with his mouth open, a memory that put her off the idea of kissing him at the door.
When Faye returned from the gym the next morning, she found Martha in a state of agitation. “Mr. Jimmy come by,” she said. “He tried to get your momma to sign a power of attorney. She's terrible upset. He try to sweet-talk her first, but she told him she wouldn't sign and he told her she was a foolish old woman and worse.” Faye was ahead of her on the stairs, racing for Sybil's bedroom. “She say she don't want to sell her house and she don't want to go to no nursin' home. So Mr. Jimmy storm out, and your momma, she's in a state.”
Sybil was a tiny dark figure in a great sea of linens, sitting upright against the headboard, her hands clenched on her thighs.
“I won't move to Broadway,” she said. “I don't care what he says. He can tie a stick of dynamite to me like he did with that stray dog, but I won't sign that paper and I won't move to Broadway.”
The next morning, a Saturday, Faye drove over to her brother's house, a sprawling ranch in a gated community called Elysian Hills, and rang his buzzer.
He came to the door wearing a shooting vest over a flannel shirt, his pink scalp glistening through the furrows of his brushed-back hair. “Sis, I was just about to call you. Come on in.”
“I don't want to come in. I just want to say don't you dare come round and bully Momma like that again. You can say what you want, but I'm not letting you lock her away. And I'm not letting you loot the house.”
He was taken off guard by this last remark; his face, always ruddy, turned a deeper shade of red. “You've really turned into a prime New York bitch, haven't you?”
“It's taken years, but I'm slowly getting there. I didn't say anything when you took Daddy's guns and his watch collection.”
“What the hell good were they to you?”
“I could have sold them just as easily as you did.”
“I've been taking care of Momma and that house for years while you were off gallivanting around New York with the beautiful people. Hell, I've even been paying your goddamn credit-card bills. Your Chanel and your ‘21’ Club.”
“Dad's estate pays my bills. And God knows what else the estate's been paying for. But if you persist in trying to lock Momma up, I'm going to send in a battalion of accountants and lawyers and it's all going to come out in the open. New York accountants and lawyers.”
That night, Faye went through the family photo albums and found herself revising her memories, as if her childhood were an undervalued asset, like an anonymous painting suddenly revealed to be the work of a master. The cumulative impact of so many smiling faces was impressive. The pleasure her parents so visibly displayed in each other's company seemed to contradict her grim recollections. Looking through hundreds of travel snapshots reminded her of just how many trips they'd taken when she was younger. Jimmy, having gone off to college and marriage, was largely absent from the later pictures, while Faye looked remarkably happy, until she started to develop a pout around the age of thirteen, a sulky expression that said, I can't believe I have to be here in Europe with my parents when I could be home with my friends. The picture that eventually made her cry was at first a mystery, a blurry shot of what appeared to be a mermaid in a Venice canal. The woman, a Botticellian blonde in a blue bikini top, seemed to be sitting or lying on a submerged stone step or platform. Below the waist, just visible within the murky water, was a blue-green fish tail. Faye had been in a mermaid period then, sometime around her eighth birthday, and this had been the highlight of her trip. Years later, she learned that her father had staged the tableau. She had long ago forgotten the incident, which along with so much else suggested she had been the happy, spoiled child of loving parents.
After finishing the better part of a bottle of Campari, she called Cal, a former boyfriend, to whom she hadn't spoken in months.
“Was I so awful,” she asked. “Was I just a total screaming bitch?”
“You were wonderful,” he said. “The girl of my dreams.”
“But you said yourself I broke your heart.”
“You couldn't