Flirting With Pete: A Novel (4 page)

“You look pale,” the lawyer said. “Are you all right?”

She nodded. “Just a little startled.”

He smiled. “Run over and take a look inside the place. It has a certain charm.”

Casey couldn’t go that day. She saw clients straight through until eight, at which time she pushed the issue of the townhouse farther back in her mind and joined her partners in the conference room. Cornelius Unger, the epitome of decorum, would have cringed at the scene that ensued. The mood was adversarial from the start. The group had often had internal differences, but those differences were now magnified by crisis.

“Where is Stuart?”

“How the hell do
I
know. I’ve made a dozen calls.”

“We need the police.”

“Pu-leeze. This is private. He’s a friend.”

“
Your
friend. From way back.”

“What were we thinking, letting him handle the funds?”

“He did it because none of
us
wanted to do it.”

“He’s always been perfectly rational, which is more than I can say for some therapists,” remarked Renée, Casey’s fellow MSW.

“Excuse me,” John said, bristling. “I take offense at that.”

“It was a joke.”

“I don’t think so. You and Casey don’t always understand that without us, you’d have no validity.”

Casey took offense at
that
. “We would have validity.”

“And a more pleasant work environment,” added Renée.

“Go, then,” John dared. “That’ll be less office space we have to rent.”

“What landlord’s going to rent us space?”

“Hey,
we
didn’t default on anything,” argued the adolescent specialist, Marlene Quinn, needing to absolve herself for being the one closest to the thief. “Stuart signed the lease. His name was the only name there. He’s the only one in default.”

“He has our money.”

“How do we get it back?”

“I don’t want to move.”

“Can we come up with the money ourselves?”

“Casey worried about money?” John mocked. “You’re such a softie, you counsel clients for
free
.”

“What I do,” Casey argued, “has nothing to do with being a softie and everything to do with needing to give closure, whether insurance agrees or not. Have I ever been late shelling up money for rent?”

“No,” Renée answered, “and neither have I. Eviction is unthinkable. I have patients to see.”

“Clients,” John corrected. “I see patients. You see clients.”

“None of us will see anyone if we’re evicted,” Casey put in. “And this landlord does evict tenants. Remember what he did to the lawyers on the third floor?”

Marlene said, “They landed on their feet, actually got a much better deal in another building.”

“Why do we have to be right in Copley Square? If we’re willing to move four blocks over, we’d get a better buy.”

“
I’m
not working in the South End,” declared John.

“How can Stuart have wiped out the account?” Casey asked in disbelief.

“He had the authority to do it. The bank didn’t have cause to question it.”

“
Why,
then? Is he in debt? Does he gamble? Is his marriage a wreck?”

Renée picked up where Casey left off. “And none of us saw it coming? Insight is our business.”

“Well, hell, we’re not mind readers,” Marlene argued. “We can’t be insightful until we’ve worked with a client enough to break down walls of denial and distrust.”

Casey didn’t see the analogy to Stuart. “That’s not it.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No,” she insisted, forsaking formal theory for good old common sense. “We’re human. Stuart served a purpose here, so we saw what we wanted to see.”

“Well, that gets us nowhere,” said Renée. “We need money fast. How are we going to get it?”

The meeting ended without a resolution. Exhausted, Casey left the office and headed out of Copley Square. She took long strides, breathed deep from the belly, yoga-style, as she went down Boylston Street to Massachusetts Avenue. Turning left, then right, she cut through side streets until she reached the Fenway with its row of brownstones overlooking a ribbon of water and trees.

The yoga breathing helped only marginally. Her tears had long since exhausted themselves, but as many times as she came here to visit, she couldn’t be calm. This was not where she wanted to be, here, seeing her mother. If she could change one thing in her life, this was it.

Up five stone steps, she let herself in. With a short wave to the receptionist, she trotted on up two more flights of stairs. She leveled off at the third floor and greeted the nurse on duty. “Hi, Ann. How’s she doing?”

Ann Holmes was a motherly type whose calmness suggested she had come to terms with caring for those with severe brain injuries. Caroline Ellis had been in her charge for three years.

Ann waggled a hand. “Not a great day. She had a couple of little seizures this morning. Dr. Jinsji called you, didn’t he?”

“Yes, but the message said the Valium helped.” The message had also said that the doctor was concerned with the increasing frequency of the seizures, but Casey was more encouraged than concerned. She chose to believe that after so many months of vegetation, seizures were a sign that Caroline was starting to wake up.

“She did get past them,” the nurse said. “She’s sleeping now.”

“I’ll be quiet then,” Casey whispered.

Going on down the hall to her mother’s room, she slipped inside. The room was lit only faintly by the city lights, though Casey could have found her way without. Aside from the few pieces of medical equipment needed for feeding and hydration, the room wasn’t big enough to hold more than a bed, a pair of easy chairs, and a dresser, and since Casey had brought and placed the chairs and dresser herself, she knew where each was. She had also visited Caroline Ellis several times a week for each of the three years since the accident. After so many hours here, walking these floors, staring at these walls, touching this furniture, Casey knew every inch of the space.

In the shadows, she crossed unerringly to the bed and kissed her mother’s forehead. Caroline smelled newly bathed. She always did, which was one of the reasons Casey kept her here. Well beyond the fresh flowers placed on the bureau each week, care was given to quality-of-life issues such as personal hygiene, though— like the flowers— that often mattered more to the families of patients than to the patients themselves. This was particularly true for Casey. The Caroline she’d known had mucked out stalls for the animals she owned, yet the only smell Casey had ever associated with her was the light, fresh one of the eucalyptus cream she used. Casey kept a supply of it here, and the nurses applied it liberally. They couldn’t prove that it helped Caroline any, but it certainly calmed Casey.

Sitting by Caroline’s hip, she took her mother’s stiff hand from the sheet, gently unbent her wrist and uncurled her fingers, and pressed them to her own throat. Caroline’s eyes were closed. Though she wasn’t aware of doing so, her body still followed the circadian sleep and wake cycles.

“Hi, Mom. It’s late. I know you’re sleeping, but I had to stop by.”

“Bad day?” Caroline asked.

“I don’t know ‘bad.’ ‘Odd’ is more like it. Connie left me the townhouse.”

“He what?”

“Left me the townhouse.”

“The Beacon Hill townhouse?”

The question evoked a memory. Casey was suddenly sixteen again, just back from an afternoon in Boston. “Beacon Hill?” Caroline had echoed when, in a rebellious little snit, Casey had slung the word at her. Beacon Hill was a landmark that offered many things, but mention of it in the Ellis home brought one thought: Connie Unger. “Did you go to see him?” Caroline had asked. Casey denied it, but her mother was predictably hurt. “He has not been there for you, Casey. He has not been there for either of us, and we’ve done just fine.”

Back then, there had been anger and hurt. What Casey imagined from Caroline now had more to do with bewilderment.

“Why would he leave you the townhouse?”

“Maybe he didn’t know what else to do with it.”

Caroline didn’t respond immediately. Casey knew that she was thinking of the best way to handle the situation. Finally, tactfully, she asked, “How do you feel about it?”

“I don’t know. I only found out about it this afternoon.”

Casey didn’t mention the memorial service. She wasn’t sure Caroline would understand why she had gone, didn’t want Caroline to think that she had been looking for anything from Connie. Caroline had always been the perfect mother, secure in every regard except that having to do with Casey’s father. Given her present situation and the fact that her life savings had been decimated by medical costs, she would feel threatened by so lucrative a bequest from Connie.

Eager to change the subject, Casey opened her mouth to tell Caroline about the office crisis. Before a word had come out, though, she thought twice. Crises came and went. She didn’t need to burden Caroline with the latest. Caroline’s energies were better spent on recovering.

So she sat quietly for a while, alternately working those rigid fingers into a semblance of flexibility and warming them against her neck. When Caroline was sleeping comfortably, she gently tucked the hand under the sheet and kissed her mother’s cheek.

“A townhouse means nothing. You’re what counts. You’re all the family I have, Mom. Get better for me?”

In the darkness, she studied her mother’s face. After a minute, she slipped silently from the room.

Leaving the Fenway with a deep ache inside, she walked ten minutes in the direction of the river to the small one-bedroom Back Bay condo that she had bought two years before and was still wondering if she could afford. The issue would be moot if she moved to Providence to teach, but she wasn’t up for grappling with that decision tonight. By the time she had gone through the mail and heated a Lean Cuisine, she was wiped out. With a client due at eight the next morning, she went to bed.

She didn’t get to Beacon Hill on Thursday, because when she wasn’t seeing clients she was rehashing the Stuart thing with Renée, Marlene, and John. Stuart’s wife claimed she had no idea where he was, and the bank claimed that there had never at any point
been
seven months’ rent in the partnership account. No amount of back-and-forth in their own conference room was productive. The four of them were getting nowhere but under each other’s skin.

“Didn’t you look at the bank statement?” Marlene asked John.

“Me? Why me? It was Stuart’s job.”

“But you’re the psychiatrist. You’re the senior person.
You
were the one who wanted this office.”

“Excuse me? I wanted Government Center, not Copley Square.”

“How are we going to come up with another twenty-eight thousand?” Casey asked.

“Try thirty-eight. Our landlord tacked on interest, plus he wants the next two months up front.”

“We could take out a loan.”

“I can’t afford another loan.”

“Well, then, what’s
your
suggestion?”

“Move somewhere smaller.”

“How? We still need four offices, a conference room, and space for a bookkeeper.”

“The bookkeeper can work at home.”

“Which is an invitation for her to steal from us, too?”

Casey left the office at six, so tightly wound that she headed for the Y. She needed yoga far more than she needed to go to Beacon Hill, and when the class was done, she was too relaxed to think of Connie Unger. Desperate for pampering, she treated herself to dinner with two friends from the class, and by the time they had laughed their way through a bottle of Merlot, it was too late to go anywhere but to bed, and there but briefly. She was on the road by six Friday morning, heading for a workshop in Amherst.

It was evening before she returned to her car. When she accessed her messages during the drive home, voice mail from her partners expressed more of the same quibbling, and suddenly she was tired of it. Relocating to Rhode Island to teach would certainly be an escape from the mess.

She didn’t answer their calls. The pettiness embarrassed her— and that, even before she considered what Cornelius Unger would have said about such a discordant group. She had failed again, he would say.
He
had never been robbed by a partner.

Of course, he had always practiced alone. And Casey could do that. She probably would if she took the teaching job, because she would only see clients for a few hours a week, and then from space within the university. She certainly couldn’t see herself giving up therapy entirely. She loved doing clinical work.

But moving to Providence raised another issue. She didn’t know if she wanted to be that far from her mother— which was an irony of the greatest order. Casey had grown up in Providence; Caroline had lived there right up until the accident. During all the time in between, Casey had been desperate for the distance. Caroline was the epitome of home and hearth, everything Casey was not. The closer they lived to each other, the more obvious this became. Casey’s career notwithstanding, Caroline was a hard act to follow.

Giving proof to that now, Casey returned home and rather than cleaning out her refrigerator, sorting through the pile of mail growing like mold on the kitchen counter, or even reading a book, she watched reruns of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
until she fell asleep on the sofa. She got up at midnight and went to bed, but didn’t sleep well. If she wasn’t fixating on that ugly word “concern,” used by the doctor again that day, she was thinking about the teaching position, which was past the point of needing an answer, or the office situation, which was starting to stink, or the fact that she was thirty-four and without roots. Then she thought of the Beacon Hill townhouse that she had so unexpectedly inherited, and a silent nagging began.

She was avoiding the place. She didn’t need an esteemed colleague to tell her that. She was making a statement to this dead father of hers that she resented being acknowledged only when he died and that she didn’t
need
his three-million-dollar townhouse. She was keeping him waiting. It was as simple— and as childish— as that.