in traffic to get on the ramp, seemed to be suited to the mythical creatures of unicorn and dragon as well as Elvis. What would Shelley choose?

  They had drinks before dinner, as well as wine with the turkey. Finn accepted it all greedily, but no more so than Kate, who was definitely looking for liquid pain meds as well. There was a moment when Finn locked eyes with Kate, a bottle poised over Shelley’s glass that had been raised for a refill. She thought she should say something then; as a matter of fact, he appeared to be challenging her to do just that. But she didn’t. She hadn’t seen him drink since he’d been here. Would one day make a difference? Besides, he hardly seemed affected at all, while Kate’s limbs felt all warm and wobbly.

  After dinner, Shelley took them into the studio. If she noticed the tension between Finn and Kate, she didn’t show it. Perhaps the presence of so much alcohol made it tolerable. But it was only in the studio that Finn’s mood lifted a little. He sat at the long worktable that dissected the room and looked through the sketchbooks, making intelligent enough comments that led Kate to believe his knowledge of modern art was more than the osmosis he implied from time spent with an old girlfriend who was into art.