The Never Never Sisters

by L. Alison Heller

  “Can we rehash it tomorrow?”

  “Of course.” I put down my bag. This was a work issue, separate from us, and the best I could do was avoid a major fight by stepping back and listening. Everyone craves being understood. We need it; we work for it; we exhaust our vocabularies to make sure we’ve properly communicated our viewpoints. But we don’t put in one-eighth of that effort trying to understand others. I swear it’s physiological, because even knowing this, I’d felt it myself thirty seconds before—an ember in the pit of my stomach driving me to push back at Dave’s adolescent sulk.

  “I’m sorry for being a dick.”

  I waved my hand, magnanimous and a little proud of myself for my measured reactions. It wasn’t ever easy.

  “I’m going to set up an office in the guest room.”

  “Yeah?” One of the summer projects on which I was already behind was renovating the guest room. Ian, our decorator, and I had a big meeting planned for the following week, and by then I was supposed to have cleared out everything Ian had tagged during our last meeting. “Creating the canvas,” he’d called it, because Ian was a person who said such things without irony. “You’re not going to work in the office alcove?”

  “That’s not really an office. It’s more like a desk in the kitchen.”

  “Oh.”

  “I think I’ll need more space.”

  “Fair point.” Dave and I were a little out of our league with Ian; we’d have never been able to command an audience with him if he hadn’t just completed a huge job for my parents. I was already on thin ice; last month Ian had not at all been happy when I changed my mind about the window shade fabric. He and I had only just recently reestablished our delicate rapport—a sensei-protégé dynamic that worked best when Ian spouted wisdom and rattled off designer names and I listened, wide-eyed, trying to think of good questions to ask that would prove I’d been paying attention.

  I couldn’t imagine how long I’d pay the price if I canceled next week’s meeting. Nor, I realized, could I explain to Dave that my decorator anxiety meant no home office for him.

  “There’s a lot of crap in here.” Dave had walked to the door of the office. “And what’s all this tape everywhere?” He ripped off a long piece from a lampshade and held it up for my inspection.

  “It’s for the renovation.” I opened the closet to a solid wall of boxes that we’d stacked up to the ceiling when we first moved in three years before. Honestly, I’d forgotten they were there. The mess was apparently the last straw for Dave, who slid down along the wall until he was sitting in a heap on the floor.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll get rid of all of it. I’ll move the boxes to the bedroom and we can put the renovation piles in here.” Right at my eye level was a box labeled in my mom’s slanted handwriting: Paige, Childhood. Seeing it, I felt a fresh, perhaps overly dramatic, wave of urgency. Like many therapists, I had a keen awareness of the unhealthy family dynamics that I would not pass down to the next generation. There would be no secret-filled box for Dave and me.

  “Dave,” I said, “we have to air the ugly things.”

  He saw me looking at the box and nodded, realizing what I was thinking. “It’s not like that,” he said. “I’m just tired.”

  So I helped him plug in the cords, clear off the desk and shove into the closet anything that might distract him from his work. After a half hour of item shuffling, we surveyed the room. “This looks good,” I said, although it didn’t.

  “Yeah. Well.” He sat down gingerly, fidgeting around before extending his arms like a virtuoso pianist. “I should probably get some work done.” And then, before I was out the door, he started typing, his fingers scrambling in constant motion across the keyboard as though they were being chased.

  chapter three

  WHEN I WOKE up the next morning, Dave had already gotten out of bed. I found him in the living room, his posture incongruently rigid for someone watching television on the couch in boxer shorts. The anchor of the financial news channel—the woman with the last name that sounded like a Mediterranean island—leaned forward, and Dave did too: “FBI agents swarmed and arrested thirty-one-year-old Louis Gallent in the parking lot of his San Francisco hedge fund yesterday on insider trading charges.

  “Gallent, who founded the Elmwood Fund last year, is alleged to have received a tip alerting him to massive imminent layoffs at Lifeblood, Inc. Authorities charge that he traded on that information to avoid losses of one hundred fifty million dollars. Gallent, the latest in a string of arrests linked to financier Gerald Rocher, worked for Rocher until 2012. So far it’s unclear whether authorities have found any direct link to Rocher, known in some circles as Jellyfish for”—she lowered her eyelids knowingly—“the toxic reach of his tentacles.”

  “One percent scum.” I was trying to be funny. Dave and I frequently growled that expression when his banker clients got demanding. Because it was morning, though, my voice emerged in a croak. Dave, startled, pressed the remote and diminished the screen into a small blip. “So,” I said, clearing my throat, “did he do it?”

  Dave’s brow rose high as if he didn’t know whom I was talking about. “Did who do what?”

  “What they arrested that guy for—the insider trading thing?”

  I hoped Dave would sink against the couch, rub his hands together and provide an impassioned point/counterpoint analysis on the man’s guilt. Instead, he shrugged and headed for the other room.

  I followed him into the kitchen. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, Paige.” He scooped out the coffee beans and put them in a single French press, not even asking if I wanted any.

  “You seem better than yesterday.”

  “Sure.” He turned on the kettle, took out the milk and slammed the refrigerator shut.

  My eyes narrowed at his back. “So when are you going to fill me in?”

  His palm wrapped in a death grip on the refrigerator door, he pivoted toward me. I braced myself for the fight; by this point I was twitching for it to be honest—mutual understanding be damned. Then his shoulders sagged. “Now’s fine. Let’s go out.”

  “Okay. Bagels and Joe?”

  “I’d rather go to the Patty Melt.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.” I shrugged. “The Patty Melt.”

  The Patty Melt was only three blocks from our apartment, but it was perpetually empty. The last time we’d eaten there, I’d pulled a hair from my hash browns. Long and red, it was so obviously from neither of us that we’d both recoiled, pushing our plates away in silent agreement (I had thought) that convenience aside, we should not let the restaurant’s perpetual fried onion smell and tasty-sounding name trick us into even mediocre expectations ever again.

  Our waitress, undeterred by the mood of our booth, floated over, her eyes glazed. Her name tag read BELIZE. Ordinarily I would point this out to Dave and he would run with it and I would laugh, corny as it was. Ketchup, pelize. When you get a chance, pelize.

  “Can you come back later?” I smiled in a way I hoped transmitted that, as Belize no doubt sensed, we were going through something here.

  Belize ignored me, stopping nibbling on her pen to gaze up at the light fixture.

  “Coffee.” Dave pushed his cup forward as though it were the only thing between him and insanity. “Please.”

  I shook my head. “None for me, thanks.”

  Belize glided away, hands clasped behind her back like one of Degas’s ballerinas. Dave concentrated on stacking two forks, intertwining their tines in such a focused manner that I knew I was going to have to start off the conversation. “What does ‘suspended’ even mean?”

  “I get paid; I work. But I can’t go in.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “I have no idea.”

 
“They didn’t give you any explanation at all?”

  “Nope.”

  Belize twirled over, two coffees in hand, and set them down in front of us. I smiled at Dave about the extra coffee, but he missed it, focused as he was on stirring milk into his.

  “They said something, right?”

  He shrugged listlessly. “Not really. Herb told me that they had to do a little investigation over the next week and I needed to stay out of the office.”

  I frowned at Herb’s name. “That’s who suspended you?”

  “I know.” Dave stuck out his lower lip. “It’s bad.”

  Dave thought this was bad because Herb was his mentor. I had grimaced, however, because I was remembering the last time I’d seen Herb. Dave and I had been standing with him and his wife, Brenda, in a tight little cocktail cluster at Denise Bellavoqua’s retirement gathering. Egged on by Dave’s many questions, Brenda was providing a detailed report of the technical difficulties in the Metropolitan Opera’s production of The Flying Dutchman.

  Dave had appeared genuinely interested in her story. (“Not even remotely,” he’d assured me in the cab home.) I had been wondering, vaguely, if I could ever be that passionate about something cultural, when Herb asked how my practice was going, and then the next thing I knew, we were sectioned off against a wall, his body blocking me from Brenda’s explanation of how a broken flying wire had resulted in the bass-baritone’s sprained ankle.

  I babbled on nervously about my work, aware of Herb’s glazed eyes locked on my neckline. In the first pause, he said something gruffly. I didn’t hear what exactly, but it sounded a lot like You’re a nice piece. Or You got a real nice piece. Neither phrase seemed particularly appropriate. I hadn’t had the heart to tell Dave about it.

  “Did he seem mad?”

  “Not at all. He seemed . . . apologetic. Like he knew it was ridiculous.”

  “But you didn’t demand an explanation?”

  “Of course I did, but he said it was best not discussed.”

  “That’s just weird.”

  “I know.”

  “Well,” I said, “obviously they want you at the firm. If you leave, so do your clients. All it takes is one phone call to—”

  Dave clutched my arm. “Paige, you cannot tell them about this. Promise me.”

  “Why? My parents could fix everything.”

  “They’ll make it worse.”

  “You have nothing to be embarrassed about.”

  “No parents, no friends. No one, Paige.”

  “Why?”

  “Just promise me.”

  “Fine. So then for tonight—”

  “What’s tonight?”

  I waited for him to remember that my parents, about to leave for Nantucket for the week, had insisted on a “farewell dinner.”

  “Oh god. Dinner.” The farewell dinner was not to be confused with the “welcome back dinner” and the “bought new socks dinner.” We saw my parents frequently—once every two weeks or so—but instead of just calling it dinner, my mom liked to imbue the meals with a greater purpose. She thought it made everything sound more “fun.” Dave didn’t even smile.

  “So don’t go.”

  “Then they’ll know.”

  “Know what? I can cover for you. I’ll say you don’t feel well.”

  He closed his eyes, considering. “Nope.” He shook his head. “Nope. I have to go. I always go. Don’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can do this.”

  “Dave, it’s not a Navy SEALs mission.”

  He dragged his top knuckles over the growth on his cheeks, and I heard the sound of roughness, like scratching sandpaper. “You go first, meet them there and I’ll come later. We’ll say . . . We’ll say that I came from the office and was working late. You think they’ll buy it?”

  “I think that only a crazy person wouldn’t.”

  This was his cue to say that we were in trouble for sure because my parents were in fact crazy people, but he didn’t. It should have been a relief, not having to respond to one of his predictable jokes, but by then I felt a small surge of alarm. Teasing my parents was low-hanging fruit to Dave, basic nutrition; he should have grabbed it, swallowed it whole, his eyes scanning for the next crop.

  I leaned back in the booth, watching him as he gnawed on his cuticles, one-day-old stubble spreading over his chin like a rash, and for one horrible, stomach-sinking moment, I thought, What if he’s like this forever?

  I immediately hated myself. “We could fight it, you know. Get in Herb’s face, demand an explanation.”

  “How?” Based on his drooping eyelids, he didn’t have much enthusiasm for the idea, but I pressed on.

  “Hire a lawyer.”

  “That was my first thought too. But then I burn the bridge forever.”

  “The bridge to Herb? You still care?”

  “I just want it back to normal. To go to my office and have it be like this never happened.” He pushed his hand across the table toward me and spread his fingers out. I put my hand on his. “Are you mad?” he asked.

  “Mad? Why would I be mad?”

  “I don’t know. I wish I had more answers for you.”

  “Dave, you didn’t do anything wrong. It’s going to be fine.”

  He looked skeptical. “You think?”

  “By the end of the summer, this will all probably feel like it happened to someone else.”

  “Thanks.” He swallowed and focused on his empty plate. “I was thinking today. My work used to be everything and it’s still a big deal, but I now have you. Without that . . . I’d probably be falling apart.”

  Expressing vulnerability made him uncomfortable, I knew, so I just grabbed his hand tighter. “Hey,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Get back to work.”

  “I meant, get out of here. Like to Quogue.”

  He lowered his eyebrows but didn’t say anything.

  “The house?” I palmed my phone. “I’ll cancel my clients if you cancel yours?”

  Dave’s mouth yanked up into a forlorn smile, and I knew his answer before he said anything. “Dave,” I said, trying not to sound accusatory, “you could tell me, no matter what it was.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean—” The Patty Melt? The bloodshot, glassy eyes? Both indicated he had something to hide. “Is this like the last time?”

  “I told you.” He met my eyes dead on. “I will never do that again.”

  I kept my hand on his back as we walked out of the Patty Melt and stood for a moment on the sidewalk outside. And then, instead of settling into a hammock with divided-up newspaper sections and fresh-baked croissants, we went our separate ways—me to work to wait for my ten fifteen and Dave back to the former guest room to try to convince his clients that he was calling them from a fifty-floor skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan.

  Dave had lied to me once before.

  On a Saturday night a few months before our wedding, we were out with Stan and Irene Blakesey. Dave and Stan had started together at Duane Covington as first-year associates and were now the only two left from an original group of twenty-three. They had a survivors’ bond, Dave had explained to me. It was like being foxhole buddies, you know, without having actually feared for their lives.

  Irene, who read restaurant reviews with a religious zeal, had secured us an eight o’clock table at some new Italian place with dimmed lights and dark walls and floors. I could barely see my food, but I didn’t even really care because Irene had us on our second bottle of something and was starting to dominate the conversation in a voice already too loud and rising. The four of us went out every few months, so I knew that by dessert, Irene would be doing a fairly decent impression of Jack Nicholson.


  “The gravy’s not right.” Irene was half Italian and called all red sauce “gravy,” something that had been an initial source of confusion to me. She dipped in the tines of her fork and held the red sauce up to Dave’s mouth. “See?”

  Dave was the least likely of all of us to enjoy being spoon-fed gravy by Irene, but he opened his mouth gamely, if somewhat stiffly. “Yeah,” he said. “Way off from my childhood in Tuscany.”

  “Ex-act-ly,” said Irene, and Dave mini-shrugged at me and widened his eyes in an expression of I have no idea what I’m talking about.

  “What?” Irene caught the look and whapped Dave in the shoulder with her napkin. “Gravy is the linchpin. You need good gravy, Davy. Ha-ha! Gravy Davy!”

  Dave held up both hands. “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “You need good gravy.” Irene was insistent. “Try the meatballs. The meatballs are sublime, and you need . . . You need a fun evening, Dave! We gotta do something nice for Dave. All of us,” Irene said.

  “Why for Dave?” I said.

  “We need to cheer him up.” She reached out and pushed the forked meatball right in his face. “Poor Dave.”

  I leaned across the table to scoop some truffle oil risotto from the communal plate. Irene always ordered too many sides. “You mean that they were out of the branzino special he wanted?”

  “Yeah, right.” When Dave failed to bite the meatball, Irene put the whole thing in her own mouth, talking as she chewed. “You must be pissed.”

  Across the table, Dave’s face had drained of color. “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “It’s criminal. You’ve given them everything, and they screw you like that. And you can’t go somewhere else now. It’s too late for that!” Irene’s brown eyes softened. “I just can’t believe they did this to their golden boy.”