The Middlesteins: A Novel(72)

In the living room, his daughter death-stared him. Her eyes were sloppy with anger. It was spilling out everywhere. What a mess. Danny stood behind her and gripped her shoulders, and Robin reached back and pried his hands away from her. Danny winced. I’d happily walk her down the aisle just to get rid of her, thought Richard. Hand her off to that guy in a heartbeat. Robin got up from her chair, and again the crowd cleared a path for her, and again people stared. She marched up to Richard and past him—leaving behind only the slightest trail of a sneer—and toward the kitchen, where she paused and then dramatically shoved open the swinging door that separated it from the living room. Richard could see his daughter-in-law, Rachelle, inside, a cup of coffee in her hands, leaning against the refrigerator. Rachelle was the captain of this ship, and Robin was a rebellious sailor. Mutiny was clearly afoot. “We have to talk,” was the last thing he heard before the swinging door settled to a close.

Richard turned his attention to the circular dessert table, where Josh was opening boxes of pastries and shifting them onto a giant vaseline-glass dish that Richard recognized as one of his aunt’s. She had brought it with her from Germany when she immigrated and left it to him when she died, along with a houseful of furniture, which he had since sold or donated to charity. But he had kept the dish. It was made of uranium, and it was light green and glowed faintly like kryptonite. It was a neat trick: The dish was made of a volatile substance, but had been turned into something useful. As a child in Queens, he had been mesmerized by it. He would fantasize about it exploding spontaneously. Poof! The Middlesteins would be gone forever.

A week earlier that dish had been sitting in Richard’s former living-room cabinet, and now, suddenly, it was on his son’s dining room table. He bet that his house had been ransacked. Rachelle had probably gone through every cabinet and drawer and taken whatever she liked, antiques, jewelry, those two fur coats. Now he was going to have to have a conversation with his son about it. That was his plate, everything in that house was his, lock, stock, and barrel. No papers had been signed, nothing had been filed. If Edie had lived a bit longer, it’s possible he would have had no say on that plate whatsoever. But she hadn’t. Edie was dead.

Josh had opened the last pastry box and was arranging a small assortment of chocolate-dipped cookies around the edge of the dish. When he finished, he moved the dish directly into the center of the table, and then took a step away, examined the table, and smiled. Middlestein glanced over, and then looked back: Josh had arranged the cookies on the plate in the shape of a smiley face.

“Josh!” he said.

“What?” said Josh.

“You can’t do that.” He pointed at the plate. “That’s not appropriate,” he said. Thirteen years old, and no common sense. Had he had common sense at that age? Can that even be taught?

“I thought it would cheer people up,” said Josh. “Everyone’s so sad.”

“Aren’t you sad?” said Middlestein.

“I don’t know what I am,” said Josh.

“Well, you should be sad,” he said. “It’s a terrible thing that happened, your grandmother dying.”

“You think I don’t know that?” said Josh. 5-4-3-2-1, and he was in tears. Then he ran out of the living room, and upstairs, and everyone in the room stared at Middlestein, and if he wasn’t already the most horrible person in the room, this sealed the deal.

In the kitchen, Robin was confirming it with that mouth she had inherited from her mother: loud, big, bossy, and self-righteous. He walked to the swinging door and leaned against the wall next to it, listening to her yell.

“You don’t know anything,” she was saying to Rachelle.

“They were married for nearly forty years,” said Rachelle. “You don’t know what that’s like.”

“I see. So you’re superior to me because you’re married and I’m not.”

“That’s not what I’m saying, Robin.”

“She hated him. Don’t you understand that?”

They were arguing about the rights of the living versus the dead. It was true, his wife had hated him, not just after he had left her but before then, too. Yet he had hoped in this small way that eventually, after they had divorced and everything had settled down, he with his new girlfriend Beverly, her with that Chinese man she had been dating recently (who had just arrived, and was now standing in the corner of the living room with his purple-haired daughter, the both of them stunned and silent), after they all had rearranged themselves into new formations, that he and Edie would be able to come back together as friends.