use that term in apparent earnestness and never even casually contemplate the twisted metaphor of the thing, and how it related to their dysfunctional behavior as individuals and a group. Just one of many things about the Plumb family he’d stopped trying to understand.
But Walker did understand conflict resolution, and as an attorney who had to mediate many a divorce, many a broken business partnership, he also understood how money—and the entitlement that often accompanied just the idea of money—could warp relationships and memories and decisions. He’d seen it happening with Jack and his family for years, and enough was enough.
He thought Jack was probably right; Leo probably had money somewhere, but chasing Leo was a loser’s game. Leo, Walker thought, was a loser. They all mythologized him like he was some kind of brilliant withholding god who just needed the right sacrifice to let loose his abundant blessings. As far as Walker could tell, Leo was just someone who’d been relatively bold at the right time and had lucked out very young. SpeakEasyMedia was a formula that made him wealthy. He wasn’t even rich by New York standards and what had he done since then? Nothing. Blown his wad. Become a leech.
But since Leo’s accident Walker had observed an interesting dynamic: The siblings were communicating again, and although the conversations usually began with Leo and the money, something else had started to happen. They were making casual forays into one another’s lives. He’d heard Jack and Melody on the phone countless times talking about things other than Leo, other than The Nest. Bea had always been the most amiable and accessible of the bunch; he thought she would welcome some kind of coming together. If Leo could just agree to something tonight, anything, some kind of payment plan, installments, just throw everyone a bone so they could stop gnawing the worn and brittle cartilage of The Nest—maybe they could move on, try to forge relationships with one another that weren’t about that blasted inheritance.
Walker excelled at mediation, delivering people from their own self-inflicted misery. Families were the hardest, he knew, but he also knew how to try to bring adults past their own wounds and help them find their way, if not to affection at least to accommodation. It didn’t always happen, but it could. There was no reason the Plumbs couldn’t start to accommodate one another and work toward some semblance of family, no matter how tentative or messy.
Walker also suspected that Jack was in some kind of financial pickle. So what else was new? He’d tell Walker in his own time and they’d figure it out. Tonight’s plan: Bring them together over food. Stay focused on Melody’s birthday at first. A bit of bubbly, a gorgeous chicken scaloppini, the coconut cake he remembered Melody saying she liked once. Then a gentle discussion about kindness. Accommodation. A different and sturdier kind of nest.
AS JACK LIT THE VOTIVES lining the windowsill, which would lend a warm glow to the whole room, softening its ordinary, postwar architecture, parquet flooring, and flimsy plasterboard, he was also surreptitiously e-mailing his contact for selling the Rodin. The initial interest in the sculpture had been impressive, but Jack had quickly narrowed the field to two buyers and one had dropped out when figures started being discussed. The remaining individual, someone he’d never met but had heard about, was a collector from Saudi Arabia who lived full time in London and part time in New York. He was a frequent buyer of black-market pieces with questionable—or infamous—provenance. What any of these guys did with art they essentially had to keep secret from the rest of the world Jack didn’t know. Not his problem or concern.
When Jack first offered Tommy O’Toole his assistance getting rid of the Rodin, Tommy was under the mistaken impression that Jack could find a way to return the statue to its original owners. “That would be extremely unwise,” Jack told him. “You will wind up arrested and on the front page of the paper.” He explained about the person he had in mind, a foreigner of vague business pursuits. “We’re going to go in high on the price, but even after negotiating, this will be a lot of money,” Jack told Tommy.
“I don’t care about the money,” Tommy said. “I just want it to end up in a safe place, taken care of.”
“Of course,” Jack said soothingly. Nobody ever admitted it was about the money. Grandma’s engagement ring, Aunt Gertie’s emerald