“Thanks,” Stuart said weakly, grateful that they were leaving. “Good night.”
Mandy chose that moment to wake up. She lifted her head. “Hey guys. What’s going on?”
No one quite knew what to say. The dog sat down again and began to pant.
Peaches wondered if it would be okay to ask about the quality of the pot, since she was the one who had purchased it for them. Liam and Greg might both be sort of impressed. She could even ask to try some. Liam could try it too. Greg used to take off his pants whenever he smoked pot. He probably shouldn’t have any.
A face appeared behind the glass pane to the right of Stuart Little’s front door. A small hand slapped the glass.
“Ted?” Mandy’s green eyes widened. She tried to stand up, reaching for the railing and missing it completely.
“Holy shit.” Stuart grabbed her and steadied her before she toppled down the steps. “Just a sec, Teddy!”
“You guys okay?” Greg called up to them.
“We’re okay!” Stuart shouted back way too loudly.
“Mom, Dad,” Liam whined. “Maybe we should just leave them alone?”
“Come on, guys.” Peaches steered Big Boy back the way they’d come.
“That was fucking Stuart Little from the Blind Mice.” Greg was clearly miffed. “You know him?”
Peaches bristled. “Yeah, their kid goes to my school.” She yanked on the leash, forcing Big Boy to pick up the pace.
“You work at a public school now and the kids get even richer,” Greg scoffed.
Anticipating a parental spat, Liam shoved in his AirPods and strode on ahead.
Peaches knew Greg would be weird about it. Weirdly jealous.
Greg had been the big man on campus at Oberlin, at least in the music department. But you don’t get rich and famous like Stuart Little majoring in ancient woodwinds and double-minoring in accordion and banjo. You wind up teaching music at a private elementary school to support the younger day student English major from small-town Ohio who liked to play the drums and had to drop out of college altogether because you knocked her up. Greg was so annoying. Hadn’t she tortured herself and gotten her nursing degree and the school nurse gig for precisely this reason, to stop him from constantly making comments about money? She was making the big bucks now, picking nits off famous dads and their spawn. Even Liam had two jobs, tutoring that girl and at the Strategizer. Sure, they lived on the wrong side of the Gowanus in a small street-level rental, but they were fine. Getting to know Stuart Little was the highlight of her current existence. Only Greg could turn something fun into a huge bummer.
“I guess they must be rich,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” she added, even though she wasn’t sorry at all.
Chapter 6
It wasn’t neat and tidy like his house. In fact, it was kind of a mess, like a storage unit for someone who never threw anything away. That was part of the design process, Roy supposed, creating faulty prototypes and then dissecting them to see what was working and what wasn’t. A set of seven white wooden chairs—all in different sizes, their backs adorned with brass plaques bearing the name ELIZABETH—stood in a circle, like something out of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” only more sinister.
“Those are hers,” Tupper explained. “She’s interested in Identity.”
Roy thought he detected a capital I.
“Shifting identities within one person,” Tupper went on, as if that clarified it.
“Right,” Roy said.
“My workshop is back here.” Tupper led the way through the airplane hangar–like space filled with detritus. Roy tripped over a life-size boa constrictor that was wound around a rotten wooden oar. “That was from her Adam and Eve series,” Tupper noted as he continued on.
At the back of the enormous studio was a large glass box. Inside the box were two wooden cradles. Nestled in the cradles were two toddler-size papier-mâché dolls with yellow woolen yarn hair, black bird-feather eyelashes, painted red cheeks, and red kissy-face lips. Their lumpy bodies were swaddled in felt and birch-bark patchwork quilts with just the tips of their papier-mâché fingers poking out. The fingers were oddly gray, as if the girls had been playing on the sidewalk before their nap.
Roy stared into the glass box.
“The twins,” Tupper explained unnecessarily. “She wheeled them around in a carriage for two years.”
Roy followed him through a rusted metal door that led to a bright, spotless workroom with huge windows that looked southwest, toward Sunset Park and Industry City. In front of the windows