Jack let out an exasperated puff. “Walker is working. Walker is always working. I would like to offer Walker the opportunity to not work for a bit. Eventually. As in next year, which was our plan and has been our plan forever—that Walker could cut back and we’d spend more time in the country …” Jack trailed off. He was not comfortable talking to his sisters about any of this. He wanted to get Leo alone and make his pitch for payback priority without the other two interfering.
“I’m worried, too, you know,” Melody said. “Soon we’ll be paying college tuition. You can’t imagine what it costs now. And the house—”
“What about the house?” Bea asked.
Melody didn’t want to talk about her house, about Walter’s completely insane and unacceptable idea about her house. “It’s expensive!” she said.
Bea waved at the waiter and gestured for drink refills. “I get that this stinks for all of us,” she said, “but I also know Leo. If we go on the offensive today—” She shrugged and looked back and forth at Melody and Jack. “You know I’m right. He’ll just avoid us.”
“He can’t avoid us forever,” Jack said.
“What are we going to do?” Bea said. “Stake him out? Garnish his nonexistent wages? Beg?”
“I think Bea’s right,” Melody said.
“Since when has being nice to Leo worked?” Jack said. “Since when has anything successfully forced Leo to not put Leo first?”
“People change,” Bea said, opening up another pack of oyster crackers.
“More often, people stay exactly the same.”
“I still don’t understand why he didn’t fight Victoria on the apartment and everything else,” Melody said. “Why he didn’t try harder to recover something.”
“You don’t?” Bea had a flash of that night in the ER, Leo’s face, his sutured chin, the whispers and moans on the other side of the curtain, the sobbing parents in the hallway, the mother quietly keening and fingering a rosary. “I do,” she said. “You would, too, if you’d been there.”
Melody became very invested in fishing a wedge of lemon from her soft drink and not thinking about the waitress. They’d been out of town the weekend of the wedding and had missed the entire mess. Jack had missed it, too; he never attended family functions. Melody needed to keep her energy focused on where it mattered: her daughters, her husband, her home.
“Oh, please,” Jack said. “That’s hardly the whole story. Something else is going on.” He was creating tiny origami-like folds on one corner of the paper placemat. “This is Leo we’re talking about. He’s got money hidden away somewhere. I know it.”
“What do you mean you know it?” Melody said. “You have proof?”
“No, but it’s the only thing that makes sense. I know it in my bones. Think about it. Since when has Leo been afraid of a fight?”
“Bea? What do you think?” Melody said.
“I don’t know,” Bea said, but the same thought had occurred to her. “How would that even work?”
“Oh, there are ways,” Jack said. “It’s surprisingly easy.”
The waiter was circling them now, annoyed. They’d decimated countless packs of oyster crackers, and empty cellophane wrappers and crumbs littered the space in front of them. Bea started gathering the crumbs into a small pile and brushing them onto a bread and butter plate.
“He’s not coming,” Jack said.
Bea checked her phone. “He’s just on Leo time.”
Then, as if on cue, Bea saw Melody sit up a little straighter and raise her left hand and nervously fluff her too-blonde bangs. A tentative smile lifted the lower half of her face. Jack straightened, too. His jaw slid forward the way it did when he was feeling defensive, but then he stood and gave a beckoning wave and before Bea could turn around, she felt a hand on her shoulder, its familiar heft and quiet preferential squeeze, and her heart did a tiny two-step, a little jig of relief, and she turned and looked up and there he was: Leo.
CHAPTER SIX
The day Leo landed on Stephanie’s stoop, she immediately put him to work moving firewood from the half cord piled in her backyard to a smaller area on the deck off her kitchen and under a plastic tarp, in case the storm turned out to be as nasty as the weather report was predicting. As Leo stacked wood, his phone buzzed. It was his slip of paper calling back and, lo and behold, the voice on the other end was an old, familiar dealer, Rico. They exchanged quick pleasantries and