Alternate Side(56)

“You think they’ll be able to find another housekeeper?” Nora had asked Charity.

“For sure and certain,” Charity said. “People always needing jobs.”

Grace had begun to get angry months ago, when Sherry asked her not to take a get-well card from house to house for the other housekeepers to sign for Ricky. “We got free speech like everybody,” Grace told Charity.

“Please don’t talk to reporters,” Nora had said at the time, and Charity made her explosive dismissive sound, although Nora was not sure whether it was aimed at reporters or her request. They had had a terrible time when the Rizzoli grandchildren had been interviewed on their way down the block from the school bus. Their sitter had stopped to talk to Grace, and so the magazine writer James had mentioned to Nora had had a few minutes to pretend to be merely a friendly passerby with a cellphone set to record in his hand.

“When I had strep throat, Ricky gave me honey candies and they made my throat feel better,” the little girl apparently said.

“My mom says Mr. Fisk needs to learn to get his temper under control,” said the boy. “She says let this be a lesson to me to use my words and not my hands.”

So Sherry had also stopped speaking to the Rizzolis. She had suggested to the wife that her children were inadequately supervised, and the Rizzoli wife had said that it was clear the person in need of supervision was Jack Fisk. And so on and so forth. It was the first time anyone could remember the block erupting in this kind of discord. It had always protected its own, the facing houses seeming to agree, cornice to cornice, window to window, that intimacy and privacy could exist together. For years, the elder Mrs. Rizzoli had attended both the Fenstermacher holiday party and the barbecue as drunk as a woman could be and still remain upright, and no one had said a word. Nor had they taken notice, except covertly, when she disappeared for several months and came back for a year of sparkling water with lime, followed by the addition of the occasional glass of wine, followed by the holiday party, at which she’d fallen into the tree, and then another stint away. Because of her senior status on the bench, Linda was able to take off the entire month of August and move to their beach house, Harold driving out late on Thursdays, and no one mentioned that Harold spent many weekday nights away from their house on the block, which could be because he had a sofa bed in his office (unlikely) or stayed with his sister at her townhouse in the Village (perhaps). Or it could be that while August was a time for Linda to play tennis with her friends and have her nieces come and stay, it was a time for Harold to spend the night with his girlfriend, who, in the way of girlfriends everywhere, would hope that August would turn into December, girlfriend into second wife.

Or maybe it wasn’t girlfriends at all. Maybe it was boyfriends. All of it was none of their business. Nora thought that her friends who lived elsewhere felt free to gossip about their neighbors because they didn’t know them, and about their friends because they knew them too well. But the people who lived on the block existed in some weird nether region between the two, and that made all of them protective of one another. They had been able to turn aside from one another’s secrets and setbacks until Jack Fisk had taken that three iron from his car trunk.

“I hate to say this,” Linda Lessman had told her, “but I think we need to hire somebody else to do things around the house.”

James’s friend the magazine writer had written a loathsome piece about the block, suggesting that it was a bastion of white privilege served by people who were frequently mistreated by those for whom they worked. He had asked Charity if the Nolans paid her on the books. “Go away, fool,” Charity said, snapping a finger in his face, “or I’m gonna hit you.” He had seemed to take special pleasure in comparing the holdings of the Museum of Jewelry with Charity’s public-television tote bag and imitation leather jacket. Nora took pleasure in the way Charity had schooled him, and in the fact that what was supposed to be a cover story had merely been two pages near the back of the issue.

“Boy, this guy was really out to get you,” Charlie said, looking up from the magazine.

“I’m sorry, Moneypenny,” James said when the story appeared. “I should have known he was a class-A little pissant.”

“He’s turned into a little pissant already? What was it, a couple of months? Am I the longest romantic relationship you’ve ever had?”

There was silence, and then James said sadly, “I suppose that’s true, but it’s not a fair point. In the beginning they all died.”

“And now?”

“They’re all so young,” he said.

“You could fix that.”

“I suppose that’s true, too.”





When she first woke Nora had one of those moments in which she wasn’t sure where she was. A sharp sliver of silver daylight had broken through closed drapes and maneuvered itself across her face, or maybe she’d maneuvered her face out of the shadows and into the glare as she slept. She rolled over and heard Charlie singing in the bathroom. He was giving it his all. Then she realized she was in a hotel room, and hoped that the walls were solidly built, not just because Charlie was singing so loudly but because they’d had sex the night before, and her headache and the soreness in her thighs made her suspect that both of them had been loud then, too.

Charlie had always had a thing about hotels, maybe because he’d lost his virginity in a Holiday Inn on prom night his junior year. Nora remembered taking the twins to college that first time and a hotel room in Boston, where she and Charlie had had frantic sex while both of them wept drunkenly. They’d even broken a lamp. She looked at the bedside tables. Both lamps were intact. That she would have remembered, although she was powerfully hungover. Nora had a thing about hotels, too, but it was entirely different from her husband’s. Sometimes she had a momentary fantasy of never checking out, of living forever in a state of constant impermanence, no address, no lightbulbs or shampoo to buy, no shopping, chopping, or cooking for breakfast. French-press coffee and a vegetable omelet on a tray with butter in little curls. Then she packed up and went home.