When I looked at the signature, I knew it was what I had been looking for. It read, in a surprisingly mature slanted script, “Kenny Dorn, age 15.”
Neither Pierce nor I was in any mood for wrestling our father's Caddy to Trenton for the reading of the will, so I called Bobby for a ride. Samantha answered and said he and Nancy had already gone, leaving her behind with a neighbor. “I wanted to
go,”
she complained. “Uncle Pierce said I could sit with him.” Next I tried Bitty at her place in Frenchtown. I got Mike Maas.
“Hi,” I said. “Mike. This is Bitty's brother Tim.”
Mike Maas cleared his throat. “Yeah, hey.”
“Listen, is she around?”
“She's in the bathroom,” he said. He had a phlegmy voice that sounded much older than it was. For a moment I entertained the notion that I had dialed the wrong number, and the middle-aged stranger on the other end was playing along, deadpan.
“Well, I don't really need to talk to her. I'm just wondering if you guys could swing by for Pierce and me on your way to the reading. Of the will.”
“It's not exactly on the way,” said Mike Maas.
I said nothing. This was something Amanda had taught me. When you asked somebody for a favor, and that person said something that strongly resembled no but was not quite no, you just waited silently until that person broke down and said yes.
“But, you know,” he said, “no problem.”
“Oh, great. See you around eight-thirty, then.” I hung up. Already I didn't like Mike Maas very much. I wondered briefly why my sister had married him, then decided that I didn't know my sister well enough to reckon such a thing. This realization saddened me and I thought that maybe it could somehow be set right, somehow we could get to be friends. With a heavy heart I went down the hall to find Pierce.
The previous night, I had turned in as soon as I returned from the studio. I remembered tiptoeing through the house, so as not to wake the many guests I assumed were staying there too. But it had become clear, in the groggy minutes after my travel alarm went off in the morning, that there was nobody around but Pierce and me. Rose and Andrew must have gone back to New York, and dropped my mother off at the home; no cousins or uncles or aunts appeared to have come at all. The house felt weirdly desolate, and in my childhood bed, cluttered with the ghosts of every nightmare I'd ever had, I did too.
It was ten after eight. I knocked on Pierce's door. I could hear him in there, breathing, and decided to just go in.
“Howdy,” he said with factitious cheer.
“Bitty and Maas are picking us up in twenty minutes,” I said. “Are you getting dressed?”
He was wearing a pair of white boxer shorts, smoking a cigarette and running his hand over his chest. “My skin feels fake. Everything feels fake,” he said. He looked up at me with real despair. “I can't go. I feel like a fraud.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette of my own. Amanda didn't smoke, so I didn't either, usually, but here it felt right. With Pierce, trust was a precarious thing. “How's it been lately?”
He shrugged. “Not so bad. I'm on these pills.” He gestured in an indefinite direction, away, with his hand. “They get rid of the extra people, but I never feel like myself anymore. My skin is like, numb.”
Pierce did not hear voices, per se, as many people with his illness apparently do, but he had always talked about getting out of the crowd or getting away from all the hubbub when there was almost nobody around. Once, I took the subway back from the Italian Market just as a Phillies game was letting out, and the crowd in my car was enormous and loud, and I immediately thought of Pierce. I figured that feeling was what he was talking about.
“We really have to get moving,” I told him.
He shook his head. “He isn't going to leave me anything,” he said. “He's going to yank it all out from under me, I can just feel it. The house is going to get sold and I'm going to be on the street.” He sucked on his cigarette with eerie calm, and the smoke seemed to invigorate him. “I'm not going to fucking Trenton for that.”
“Why would he do that?”
“He ignores me, man. We haven't spoken in something like a year. I don't even exist.”
I took a moment to digest this. “You've been living together all this time, and you haven't talked to him? In a year?”
“Nope. Isn't that nuts?”
I agreed that it was very strange. Pierce said, “Oh, Jesus, this is just worthless. I don't know why we're even talking. You should get out of here, really. I don't know what I'm going to do.”
After a minute, I took the cigarette out of his mouth and stubbed it in the ashtray. Then I did the same with mine. I went to his closet and pulled out the cleanest jeans and T-shirt I could find. I tossed the shirt onto his chest. He just let it lie there. I bent over his feet and started pulling the jeans onto him. Finally, he said, “Oh, fer Chrissake,” swung his legs off the bed like they were a couple of prosthetics, and pulled the jeans on himself. When it looked like he'd gotten things more or less under way, I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth. The mirror was so thickly stratified with dust that I could barely see myself. I cleared a hole in the grime, the way I would in a clean mirror steamed, and my hand came away greasy and gray.
Pierce walked in yawning while I was washing my hands. He shut his mouth fast when he noticed the hole. He leaned forward until his nose was nearly touching the mirror, and stared at himself for a full minute. Then, having done nothing else, he turned and left the bathroom.
* * *
“You're wearing that?” Bitty said from the passenger seat, apparently to both of us. I noticed that the clothes I had picked out for Pierce were almost identical to the ones I had earlier pulled from my own bag.
“I wish people would stop asking me that,” I said, too quickly. Bitty was wearing a businesslike dress in sort of an unbleached flour color, and pearls. Mike Maas had a suit on, but no tie. He was about two inches shorter than Bitty.
“Okay, whatever,” she said.
Mike was the kind of bad driver who believes with all his heart that he is the only good driver on the road. This particular type of driver drives fast because he thinks he can do so safely, and does not use turn signals because they are irrelevant and inefficient. Those driving slowly are doing so because they don't trust their own abilities, which are scant. I'd once had a roommate who explained all this to me. He too was this kind of driver.
A gravel truck was traveling the speed limit in front of Mike and Bitty's Toyota 4-Runner. Every couple of minutes a piece of gravel clicked off the windshield. After a while Mike had had enough. “This is bullshit,” he said, and moved to pass, accelerating violently, keeping his eyes focused straight ahead. Bitty glanced out the passenger window, presumably for a look at the man who had caused the delay. The man wasn't looking back. Mike jerked the car over to the right lane, then leaned heavily into his seat like a monarch who has just ordered somebody beheaded.
Trenton hummed dully beneath a hazy hot sun and some half-assed thunderheads that looked like invading UFOs from a cheap sci-fi movie. Mike seemed to know where the parking spaces were; he careened down a maze of one-way streets to a parking meter that might as well have had his name printed on it.
“Got quarters?” he said to Bitty, and she dug into her purse. To my surprise, Pierce produced several quarters from his pocket and passed them to Mike, who stared at them briefly before lunging from the car and plugging them into the meter.
We walked. “You know where we're going?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Mike Maas. “It's near my building.”
“So you work in Trenton.”
“Uh huh.”
We walked several blocks in the heat. Pierce didn't seem bothered by it; he was the only one of us whose forehead wasn't brilliant with sweat. At an Art Deco building that looked uncannily like an enormous jukebox, Mike pulled open a heavy glass door and plunged inside. Bitty jumped forward and caught the door as it closed behind him, and she held it open for me and Pierce. I thanked her and she raised her eyebrows.
We took an elevator to the sixth floor. The doors opened into a wide carpeted hallway. Before us was an empty reception desk and a padded bench, each covered in the same carpet that was on the floor, a dusty sort of gray. I imagined that it hid dirt nicely. My mother was sitting alone on the bench.
“Mommy!” said Bitty. She sprung from the elevator toward her and planted a noisy kiss on her cheek. My mother's eyes flapped open and she shied away from Bitty, startled.
“For the love of Christ!” she said.
“Mommy, it's me, Bitty.”
Mother squinted. “Ah, Bitty,” she said, though it wasn't clear if this was, finally, recognition, or simply a conversational habit she had adopted to avoid embarrassment.
I went to her while Pierce and Mike loitered before us, their hands in their pockets. “Hey, Mom,” I said. “It's Tim. Do you remember me?”
“Yep,” she said.
“Okay. Are you doing all right?” I sat down on the bench opposite Bitty, who clutched Mother's right hand as if it were a baby sparrow.
“They came and got me out of bed,” she said.
“Are you tired?”
“I was, but now I'm pretty much awake.”
“That's good.”
“So what brings you here?” Her voice was bright, the way it might be for a pleasant but unexpected guest.
“I'm here to hear Dad's will.”
She frowned. “He was going to leave me that old breakfront. But you know he never did? That really burns me, even to this day. Julia got it, the little hussy.”
Bitty leaned over her and gave me a look. “Why don't we go in, Mommy?”
“Well, all right,” she said, dragging herself to her feet. She shook us both off. “I'm not infirm, you know.”
But of course she was. She teetered for a moment, like Wile E. Coyote suspended, by the power of his own ignorance, above a yawning chasm, then buckled. Bitty and I caught her by the arms. Her bones pulled against my fingers through her thin skin, and she said, “Ouch.”
We pulled her gently up. “You're okay?”
“Had a little spell there,” she said. This is what she used to say when she got drunk and fell down from that. She was lighter now, it seemed by half. I looked up at Pierce, who was staring at her like she had just been dropped into the law office hallway from outer space. Mike Maas kept flinching toward us, as if to help.
“Why don't you go in, Mike,” said Bitty.
“Oh, yeah.” He turned and headed for the smoked-glass doors at the end of the hallway. We followed, with Pierce bringing up the rear. Mike held the doors open for us this time.
* * *
Rose and Bobby and Nancy were already there, along with Susan Caletti the editor, and a tall, pot-bellied man with jet-black hair. They all sat behind the burnished mahogany table that filled the room, my brother's family and Rose around the tall man, Susan a few seats away.
Rose blanched. “Jesus! Where's her walker?”
“I didn't see it,” I said. My mother was scanning the room, scowling.
“I put it behind the desk,” Rose said, exhaling loudly. She clomped past us into the hall and came back wielding the walker like a lion tamer with a wooden stool. She swept around us and placed it before Mom. “Here you go, Mom,” she said.
“Oh, yes.”
“So,” Rose said. She put her hands on her hips. “Is this everybody?”
“I don't know,” I said. “Aren't cousins supposed to crawl out of the woodwork to claim their slice of the pie?”
“What cousins?” Rose sounded angry, like the cousins were waiting in the lobby with six-shooters and burlap sacks with dollar signs printed on them. I looked past her to the tall man. Bobby was seated across from him, asking quiet questions.
“Who's that guy?” I asked quietly.
“Ha, ha,” said Rose.
“No, really,” I said. “Do I know him?”
Bitty released Mom, who had taken hold of the walker. “You don't remember Uncle Mal?” she said.
At this, Uncle Mal met me with a grim smile. “Hello, Tim, Pierce,” he said. “Hello, Bee.”
Bee was Uncle Mal's name for Bitty. She loved it. When he came to the house, he used to bring her bee things: little plastic bees, stickers with bees on them, and once, a spiral notebook with a giant cartoon bee on the cover, pollinating a wide pink flower. For months she spent her weekend afternoons sitting at the kitchen table, writing stories in it about her and Uncle Mal. She let me read one once. It was about a killer robot that threatened them with violence; Uncle Mal talked the robot out of it, and the three of them went and had a picnic. It was a strange story, full of peculiar details. A crush of Bitty's from the TV at the time had a fluffy, feathered haircut, and in the story Uncle Mal did too. It was an expressive head of hair, tossing and tousling in the air as the story ebbed and flowed.
But now it was exceedingly thin, and dyed a deep, implausible black. He wore it clumped and spiky, like a wet Marine. And though he still had the same sunken chest, into which his necktie dipped like an old clothesline, Mal had developed a shocking paunch. It stuck out over his belt as if tied there with rope. He looked like a former basketball star who now managed apartment buildings for a living. I must have gaped.
“I look a little different,” he said.
“Well, it's been a while.”
Bitty left Mom's side and tiptoed around the table to him, planting a kiss in the oily fuzz over his ear. “It's good to see you,” she said.
“Always good to see you, Bee. I'm so sorry about your dad.” He looked up at me. “You too, Tim.”
“None of this seems real,” I said, and meant it.
He nodded solemnly. “How are you doing, Pierce?”