Tuesday Mooney Wore Black

by Kate Racculia

  “Weird how?” his mother asked.

  “He was wearing a top hat,” said Archie.

  Vince came for lunch. His mother had extended the invitation when she returned his plate, something Archie didn’t know she’d done until Vince reappeared with it at the door, heaped, again, with cookies. He was wearing a pith helmet and a Hawaiian shirt with interlocking pink flamingos on a black background, and they drank gin and tonics and ate lobster rolls on the great patio overlooking the sea.

  Vince came back a week later. Vince came back three days after that. Vince kept coming back until he was coming daily. At first the intrusion was annoying. Archie resented the interruption to his self-centered wallow, begrudged feeling half awake at lunchtime, whenever Vince was in the house. Vince was strange and smart and funny; Vince was warm and nice and the opposite of his father. Vince made his mother laugh. Archie had forgotten what that sounded like, or felt like – to hear his mother laugh. Her eyes sparkled. Which was such a stupid cliché, but it was true. His mother’s eyes crinkled and filled and caught the light. Every day Vince asked him what he thought about things; he actually cared about Archie’s opinions. Vince prodded him, one question at a time, to imagine other lives for himself. What did he think about the law? What did he think about piloting his own hot-air balloon? What did he think about becoming a librarian?

  “Archie,” he said – it was Vince who had first called him Archie – “tomorrow you could be anyone. Imagine that.”

  It wasn’t that Archie suspected his mother was having an affair with Vince, though he wouldn’t have blamed her. He’d forgotten she could be this other person, this lighter person, who hummed to herself, who looked at the sky and the ocean, who noticed the world with something like hope, and he didn’t care who or what was making it possible. Vince had snuck up on them both. In the span of a month, the weirdo next door had become a person who made their house feel, improbably, like a kind of home.

  Archie loved that this friendship was theirs, together. It was like he had a secret other family, a family that was easy – not easy the way being an Arches already was, but easy because it was safe. Because it was made up of people who took care of one another.

  Of course it couldn’t last.

  Of course his real family would ruin everything.

  “In Pryce’s collection,” Archie told Tuesday, “is a copy of my father’s will.”

  She made a face.

  A skeptical face.

  “You don’t believe me?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you believe me?”

  “Because it doesn’t make sense.”

  “Not everything does,” he said. The lie was twisting his gut so hard he would’ve been embarrassed for her if she didn’t notice. Why had he made the lie more complicated than the truth? Wasn’t the first rule of lying to keep it simple?

  “Granted,” she said. “But it really doesn’t make sense. That your father would give a copy of his will to a man he publicly and violently disliked. Unless Vince got a copy without your father knowing, which also – doesn’t make sense. Unless—”

  Archie sat completely still and watched. He was better at the second rule of lying: once you’re down in the hole, stop digging.

  “Unless this has something to do with your mother. Or your sister.” She hooked her front teeth into her lower lip. “What does the will say?” Tuesday lurched forward, hands gripping the binder. “How do you even know he has it?”

  “I saw it. Six years ago. Before I left.” Tuesday looked at him. Archie looked back. He could have searched her face forever. Could have hunted the dark arches of her brows for clues, the full roll of her lips for hints. Her face didn’t so much conceal the riot of the mind behind it as it did contain and frame it, like a door to a strange new universe. He hated that the only way he could talk about his life was to lie. He hated that he could lie, even to her. But Nathaniel was a fucking monster, and this was the only way he could think to throw her off the scent. “I don’t know what the will says. I don’t know if it reinforces or rewrites the succession plan at Arches Consolidated,” he said. “But I think it’s worth finding.”

  “That’s what you want, from Pryce’s collection.” Tuesday didn’t look away. She didn’t blink. She flushed, again, with the satisfaction of knowing. Despite not knowing the half of it. “That’s why you’re playing this game.”

  “Yes,” said Archie. He smiled because he couldn’t help it. He was playing several games at the moment, and if he was very lucky, he might possibly win them all.

  Something rattled twice.

  “What’s that?” asked Tuesday.

  He looked away from her, over his shoulder, and the room felt cooler. His cell phone chatter-pulsed and flashed on the coffee table.

  “You have a flip phone.” Tuesday sat back with a smirk. “Like a drug dealer.”

  “Like someone who prefers to be slightly less—”

  “Like a drug dealer.”

  “Available.”

  “And here—” She flipped through the white binder until she found the research she was looking for. She marked it with the tip of her finger. “Boston magazine says you’re one of the city’s five most eligible heirs.”

  “You’re thinking of my brother.” Only: I am not my brother, he thought. He tapped his chest with the tip of his own finger. Light, like it was funny. “I’m the spare.”

  “Who can tell you apart?” Tuesday said.

  Archie shrugged.

  Ha ha ha.

  My brother and I.

  The killers.

  She nodded at his still-vibrating phone. “Are you going to answer that or let it go to your service?”

  “I ordered delivery before I knew you were bringing takeout,” he said, wondering, after all of this, how he could have any appetite at all. But he did. He could’ve eaten the table. He could’ve eaten the chairs. Just so long as it meant he could use his mouth, his lips, and his tongue for some activity other than lying. “How do you feel about Thai?”

  Tuesday pushed back from the table and turned so he could see when she slid off one shoe, then the other. She dug her naked toes into the deep plush of the rug. Archie’s face filled with heat.

  “Still hungry,” she said.

  11

  MUCH WORSE

  On Tuesday morning, Mo popped her head over the wall of Tuesday’s cube and asked her to step into her office.

  There was no reason to suspect Mo’s request was unusual – not considering everything else in Tuesday’s life at that moment. Dorry had blown off tutoring, and when Tuesday did pass her in the vestibule that weekend, she was texting and giggling and bumping, gently, into the mailboxes. Then Dex – who’d been enthralled to learn, via text, that Archie wasn’t Nathaniel but another Arches entirely (good lord, he’d texted, he’s a mess, a perfect mess, how do you attract these ridiculous should-only-exist-in-Wodehouse imposter menfolk, and Tuesday had responded, he is literally the first man like this I have ever met) – had blown her off too. He had some funky irons in the fire that required his complete attention, and when she responded, ???, he’d replied, two can play the withholding game – which stung. She wasn’t used to wanting Dex’s attention, let alone wanting it and being rejected. It dropped her into a blue mood that only the developing Archie situation, in all its abject novelty, was capable of snapping her out of.

  The Archie situation was a Situation. Archie had a scheme. A scheme to use Vincent Pryce’s game to get back what he thought was his, or at least to make sure it didn’t fall into his brother’s nefarious hands – or something to that effect. Tuesday knew he was still lying to her. But enough of the truth was out between them now that the difference was palpable. Archie was wearing his own skin. He was warmer and looser. For the first time, she knew she was playing Pryce’s game with him, that even if there wasn’t absolute honesty between them, their interests were aligned. They were ticking in rhythm, giving and taking.

  “Wh
at’s the point of this game?” she had asked him. “You knew him. What would Vince mean by ‘seeking well’?” They’d moved on from the Thai to dessert – a pint of chocolate ice cream left in the freezer, which might well have last been eaten by Vincent Pryce himself. “What’s the money for?”

  “Use your imagination,” said Archie.

  “I know. That’s what Pryce—”

  “I know,” said Archie. “I’m saying, there’s no trick to it. Vince was big on imagination. On being able to step into other lives. Other futures. Other worlds. Imagining other things and people and ways of living and letting that … change you, I guess.” He shook his head. “He was trying to get me to snap out of it.”

  “It?”

  “My life. My life of obscene—” He scrunched up his nose. “Just – disgusting – waste. We didn’t use our money to build anything, or help anyone, or make anything better. We used it to insulate ourselves, and it was suffocating. I mean – use your money however the hell you want, and if that’s how you want to live, like, sure. But I didn’t want to live that way. I don’t.”

  “That’s why you left.”

  “I have the Arches nose.” He drew his finger down from his brow. “And I have the Arches hunger. But I did not want to live like an Arches. Like my brother. Or my father—”

  Every time he mentioned his father, every single time, the part of Tuesday that knew how it felt to live with that kind of unfinished thought thrummed. She was dangerously close now to telling him what she hadn’t told another soul – not for half her life. She almost said: That’s what I recognized the first time I saw you. Not your brother but your father. Your father, and the weight of his absence. I know.

  I know how it feels to be haunted.

  But she didn’t.

  She left him not long after. She didn’t kiss him. She wanted to, but she also wanted to prolong the inevitable, stretch that feeling between them like warm taffy, because that game was its own kind of satisfaction. All weekend, they texted. They sent jokes. Ridiculous ideas about how to play Pryce’s game. How about a down payment on a precision driving machine? said Archie, and Tuesday replied, I’m not parking anything precision on the street in Somerville. Next she suggested they get drunk and clean out a dollar store. Archie thought that didn’t entirely fit the brief. Let’s spend it all on balloons, said Tuesday. Then WAIT HALT I’VE GOT IT, said Archie, followed by a picture of the green and red retro sign outside Modern Pastry.

  I’ve always wanted to see what thirteen thousand dollars’ worth of cannoli looks like, he said.

  It looks like heaven, she said. Also if you’re in the North End you’re close to my office BRING ME PASTRY

  And he did. That Monday, at three in the afternoon, Archie sent her a text that would have been deeply alarming in almost any other context, which was how Tuesday knew she had officially gone around the bend.

  Look out your window

  A small cardboard pastry box tied with blue and white string was sitting on the outside ledge of her cube’s floor-to-ceiling window.

  Yes, since confronting Archie on Friday night, Tuesday had become the kind of person who flirted stupidly via text. She felt a little delirious. But even in her delirium, she insisted on a plan: dinner on Tuesday night at Vince’s condo. Archie would cook. They would decide what to do with the money, and what they would tell Lyle Pryce when they were granted their audience. Tuesday felt certain that, with all the energy they were bouncing off each other, she and Archie would come up with a plan that was as good as anyone’s. As good or better, because Archie had known Vince, and Tuesday had met Lyle. They had an innately better hand than the forty-nine other players and teams – the Globe was cataloging and interviewing them daily – and they only needed to figure out how to play it well, together.

  For that, they would use their imaginations.

  Given all that, there was no reason for her to suspect Mo was calling her into her office on Tuesday morning for any reason other than to watch a new stupid cat video on YouTube.

  Mo let Tuesday walk ahead of her and closed the door.

  That was strange.

  “Whoa,” said Tuesday, sitting down. “What’s up?”

  Mo didn’t say anything. She sat behind her desk, which, Tuesday noticed, was clean.

  “Did you – straighten?” Tuesday rolled back in her chair – freely, unstopped by stacks of paper and old issues of Town & Country. “You only straighten when—” When someone important was stopping by. But why would someone important stop by for a meeting that would also include Tuesday? And Mo, sitting at her clean desk, tucking her hair behind her ear, looking—

  Somber.

  “Oh,” said Tuesday.

  “Do you get it now?” asked Mo.

  “I get that it isn’t good,” said Tuesday.

  “It’s not good,” said Mo.

  “What—” Tuesday’s mental files flipped, fluttered, shuffled like cards. All she felt was breeze. “What’s going—”

  Mo’s door opened and three people joined them. The first, June MacRea, the big boss, the VP, head of the whole development office, took an extra chair Tuesday now noticed behind Mo. The second was a woman Tuesday didn’t recognize. She was wearing a blazer over her dress and she wasn’t smiling.

  The third person was Nathaniel Arches.

  He looked even sharper than when he’d taken her out to lunch. Glistening. Slippery, almost. Or maybe that was because, in the meantime, she’d gotten more familiar with his brother – his lumpier, softer, stranger brother. Nathaniel was an uncanny mirror now, bright and careless as a knife. He sat in the rolling chair beside Tuesday, brushing at his impeccable suit. This early in the day, he was practically dew-dropped with aftershave. He slotted his hands neatly together, finger on finger – his knuckles were raw, like he’d been working a heavy bag – straightened his shoulders, did not look at her.

  Tuesday’s fingertips went cold.

  “We have an unfortunate situation,” said June.

  Tuesday had always liked June, though before this morning they’d hardly spoken a dozen words to each other. She was probably in her mid- to late sixties. She was slim, tailored, and wore a lot of tweed, and rumor had it that she purposely downplayed her skills on the golf course with male donors of a certain age – those male donors who agreed to go golfing with her in the first place. Because of this, Tuesday primarily felt frustration on her behalf. But at the moment, when it was becoming clearer and clearer that Tuesday was in some serious shit, what she felt was a gut-deep shiver of reverence.

  “Tuesday,” June said, and Tuesday twitched a little. “We have to let you go.”

  The coldness in her fingertips shot up both arms. She looked at Mo, desperate, not caring if it showed. She looked at the stranger, and thought, HR. She had to be from the hospital’s administration. An impartial witness to make sure—

  “We have evidence that you’ve spent a fair amount of office time and resources on a project not related to your employment here,” continued June. “You violated patient privacy, accessing medical records for reasons unrelated to your job, which, as you well know, is illegal. Coupled with your recent publicity—”

  “She means,” said Nathaniel Arches, out of the side of his mouth, “those pinups in the Metro.”

  It was not Tuesday’s imagination that both June and Mo bristled at “pinups.” Which made everything clear: this firing was not their choice. Their hands were being forced. This firing was the express desire of Nathaniel Arches, because he could, because it was their job to do what the money wanted. And because Tuesday, like an idiot, had given him all the ammunition by – holy shit—

  Mo opened one of her drawers. She pulled out the three-ring binder of research Tuesday had last seen on the dining room table of Vincent Pryce’s Beacon Hill apartment.

  “Do you recognize this?” Mo asked. She flipped the binder open.

  “Yes,” said Tuesday, though she didn’t know how she still had the power of speech
when all the air had been sucked out of her body.

  She had left it.

  Left it for Archie.

  “Keep it,” she’d told him. “Read it. Let me know what I missed.”

  “I sincerely doubt,” he’d said, “that you missed much of anything.”

  “Except you,” she said.

  She’d trusted Archie to keep it to himself.

  She had trusted him.

  “You,” said Nathaniel Arches, “are an odious woman.”

  Tuesday’s hands and arms no longer felt like ice. Now they felt like rubber bands.

  “I,” she started, but her voice had evaporated. She tried to swallow, and when she continued it came out like a wheeze. “I am good at my job.” She addressed June and Mo. “And I sincerely regret that I abused the tools of this job to perform a different task than what I was hired for. And I did.” She made two fists. “I did everything you said. That was arrogant and careless, and I’m sorry. It’s appropriate to fire me. It’s egregious that this—”

  Her pulse hammered.

  “—it’s egregious that this asshole gets to be here while you do it,” she said, and Nathaniel laughed. “What did he do, bribe you?” She looked at June. “He brought you the binder and made you a deal, right? Fire me while he watches, and he won’t sue? Maybe he’ll make a gift? Six figures? Maybe more?”

  Tuesday showed all her teeth to Nathaniel. “How much am I worth to you?” she hissed.

  Mo’s face was bright red. She looked anguished. “Tuesday,” she said, “please don’t make—”

  “I won’t,” she said. “I understand why I’m being fired. I’ll be fine. Six figures can do some good. I’m one person. One person, one person who is actually guilty, is an acceptable loss.” She rested her fingertips on Mo’s desk. “I would do the same,” she said quietly.

  “We have to ask you to clean out your things right now,” said the stranger from HR. Her voice was surprisingly high. “Maureen will escort you out.”