LITMIR.BIZ

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agonizing creep of cars he still wanted The Afterlife to be possible for somebody.

      “Hey,” she asked. “You made any new fountains lately?”

      A safer subject. Unlike his own family, Beryl thought his fountains were charming.

      When he turned onto Crescent Drive, Shep realized that he could have told his sister on the trip up, and that might have been nicer. Yet he understood what Glynis had meant by “I haven’t been feeling nice.” For some reason he was inclined to make this as difficult for Beryl as possible.

      His wife and sister greeted each other coolly in the kitchen. In the absence of a theatrically commiserating embrace, Glynis could tell that he’d kept quiet about her diagnosis in the car; a shared glance confirmed that she approved. They had a secret, and when they decided to impart it was their business. In fact, as the uncomfortable evening got under way – uncomfortable for Beryl – he began to understand what his wife might have got out of keeping all those tests and appointments to herself. There was something powerful in the withholding. Like walking around the house with a loaded gun.

      Glynis had been fussing with the foil on the lasagna. Shep chided that he would take care of the food. Beryl was too unobservant to find this odd, since in times past dinner would always have been her sister-in-law’s province. She didn’t seem to note, either, the care with which he led his wife gently to a chair in the living room and settled her with a drink. Glynis wouldn’t be having wine in two weeks’ time, and he hoped that she remembered to enjoy it. Beryl hadn’t brought a bottle. She never did.

      As they waited for the main course to warm, Beryl helped herself to a top-up glug and began noshing through olives in the living room, ignoring the bowl provided and laying the pits on the glass coffee table beside the Wedding Fountain, where they left a smear. She seemed nervous, which put Shep at a contrasting ease.

      “So, Glynis,” she said. “Done any new work lately? I’d love to see it.” To the degree that the inquiry was not knee-jerk conversation filler, Beryl was betting on the high likelihood that her sister-in-law hadn’t visited her studio in months. Glynis and Beryl hated each other.

      Ordinarily Glynis would have bristled, but she had a smug feline purring about her this evening. “Not since you asked me that last time,” she said. “I’ve been distracted.”

      “The house and shit?”

      “A house of sorts,” said Glynis. “And shit. Lots of shit.”

      “You still making molds for that chocolate shop?”

      “Actually, I recently retired. But if you mean do we still have the usual box of rejects on hand, yes. A little deformed, but they’re fresh. You’re welcome to take home as many truffles as you like.”

      “Well, that’s not what I meant …” It was. “But if you’re offering, sure. That’d be great.”

      Shep put the box from Living in Sin by the door as a reminder. Glynis had admitted to missing her ridiculous part-time job more than she’d expected. Because even Glynis could see that the quality of chickshaped molds for raspberry creams was inconsequential, the work had been her first experience in decades of creation without fear. Sadly, had she embraced the same liberated playfulness in her attic studio, she might now be a metalsmith of some renown.

      He refilled his sister’s glass. Keeping the evening’s main agenda under wraps may have been cruelly gratifying, but it might soon seem impossible to raise the subject at all.

      “Hey, you know I took the bus up to see Dad last week?” said Beryl, who rarely headed to New Hampshire without getting a lift from her brother. “I’m a little worried about him. I don’t think he’s going to be able to live on his own much longer.”

      “He’s managed pretty well so far. And his mind is – almost horribly – sharp as ever.”

      “He’s almost eighty! Most nights he sleeps in that chair in the den to keep from tackling the stairs. He eats nothing but grilled cheese sandwiches. His former parishioners help with the shopping, but most of them are pretty old by now, too. And I think he’s lonely.”

      Routinely visiting Berlin three times more often than his sister, Shep knew about the chair, more a matter of lassitude than incapacity. Dad fell asleep reading detective fiction – thankfully not the Bible – and he liked grilled cheese sandwiches. Still, Shep should be glad for his sister’s concern. “What did you have in mind?”

      “We should probably consider putting him up in one of those assisted-living places.” His sister had a funny way with pronouns.

      “You know they’re not covered by Medicare.”

      “Why not?”

      “It doesn’t matter why not,” Glynis said with exasperation. Beryl imagined that if you established why something should be otherwise then you changed the way it was.

      “Technically, they’re not medical facilities,” Shep said patiently. “I’ve looked into it. These places run to seventy-five, even a hundred grand a year. Dad has no savings, since he gave away anything he ever had to spare, and his pension is peanuts.”

      “Shepardo! Typically, I bring up something like our father’s increasing infirmity, and you immediately start talking about money.”

      “That’s because what you’re suggesting involves a good whack of it.”

      “A good whack of our money, more to the point,” said Glynis. The fact that Shep had “loaned” his sister tens of thousands of dollars had always outraged his wife, whose minimal income made her only more proprietary about his. “Or were you planning to make a contribution? He’s your father, too.”

      Beryl raised her hands and cried, “Blood from a stone! You think the day I won the lottery you just forgot to read the paper? I’ve already run through the grant for this childlessness documentary, and I’m finishing it with my own money – what little there is of that. It’s not that I’m some kind of asshole. I’m completely strapped.”

      Poverty had its stresses, but for a moment Shep envied his sister its relaxing side. Penury reprieved Beryl from responsibility for a host of matters, from maintenance of the Williamsburg Bridge to his father’s care. But then, if in legalese Beryl was “judgment-proof,” that did not necessarily reprieve her from judgment of other sorts, and it seemed important right now to side decisively with his wife. “It’s your idea to put Dad in a retirement community, but you expect us to pick up the bill.”

      “Didn’t you sell Knack of All Trades for, like, a million dollars? Jesus, Shep!”

      In his next life, he would keep his mouth shut. “My resources aren’t infinite. I have – other commitments. And if Dad stayed in decent health for another five to ten years, what you’re suggesting could leave us completely strapped.”

      Beryl’s eyes smoldered; she obviously pictured his other commitments along the lines of an iPod for Zach. “Well … what if Dad moved in here? There’s Amelia’s old bedroom.”

      “No,” Shep said flatly, irked with himself, since breaking the news in the car would have obviated much of this discussion. “Not now.”

      “What about your place?” said Glynis. “It’s palatial, in Manhattan terms. And if you can’t do your part financially …”

      “True,” said Shep, playing along. “And then I could help you out with incidentals.”

      Of course his sister’s newly forged filial concern would never extend to her personal inconvenience, but he thought they’d cornered her sufficiently to at least make her squirm. Instead, her eyes lit from sullenness to rage.

      “Sorry, won’t fly,” said Beryl, her tone clipped, victorious. “That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about.”

      It was, Shep intuited, the thing she wanted to talk about. They moved

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