The Dutch House(30)

“That’s legal?”

“All assets are passed by operation of the law to his wife because of joint titling. Are you following this? I know it took me a minute.”

“I’m following.” I wasn’t sure that was true.

“Smart boy. The same goes for the house. The house and all its contents.”

“And Lawyer Gooch did this?” I knew Lawyer Gooch. He came to my basketball games sometimes and sat in the bleachers with our father. Two of his sons had gone to Bishop McDevitt.

“Oh, no.” She shook her head. She liked Lawyer Gooch. “Andrea came with her own lawyer. Someone in Philadelphia. Big firm. Lawyer Gooch said he talked to Dad about it many times, and you know what Dad said? He said, ‘Andrea’s a good mother. She’ll look after the children.’ Like, he married her because he thought she was good with children.”

“What about the will?” Maybe Maeve was right about the second generation because even I knew enough to ask about a will.

She shook her head. “No will.”

I sat down in a kitchen chair and took a long drink. I looked up at my sister. “Why aren’t we screaming?”

“We’re still in shock.”

“There has to be a way out of this.”

Maeve nodded. “I think so, too. I know I’m going to try. But Lawyer Gooch told me not to get my hopes up. Dad knew what he was doing. He was competent. She didn’t make him sign the papers.”

“Of course she made him!”

“I mean she didn’t hold a gun to his head. Think about it: Mommy leaves him, then this slinky chinchilla comes along and tells him she’s never going to leave him. She wants to be part of everything he does, what’s mine is yours. She’ll look after all of it and he’ll never have to worry.”

“Well, that much is true. He doesn’t have to worry.”

“The wife of four years gets it all. She even owns my car. Lawyer Gooch told me that. She owns my car but she told him I could keep it. I’m definitely going to sell it before she changes her mind. I think I’m going to get a Volkswagen. What do you think?”

“Why not?”

Maeve nodded. “You’re smart,” she said, “and I’m pretty smart, and I used to think Dad was smart, but the three of us together couldn’t hold a candle to Andrea Smith Conroy. Lawyer Gooch wants you and me to come in together. He said there are still a few things left to go over. He said he’d keep working on our behalf, free of charge.”

“It would have been better if he’d worked on our behalf while Dad was still alive.”

“Apparently he tried. He said Dad didn’t think he was old enough for a will.” Maeve thought about this for a minute. “I bet Andrea has a will.”

I drained my beer while Maeve leaned against the stove and smoked. We were delinquents in our own small way. “Two dead husbands,” I said, though Andrea must have been, what then? Thirty-four? Thirty-five? Ancient by the standards of a teenaged boy. “Did you ever wonder what happened to Mr. Smith?” I asked.

“Never once.”

I shook my head. “Me neither. That’s strange, isn’t it? That we never thought about Mr. Smith, how he died?”

“What makes you think he’s dead? I always thought he put her out on the curb with the kids, and Dad must have driven by at just the wrong moment, offered them a ride.”

“I feel bad for Norma and Bright over there by themselves.”

“May they rot in hell.” Maeve stubbed her cigarette out on a saucer. “All three of them.”

“You don’t mean that,” I said. “Not the girls.”

My sister reared back with such ferocity that for a split second I thought she meant to hit me. “She stole from us. Do you not understand that? They’re sleeping in our beds and eating off our plates and we will never, never get any of it back.”

I nodded. What I wanted to say, what I did not say, was that I’d been thinking the same thing about our father. We would never get him back.



Maeve and I set up housekeeping together. We found a secondhand dresser at the Goodwill and stuck it in the corner of the bedroom so I could put my clothes away. I still didn’t like taking the bedroom, but every night, Maeve went to the couch with her stack of blankets. I wanted to ask her about finding a bigger place, but seeing as how it was all on her—our food and our shelter—I thought better of it.

When everything was all set up, we called Sandy and Jocelyn to come and see what we’d accomplished. Maeve brought home a white box of cookies from the bakery. She arranged the cookies on a plate and threw out the box, as if we were going to fool them. I straightened up the cushions on the couch, she put away the glasses that were in the drainboard. When the bell finally rang we threw open the door and the four of us exploded with joy. What a reunion! You would have thought it had been years since we’d seen one another.

It had been two weeks.

“Look at you,” Sandy said, reaching up to put her hands on my shoulders. I thought her hair was grayer. There were tears in her eyes.

Sandy and Jocelyn hugged us and kissed us in a way they never had at home. Jocelyn was wearing dungarees and Sandy had on a cotton skirt with cheap tennis shoes. They were regular people now, not the people who worked for us. Still, they handed over one big jar of minestrone soup (Maeve’s favorite) and another of beef stew (mine).