The Dutch House(67)

It didn’t matter that we were living a very good life, a life my friends from medical school would never know unless they sold off pages from their prescription pads, Celeste would have preferred to introduce me as a doctor. My husband, Dr. Conroy. In fact she used to do it despite my requests she knock it off. My title was the source of most of the arguments we had that weren’t about my sister.

But that night in bed Celeste stretched out on top of me, her head against my shoulder, every argument worn out of her by the day. “Do my spine,” she said.

She hadn’t taken her shower yet and she still smelled like the ocean, like the wind coming over Brighton Beach. I reached my fingers beneath her hair and felt the base of her skull. “Atlas, axis, first cervical vertebra.” I pressed each one like a piano key, touch and then release, counting all seven. “Thoracic. You’ve got to do a better job with the sunscreen.”

“Hush. Don’t ruin it.”

“Thoracic.” I counted out the twelve, and then I got to the lumbar. I rubbed deep circles in her lower back until she made soft, cowlike sounds.

“Do you remember?” she asked.

“Of course I remember.” I loved the weight of her spread across me, the terrible heat coming off her skin.

“All those years I helped you study.”

“All those years you kept me from studying.” I kissed the top of her head.

“You were a great doctor,” she whispered.

“I was no such thing,” I said, but she raised her face to mine all the same.



Years and years after medical school was behind me, when some buildings I had bought and sold had turned enough of a profit to pay off our house and shore up our savings, I became fixated on the impossible notion of fairness. So much time and money had been wasted on my education, while nothing had come to Maeve. There was already a trust in place for May and Kevin, so why shouldn’t Maeve go to law school, business school? It wasn’t too late for that. She had always been the smart one, after all, and whatever she decided to study she could be a huge help to me.

“I’m already a huge help to you,” she said. “I don’t need a law degree for that.”

“Get a degree in mathematics then. I’m the last person to tell you to study something you’re not interested in. I just don’t want to see you give your entire life to Otterson’s.”

She was quiet for a minute. She was trying to decide whether or not she wanted to get into it. “Why does my job bother you so much?”

“Because it’s beneath you.” Everything in me leapt to tell her what she already knew. “Because it’s the job you got the summer you came home from college and you’re forty-eight and you’re still doing it. You were always pushing me to make more of myself. Why not let me return the favor?”

The madder Maeve got, the more thoughtful she became. In this way she reminded me of our father—every word she spoke came individually wrapped. “If this is my punishment for sending you to medical school, fine, I accept that. I wasn’t pushing you to make more of yourself anyway. I think you know that. But if you’re saying you’re interested in my livelihood then let me tell you: I like what I do. I like the people I work with. I like this company I’ve helped to grow. I’ve got job flexibility, health insurance that includes vision and dental, and enough paid vacation saved up that I could go around the world, but I don’t want to go around the world because I like my job.”

I don’t know why I wasn’t ready to let it go. “You might like something else, too. You haven’t tried.”

“Otterson needs me. Can you get that? He knows a lot about trucking and refrigeration and a little about vegetables and absolutely nothing about money. Every day I get to believe that I’m indispensable, so leave me alone.”

The full-time job she had at Otterson’s, Maeve did in half the time. At this point, Otterson didn’t care where she did her work or how much time she spent on it, she always got it done. He gave her the title of Chief Financial Officer, though I couldn’t imagine the company needed a CFO. She did the books for my business on the side, and never gave it anything less than her full attention. Maeve’s eye was on the sparrow: if a lightbulb burned out in the lobby of a building I owned, she wanted a record of its replacement. Once a week I mailed her a folder of receipts, bills, rent checks. She made note of everything in a ledger that was not unlike the one our father kept. We banked in Jenkintown, and Maeve’s name was on all the accounts. She wrote the checks. She kept up with New York state tax laws, city taxes, rebates, and incentives. She wrote firm and impartial letters to tenants who were past due. Once a month I included a check for her salary and once a month she failed to cash it.

“I pay you or I pay someone else,” I said. “And for someone else this would be an actual job.”

“You’d have to really hunt for someone who could turn this into a job.” The work she did for me she did over dinner at her kitchen table. “On Thursdays,” she said.

Maeve had long lived in a rented red brick bungalow two blocks from Immaculate Conception that had two bedrooms and a deep front porch. The kitchen was sunny, outdated, and looked over a wide rectangular yard where she planted dahlias and hollyhocks along the back fence. There was nothing wrong with the house really, other than it was too small: tiny closets, one bathroom.