Albie looked hungry, not only in the unnerving thinness that all the Cousins children possessed, but in his hollow eyes. Albie looked like he could eat an entire pig, python-style, and it wouldn’t begin to address the deficit. “To tell you the truth I could use a drink.”
“Name it,” Franny said. She was half-turned towards the house, her mind already considering the secret stash of 7-Up her mother disapproved of.
“Gin.”
She looked back at Albie and smiled. Gin on a Thursday night. “Did I tell you I’m glad you’re here? Probably not yet. I’m glad you’re here. Are you going to come with me?”
“I will in a minute,” he said.
While she was gone Albie looked at the sky. There were animals zipping around up there — sparrows? bats? — along with the near-deafening roar of something cricket-ish. He wasn’t in Torrance anymore.
In a minute Franny came back with two glasses half-full of ice and gin, a bottle of 7-Up under her arm. She topped off her glass with the soda, used her finger to stir it around, and then looked at him, wagging the 7-Up back and forth.
“Pass,” he said.
“Very manly.” They tapped their glasses together the way people did in movies, the way her girlfriends did at slumber parties after siphoning off what could be taken discreetly from the family supply. Franny had had some drinks before, just not at home, not on a school night, not with Albie, but if ever there was a day to break the rules it was today. “Cheers.”
She made a little face at the taste while Albie just sipped and smiled. He lit another cigarette because it went so nicely with the gin. It felt like they were catching up just sitting there not talking. Too much had happened, too much time had passed, to try putting it into words now.
After a while Bert came back out. He seemed so happy to see Franny there. He kissed the side of her head, the cloud of cigarette smoke eradicating the smell of gin. “I didn’t know you were home.”
“Both of us,” Franny said, smiling.
Bert jingled his car keys. “I’m going to get a pizza.”
Franny shook her head. “Mom made dinner. It’s all in the fridge. I’ll heat it up.”
Bert looked surprised, though it would be hard to say why. Beverly always made dinner. He picked up Albie’s suitcase. “You kids come inside now. It’s getting cold out here.”
The three of them went inside just as the deep darkness of night was setting in. Franny and Albie picked up their glasses, the cigarettes and the lighter, and followed Albie’s father through the door.
7
“So Bert Cousins’s kid was the one who broke you and the old Jew up?” Fix said. They were on their way to Santa Monica, the car windows down. They were going to the movies. Caroline was driving. Franny was in the back, leaning forward between the two seats.
“How have I never heard that part of the story?” Caroline asked.
“Would you please not call him ‘the old Jew’?” Franny said to her father.
“Sorry.” Fix covered his heart with his hand. “The old drunk. May God rest his soul in Zion. Hats off to the kid is my point. He’s finally earned my respect.”
Franny imagined calling Albie with that bit of news. “It wasn’t like I left the house that night and never went back. We stayed in Amagansett all summer.” There was still Ariel and her intolerable Dutch boyfriend and sad little Button to deal with, the entire long, horrible summer of houseguests to endure. The end of Leo and Franny’s relationship played to a full house. It was more than twenty years ago and still the complete misery of that time was fully accessible to her.
“But essentially that was that, right?” Fix said. “The kid put the nail in the tire.”
Caroline shook her head. “Albie identified the fact that the tire had a nail in it,” she said, and Franny, surprised by the accuracy of her sister’s assessment, laughed.
“I should have stayed in law school,” Franny said. “Then I’d have been as smart as you.”
Caroline shook her head. “Not possible.”
“Get over a lane,” Fix said, pointing. “You’re taking a left at the light.” Fix had his Thomas Brothers street guide in his lap. He refused to let Franny put the theater’s address into her phone.
“Do you have any idea how it could have taken this long to make the movie?” Caroline glanced in the rearview mirror then accelerated deftly to get the better of an oncoming Porsche. As with so many other things in life, Caroline was the superior driver.
“It happens. Leo wouldn’t sell the film rights so nothing could have started until after he died. I can’t imagine his wife was easy to work with.” Natalie Posen. They were, miraculously, still married when Leo died fifteen years ago, still battling it out. All those years his wife and now his widow. Franny saw her just that one time at the funeral, so much smaller than she would have imagined, sitting in the front row of the synagogue flanked by two sons who looked like Leo — one from the nose up and the other from the nose down — as if each had inherited half his father’s head. Ariel was on the other side of the synagogue with a very grown-up Button and her own mother, the first Mrs. Leon Posen. Eric was listed in the program as an honorary pall bearer, too old himself to lift one sixth of the casket’s weight by that point. He’d been the one to call Franny with the news of Leo’s death, thoughtful considering all the time that had passed. She asked about the next book, the one of the long-ago advance that he was always supposed to be writing. Eric said no, sadly, it wasn’t there.
They were all there, time having run them down: Eric and Marisol, Astrid, the Hollingers, a dozen more — all the summer guests come to claim him along with the rest of the world. Franny stayed at the back, standing against the wall in the peanut gallery of former students and devoted fans and old girlfriends. Natalie Posen had chosen to bury her husband in Los Angeles, giving her spite the air of the eternal.
“The wife,” Fix said. “As long as we’re thinking of things to feel good about, let’s thank the wife.”
“Leo’s wife?”
Fix nodded. “She’s the unsung hero in all this.”
“How do you figure?” It was Fix’s birthday, eighty-three, with metastases to the brain. Franny was making her best effort.
“If she hadn’t hung in there like a pit bull to get more money, Leo Posen would have been a free man.”
“Ah.” Caroline nodded. She colored her hair the warm reddish shade of brown it had been when they were children, she went to Pilates three times a week. She had followed their mother’s example, kept herself up. Caroline had become the younger sister.
“I’m not seeing your point,” Franny said.
Fix smiled. Caroline, as far as he was concerned, had never missed a trick.
“If Leo had ever gotten a divorce,” her sister explained, “he would have married you.”
“Franny girl,” their father said, turning with difficulty to look at her, “that may have been the only bullet you ever dodged.”
Franny and Caroline had long agreed it was a waste of resources for them to visit either parent at the same time. With divorced parents on opposite sides of the country, and husbands whose parents also required a certain number of family holidays, Franny and Caroline divided their burden in order to conquer it. There were only so many vacation days, personal leave days, plane tickets, missed school plays, and unexcused absences between them. Whatever affection the two sisters had found for each other later in life would not be manifesting itself in visits. Los Angeles was as close as Franny ever got to the Bay Area, though she meant to go. Albie lived there now, two hours away from Caroline. Caroline’s oldest son, Nick, was a senior at Northwestern, so at least when Caroline and Wharton came out for parents’ weekend Franny could drive up to Evanston to see the three of them. Caroline’s other two children, the girls, Franny had missed out on entirely, much the same way Caroline had missed out on Franny’s two boys. But Ravi and Amit, no matter how long she’d had them, were not actually Franny’s. They had come with the marriage, and Caroline, try as she might to feel otherwise, could never grant full citizenship to stepchildren.