Commonwealth(73)

It was more than twenty years since Albie had taken the train to Amagansett. He had finished reading the book before he left and had given it to Jeanette. He had walked the three miles to the actress’s house from the station and knocked on the door to find out how his life had fallen into someone else’s hands.

Later, after the argument with Leo, she and Albie had gone out the back door without ever seeing Ariel or Button. They were only going as far as the cabin at the back of the property, and they passed John Hollinger in the backyard on their way. He was wearing a perfectly crumpled summer suit and was smoking a cigarette. He was taking in the beauty of the night. “Isn’t this place something,” he said to them in wonder.

Franny and Albie kept the lights in the cabin off and drank the gin, passing the bottle back and forth between them. No one thought to look for them there, but then there was a good chance that no one had thought to look for them at all. Instead, Leo and his guests would be sitting on the screened-in porch on the other side of the lawn, smoking and drinking the gin the Hollingers had brought. Leo would be railing about Franny’s crazy ex-stepbrother who had shown up out of nowhere in a rage, but he wouldn’t mention what the stepbrother might have been mad about.

“Did you tell Jeanette you were coming?” Franny asked him.

“No, no.” Albie shook his head in the dark. “Jeanette would have wanted to come with me, and Jeanette really would have killed him.”

“Not him,” Franny said. The burn of the gin was pleasant and familiar. She realized now she’d been saving this drink for the necessary occasion. “It was my fault.”

“Yeah,” Albie said. “But I wouldn’t let Jeanette kill you.”

“Quick errand of mercy,” Franny said when she got back in the car. She explained the situation to Caroline and their father. “Let me drop the two of you off at the house and I’ll go check on her. It shouldn’t take long.”

“That was Albie on the phone just now?” Fix said.

“That was him.”

“That’s crazy!” Caroline said. “What are the chances?” Even Caroline was impressed.

The chances were unremarkable. Franny and Albie were friends. She and Kumar had gone to his wedding. She had a picture of his daughter Charlotte on her refrigerator. Most years they remembered each other’s birthdays.

“Well, I can’t speak for your sister but you aren’t dropping me off at the house,” Fix said. “I haven’t seen Teresa Cousins in a dog’s age.”

“Since when do you know Teresa Cousins?” Caroline asked. The four girls used to talk about it in their bunk beds at night when they were all together for the summer, how perfect it would be if Caroline and Franny’s father could marry Holly and Jeanette’s mother. Then everything would be settled.

“When Albie burned down the school. Haven’t I ever told you that story? Your mother called and asked me to get him out of Juvenile as a favor to her, like I was in the business of doing your mother favors.”

“We know this part,” Caroline said. “Get to the Teresa part.”

Fix shook his head. “It’s amazing when you think about it, those guys in Juvenile releasing him to me. They didn’t know me from Adam. I just showed them my badge and said I was there to pick up Albert Cousins. Two minutes later I’m signing for the kid and they’re handing him over. I would bet they don’t do it like that now, at least not with a juvenile. There were two or three other boys in his gang if I remember, a couple of blacks and a Mexican. The desk sergeant asked me if I wanted them too.”

“What did you do with them?” Franny said. How could she have heard a story so many times and just now realize that all of the interesting parts had been left out?

“I left them there. I didn’t want the one kid, I sure as hell wasn’t going to take all four of them. I remember he’d gone to the hospital first. He had a burn on his back from where his T-shirt caught fire. They gave him a scrub top to wear but he still stank of smoke. I made him keep the windows down in the car.”

“You’ve got a cold heart, Pops,” Caroline said.

“Cold heart my ass. I saved that kid. I was the one who got him out. I took him over to the fire station to see your uncle Tom. He was working Westchester then, all the way out by LAX. I was stuck in that airport traffic with Bert Cousins’s kid who smelled like a charcoal pit. He and Uncle Tom had their heart-to-heart about arson. You know your uncle was a childhood arsonist, used to burn things up all the time. Not schools, mind you, just empty lots and little things no one cared about. Lots of firemen got their start setting fires. They learn to set them, then they learn to put them out. Tom explained all that to Albie and then I drove him back to Torrance. It was a whole goddamn day in the car.”

“And that’s when you met Teresa Cousins,” Caroline said.

“And that’s when I met Teresa Cousins. Nice woman, I remember that. She’d really been through it but she kept her head up. That kid of hers, though, he was a wolf.”

“He improved,” Franny said.

“I’ll say he’s improved. First I find out he broke up your engagement to the Jew—” Fix held up his hand. “Wait, I did it again, sorry, the drunk, and now he’s worried about his mother.”

“We weren’t engaged,” Franny said.