Alternate Side(8)

Oliver had always liked the idea of being one of two. Rachel, not so much. “It’s a good thing we’re not identicals,” she said more than once.

“A boy and a girl, identical twins,” Oliver said. “That would be one for the bio books.” Rachel’s singularity was her national flag, her official seal.

“I saw some people on campus—they had triplets,” Oliver said to Nora now.

“God bless them,” Nora said.

A group of Japanese tourists wearing surgical masks went by, taking pictures of one another without bothering to lower the masks. Nora sighed again. “I wish your sister would stop pushing my buttons,” Nora said.

“She’s fine, Mom,” Oliver said. “I know you feel like she unloads on you, but sometimes she just goes down a rabbit hole. She’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

“Okay, now I’m worried.”

“No, don’t be, it’s just—be cool. Senior year is hard on people. Not me so much, but a lot of people. She’s just a lot more breakable than she seems sometimes.”

“Ollie, if you’re trying to make me feel better, you’re not doing such a great job.”

“Mom,” said Oliver. “Everything’s fine. Just cut her some slack.”

Nora watched Charlie put his arm around Rachel’s shoulder. She had spent some of the best years of her life worrying about Rachel, staring at the bedroom ceiling as Charlie snored beside her, thinking mainly about terrible things she’d read about in magazines. If Rachel lost weight, Nora worried that she was anorexic. If she was distracted, Nora worried that she was taking drugs. The sound of vomiting echoing through the stairwell during high school first thing in the morning—that one didn’t even bear thinking about. Alma Fenstermacher, who was twenty years older than Nora, once said there was a fine line between worrying about your daughter getting pregnant accidentally, and obsessing about when she would finally give you grandchildren. Luckily Rachel threw up in the morning only twice, once because of tequila, once because of bad sushi. Nora worried about her no less now that she was out of the house much of the time, and she didn’t suppose she would worry about her any less even when she was gone for good. Which Nora thought was a horrible turn of phrase.

Nora rarely worried about Oliver. That worried her.

“Ollie, want to check out the parking space when we get home?” Charlie called as Rachel leaned into him.

“Wait until the first time he has to dig the car out after a snowstorm,” Sherry Fisk had said.

“Charlie says he finally feels like he’s part of the block,” Nora said, as Sherry rolled her eyes.

Nora had felt as though they were part of the block long before, when the twins had been invited to babysit for the Rizzoli grandchildren (which had sometimes consisted of Nora helping to sit for the Rizzoli grandchildren), when they’d received their first invitation to the holiday party on Alma Fenstermacher’s beautiful thick note cards with the engraved border of holly, but especially when Ricky first rang their bell. For Nora, Ricky was one of the two linchpins of a daily existence that, between the house, the twins, the dog, and the job, was always in danger of tumbling out of control in some minor but annoying way, like a persistent itch. They had lived on the block for almost six months when the doorbell rang on a Saturday morning. The twins, who had spent their first nine years in an apartment, were still agog at the idea of answering their own door, and ran down the stairs, shoving each other aside.

“It’s some man who wants to talk to you or Daddy,” Rachel said. “I said Daddy was at work. Like always.”

The man at the door was someone Nora had already seen dozens of times on the block, wearing a uniform of drab green pants and matching shirt, often with two or three others trailing behind him. “Missus,” he said, removing a baseball cap that said METROPOLITAN LUMBER, “my name is Ricky. I do fixing, painting, putting out the recycle, you name it. I am reasonable and reliable.” There was no doubt that it was a carefully rehearsed speech.

He handed her a slightly grubby business card. ENRIQUE RAMOS, it said, with a phone number.

Satisfaction guaranteed.

No job too small.

Reasonable rates.

References available.

He’d crammed every cliché from every small business onto the card, so that the type was almost unreadable, it was so tiny. George had been his patron then, telling everyone he met that Ricky had done a great job rebuilding the brick wall in his backyard. “Rock-bottom prices,” he said.

Nora insisted that the twins address him as Mr. Ramos, and she never called him Ricky when she spoke to him directly. “Enrique,” she would say when she ran into him on the street, “there’s a short in that backyard light again.” Or there was a problem with Oliver’s toilet, or a clogged sink in the basement, or a tap in Rachel’s bathroom that dripped, and, according to Rachel, kept her from sleeping for even a single minute during the night. Ricky would ring the bell and stand just inside the front door slipping paper covers over his shoes, the kind that surgeons wore when they were operating. If it was a bigger job, he would have one of his guys with him, but Nora had never learned any of their names and they rarely spoke. Once there had been a young one with gelled hair ridged into rows like a cornfield and a shabby little soul patch flaring beneath his lower lip. He had arrived with Ricky and another guy to reattach a section of the furnace duct work that had come loose. Rachel had gotten home from school as the young guy was pulling off his shoe covers, and he had said, “Hola, chica,” and Ricky had let loose a string of Spanish that Rachel said she had not understood despite an immersive summer program. What Nora understood was that she never saw the young guy again. “He’s gone,” Charity said darkly.