Dreamland Social Club(70)

“But it was beloved by your beloved grandparents,” Marcus said with a hand to his heart for drama.

“Yeah,” Jane said. “And they’re gone.”

“Keep talking,” her father said.

Jane wiped her own mouth and hands with a napkin. “Well, I mean it had sentimental value to them but now they’re not here anymore, and it has sentimental value to me but I’m not sure the value I have trumps the value that Grandpa Claverack has.”

“But he’s going to sell it,” her brother said.

“And that’s his prerogative.”

“But that means it has no sentimental value to him, so none is less than whatever you have,” Marcus said.

“Yeah, but I don’t know. Maybe he’ll be sentimental once he has it. Maybe he’ll get it and then realize he doesn’t even want to sell it. Anyway, it’s just dumb for us to keep it.” She was about to say, “We’re mothballing,” but instead she just looked at her father and said, “We have no good reason to keep it is all.”

“This seems like an unexpected change of opinion.”

“I don’t know,” Jane said. “Maybe I’m just sick of looking at it there, sick of thinking about it. Call it, I don’t know”—a cool breeze tickled the kitchen curtains—“Call it spring cleaning. You said we had to clean out the house, Dad, and we haven’t even really started.”

“Well, now that you’ve brought it up”—he put his plate in the sink, then came back to the table—“I think we should talk about what my job means for us, for the house. Because if all goes well this week with the presentation, the Tsunami will be built. Which means I’d want to be here. I’d need to be here. I just wanted to see how you felt about that.”

Marcus said, “Whatever you want, Dad.”

“Well, that’s easy for you to say,” he replied. “You’re going away to college.”

Marcus had just that week started obsessively checking the mailbox hanging on the porch. Letters of acceptance—and Jane was sure they’d mostly be acceptances—were due to start arriving any day.

Their father said, “Jane, what about you?”

“When is the house officially mine and Marcus’s?” she asked, surprising herself. But all the talk of real estate this year made her realize that stuff like this was important. They hadn’t actually spoken in months about the fact that the fate of the house was really up to Jane and her brother, not their dad.

He rubbed his eyes and then looked at her. “The easiest thing would be to stay here until you’re both eighteen and entitled to proceeds. And then sell it and divide the money down the middle. Earlier than that and the money will go into a trust.”

“You want to stay until I’m eighteen?” Jane asked. In July she was going to be seventeen. That meant staying another year and a half or more. It meant graduating.

Her father shrugged. “Well, it depends on what happens with this vote.”

“I think I’m okay with that,” she said, though she wished this moment could have ended up being more joyful. The idea of spending more than one year somewhere—anywhere—was enough to make her want to cry with happiness, but things with Leo were complicated enough now that fleeing had its appeal, too. But it was better to be here on the wrong side of things than to be right but be gone. Wasn’t it?





Her father went to look for an ax, claiming he thought he’d seen one in the back of a closet on the second-floor hall. They were going to try to bust the horse free. Jane went into the living room and approached the horse and petted it the same way Leo had the night he’d come over. She wanted to ask her father whether he had known about the FOR LEASE signs, about the closings of the Anchor and Wonderland, but she almost didn’t want to know the answer. “I was thinking,” she said when he came in with the ax, “about the Tsunami.”

“What about it?” He knelt and surveyed the radiator, the chain.

“I was just thinking about how when they built this other roller coaster, the Thunderbolt, they ran the beams and stuff through the hotel that was in the way, so that they didn’t have to close it down.”

He rubbed his eyes. “Honey, I know it’s your friend’s father’s place, but you don’t know the whole story.”

“Well then, tell me.” She turned away from the horse.

“Okay,” he said. “Apparently, your friend’s father owes thousands of dollars in back rent because one day he just decided to stop paying.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Jane said, but her father just kept talking.

“They’ve been cited for violations of a few safety and fire regulations, which they’ve done nothing to fix, and they have a ton of open health code violations. There are rats, mice, roaches, you name it.”

“Loki made those up. Leo told me.”

“There’s video of the rats, honey. I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you,” he said. “But it’s really easy to romanticize a place like that if you get to thinking that way. It’s just not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s just not worth saving.”

“What is, then?” Jane grew suddenly angry, remembering the trash bags on the porch. “What does someone like you think is worth saving?”