because the cracked handle overheated so quickly (“Use with Care!”), outlets that delivered tiny electric shocks (“Use Upper, Not Lower!”), leaky coffeemakers (“Use Sparingly!”), bikes with no brakes (“Use with Caution!”), and countless defunct blenders, tape recorders, televisions, stereo components (“DO NOT USE!”).
(Years later, unconsciously at first and then deliberately because it made them laugh and was a neat, private shorthand, Bea and Leo would borrow Leonard’s note vernacular for editing manuscripts—use more, use sparingly, DO NOT USE!)
Leonard was a careful, conservative investor in blue chip stocks. He was happy to set aside some funds to provide a modest safety net for his children’s future, but he also wanted them to be financially independent and to value hard work. He’d grown up around trust fund kids—knew many of them still—and he’d seen the damage an influx of early money caused: abundance proffered too soon led to lassitude and indolence, a wandering dissatisfaction. The trust he established was meant to be a soupçon, a little something to sit atop their own, inevitable financial achievements—they were his children, after all—and pad their retirement a bit, maybe help fund a college tuition or two. Nothing so vast as to be truly significant.
Keeping the money tied up until Melody was forty appealed to Leonard for many reasons. He was realistic about the maturity—emotional and otherwise—of his four children: not commendable. He suspected if they didn’t get the money all at once, it would become a source of conflict between those who had it and those who didn’t; they wouldn’t be kind to one another. And if anyone was going to need the money earlier in life, Leonard imagined it would be Melody. She wasn’t the brightest of the four (that would be Bea), or the most charming (Leo), or the most resourceful (Jack).
On the long list of things Leonard didn’t believe in, near the top was paying strangers to manage his money. So one summer evening he enlisted his second cousin George Plumb, who was an attorney, to meet for dinner and hammer out the details of his estate.
It never occurred to Leonard that evening, as he and George leisurely made their way through two Gibson martinis, a superior Pommard, twenty-eight ounces of rib eye with creamed spinach, cigars and brandy, that in less than two years he would be felled by a massive coronary behind the wheel of his scrupulously maintained fifteen-year-old BMW sedan while driving home from work one late night. He never imagined that the bull market of the aughts, riding on mortgage-backed securities, would balloon the trust far beyond his intention, nor could he have foreseen how the staid but eerily prescient George would providentially transfer The Nest to the safer havens of bonds right before the market’s decline in 2008, protecting the capital that the Plumb siblings had watched, during the decade before Melody’s fortieth birthday, inflate to numbers beyond their wildest dreams. He never imagined that as the fund grew so, too, would his children’s tolerance for risk, for doing the one thing Leonard had repeatedly warned them not to do, ever, in any avenue of life, from the time they were old enough to understand: count the chickens before they hatched.
The only person who could access the funds early was Francie and in spite of her casual allegiance to Leonard while he was alive (or maybe because of it, she married her second husband practically within minutes of shedding her widow’s weeds), she abided by Leonard’s wishes to the letter. Her interest in her children, anemic when she was actually responsible for them, dwindled to the occasional holiday brunch or birthday phone call. Leo was the only one who had never petitioned Francie for a loan using The Nest as collateral. Jack and Melody and Bea had all asked at one time that she consider an earlier dispersal, but she stubbornly refused.
Until Leo’s accident.
CHAPTER THREE
The day Leo was released from rehab, a few days before the family lunch at the Oyster Bar, he went straight to his Tribeca apartment hoping to broker some civil temporary living arrangement with his about-to-be ex-wife, Victoria. That she had other plans became clear when his key no longer fit in the lock of the front door.
“Don’t bother fighting this one,” George told him over the phone. “Just find a hotel. Remember my advice. Lie low.”
Leo didn’t want to confess to George that Bea had taken his wallet the night of the accident. He’d arrived at rehab with nothing more than his