LITMIR.BIZ

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playing a trump.”

      “It means something.”

      “Something but not everything. Why couldn’t he stay with Travis? Or Solstice?”

      “My father is impossible and over seventy. By the time my sister was born, Edison was nearly out of the house. He and Solstice barely know each other.”

      “You have other responsibilities. To Tanner, to Cody, to me. Even”—a loaded pause—“to Baby Moronic. You can’t make a decision like this by fiat.”

      “Slack sounded at his wit’s end. I had to say something.”

      “What you had to say,” said Fletcher levelly, “was, ‘I’m sorry, but I have to ask my husband.’”

      “Maybe I knew what you’d say.”

      “And what was that?”

      I smiled, a little. “Something like, ‘Over my dead body.’”

      He smiled, a little. “Got that right.”

      “I realize it didn’t go that well. The last visit.”

      “No. It didn’t.”

      “You seemed to get on the wrong side of each other.”

      “There was no ‘seeming.’ We did.”

      “If it were just anybody, I wouldn’t ask. But it isn’t. It would mean so much to me if you tried a little harder.”

      “Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don’t. If you’re ‘trying,’ you don’t.”

      “You can give folks a break. You do that with other people.” I took a moment to reflect that in Fletcher’s case this wasn’t always true. He could be harsh.

      “Are you telling me that throughout this negotiation you never talked to your brother directly? So his friend is trying to offload the guy behind his back.”

      “Maybe Edison’s embarrassed. He wouldn’t like asking favors of his little sister.”

      “Little sister! You’re forty years old.”

      An only child, Fletcher didn’t understand about siblings—how set that differential is. “Sweetheart, I’ll still be Edison’s little sister when I’m ninety-five.”

      Fletcher soaked the rice pan in the sink. “You’ve got some money now, right? Though I’m never too clear on how much.” (No, he wouldn’t have been clear. I was secretive.) “So send him a check. Enough for a deposit on some dump and a couple of months’ rent. Problem solved.”

      “Buy him off. Bribe him to stay away from us.”

      “Well, he wouldn’t have much of a life here. You can’t say Iowa has a ‘jazz scene.’”

      “There are venues in Iowa City.”

      “Pass-the-hat gigs for a handful of cheapo students aren’t going to suit Mr. Important International Jazz Pianist.”

      “But according to Slack, Edison isn’t—‘in the best form.’ He says Edison needs—‘someone to take care of him.’ He thinks my brother’s confidence has taken a knock.”

      “Best news I’ve heard all day.”

      “My business is doing well,” I said quietly. “That should be good for something. For being generous.” The way I’ve been generous with you, I almost added, and with kids who are now my children too, but I didn’t want to rub it in.

      “But you’re also volunteering the rest of this family’s generosity.”

      “I realize that.”

      Fletcher leaned on either side of the sink. “I’m sorry if I seem unfeeling. Whether or not the guy gets on my nerves, he’s your brother, and you must find it upsetting, his being down on his luck.”

      “Yes, very,” I said gratefully. “He’s always been the hot shot. Being strapped, straining his friends’ hospitality—it feels wrong. Like the universe has turned on its head.” I wasn’t about to tell Fletcher, but Edison and Slack must have fallen out, since the saxophonist’s urgency had been laced with what I could only call, well—disgust.

      “But even if we did decide to take him in,” said Fletcher, “and we haven’t—the visit couldn’t be open-ended.”

      “It can’t be conditional, either.” If I was going to think that way, and I preferred not to, I had amassed, as of the previous couple of years, most of the power in our household. I disliked having power, and in ordinary circumstances rather hoped that if I never exercised this baffling clout it would go away. For once, however, the novel agency was useful. “Saying, ‘only for three days,’” I said, “or ‘only for a week.’ That doesn’t sound gracious, but as if we can only stand his company for a limited period of time.”

      “Isn’t that the truth?” Fletcher said curtly, leaving the dishes to me. “I’m going for a ride.”

      Of course he was going for a ride. He rode his bicycle for hours almost every day—or one of his bicycles, since he had four, competing with unsold coffee tables for limited space in a basement that had looked so cavernous when we moved in. Neither of us ever mentioned it, but I’d bought him those bikes. Technically, we pooled our resources. But when one party contributes the contents of an eyedropper and the other Lake Michigan, “pooling” doesn’t seem the right word, quite.

      Ever since my husband had started cycling obsessively, I wouldn’t go near my own ten-speed clunker, by then gathering dust with deflated tires. The neglect was of my choosing, but didn’t feel that way. It was as if he’d stolen my bike. Were I ever to have dragged the thing upstairs, greased the chain, and wended down the road, slowly and not very far, he’d have made fun of me. I preferred to skip it.

      Every time Fletcher went for a ride I got annoyed. How could he stand the boredom? He’d come home some afternoons in a state of brisk satisfaction that his time had improved, usually by a few seconds. Churning the same route through the cornfields to the river a smidgeon faster was of no earthly consequence to anyone. He was forty-six, and soon the computer on his handlebars would simply track his disappointment in himself. I didn’t like to think that I begrudged him something all his own, but he had the furniture making, which was private enough. He used those rides to shut me out.

      I felt so guilty about this annoyance that I went to lengths to disguise it, forcing myself to suggest he go for a ride in order, say, to get out of his system some frustration with Tanner, “since it makes you feel so much better.” But a too-lilting falsetto gave my falsity away. Most confounding: he liked that the cycling annoyed me.

      Clearly, I was a bad wife. Aerobic jaunts would lengthen his life. After Cleo, his ex, went so bizarrely off the deep end, Fletcher had grown ever more consumed with control, and as obsessions went the cycling was harmless. Between exercise and his stringent diet, my husband had lost the tiny roll at his middle for which my own mashed potatoes and muffins had been to blame. Yet I’d cherished that little roll, which had softened him in a larger sense. By soliciting forgiveness, the gentle excess had seemed also to dispense it.

      I required that forgiveness in some quantity. During the previous three years I must have put on about twenty pounds (I was loath to stand on a scale and confront an exact number). When running Breadbasket I’d been pretty thin. In the catering trade, food has a way of becoming repulsive; a vat of cream cheese is indistinguishable from a batch of plaster. But in my subsequent endeavor, the Mexicans on my staff were forever bringing trays of tamales and enchiladas into work. I’d cooked on my feet; now I sat in my office. Thus I’d come to squander an appalling proportion of my mental time on empty vows to cut down to one meal a day, or on fruitless self-castigation over a second stuffed pepper at lunch. Surely on some unconscious, high-frequency level other people could hear the squeal of this humiliating hamster wheel in my head, a piercing shrill that emitted from

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