Family Trust

by Amanda Brown

  “You described yourself as a stud-dog owner?”

  Becca made a sudden snort of laughter. “You’re kidding!”

  Edward was perfectly composed. “That’s right. I own stud dogs. Sporting dogs. I breed them.”

  “How nice,” Becca said, still laughing through her words. “A stud-dog owner. Never in all my time have I met a stud-dog owner. Some schleppy dog owners, sure. But this is a first!”

  “Great,” Edward said, with the same easy smile.

  Dr. Ben Honeywell cleared his throat, turning the page to where Edward had continued his list on the back. “Here’s an interesting hobby. ‘Riding to hounds’? Tell me about that one.”

  “That’s fox hunting,” Edward explained. “I go to Virginia for hunts in the late fall. Down around Middleburg, usually.” He paused. “It will be really busy this year. They banned it in England. We’ll have a big influx, I bet.”

  Becca’s jaw dropped as she turned to look at Edward Kirkland. She was, by now, convinced that she had met the most useless person in the entire universe.

  Edward turned to Becca with an enthusiastic smile.

  “Emily should come down to Virginia with me this year. The trees are beautiful, and the hounds love kids. She’d have a great time.”

  Becca imagined a silver-tray tea party of old Confederate ladies with those gruesome fox stoles clipped around their necks.

  “I’m sure,” she said, skeptically. She couldn’t believe he was serious.

  Dr. Ben was still fixated on Edward’s hobby list. “Sailing?”

  “Sure, I sail. Just recreationally, these days. I don’t race anymore.”

  “And you travel quite a bit?”

  “Sure,” Edward said. He rubbed his temples, feeling a yawn coming on. He needed to get outside.

  “Can you give us some examples?”

  “No problem. I mentioned London; I go to England in the fall, to shoot. That’s pretty regular. Sometimes I go to the art openings in Paris, but only if it’s someone I know. And I keep a yacht off Mykonos. We sail from there to some spots in the Mediterranean.”

  “You said we,” Dr. Honeywell shrewdly observed. “Do you travel with a companion?”

  “Sure,” Edward answered casually. “With a variety of them. I really hate to travel alone.” He turned his calm, pleasant eyes toward Becca, who stared straight ahead. She was occupied with a single idea.

  “I see,” said Dr. Ben. “Mostly European travel, then?” He forgot where he had been going with this, from a psychological standpoint, and hoped by talking to pick up the thread.

  “Mostly,” Edward agreed.

  Becca couldn’t hold her fire any longer.

  “Do you work?” she asked, the disdain in her voice indicating her extreme doubt.

  Edward nodded. “I do. I manage the Kirkland Philanthropic Foundation. It’s a charitable trust.”

  “Who does your investing?” she asked in a flash.

  “Milton Korrick at Morgan Stanley,” he answered.

  Becca nodded with approval. Milton was trustworthy: a good old shoe. But she could get better returns than Milton, she was sure of it.

  “I’ll skip the rest of these hobbies,” Dr. Ben said, flipping through several pages, “so we can get on to the essays.”

  “Listen,” Becca interrupted impatiently, “did I pass this test or not?”

  “The evaluation has not been completed,” Dr. Ben answered evasively.

  “Whatever.”

  “No, it’s not ‘whatever,’” he rejoined, looking strictly at her. “These questions are designed by experts to evaluate your fitness as a parent.”

  “I read the statute,” Becca answered back. “I know I meet the minimums for parental fitness. I have no drug offenses, no felony convictions, a good employment record, plenty of money, blah blah blah.” She picked up her phone to check its LCD display.

  “Ten messages!” She held it up. “You see that, Doc? Can we move on?”

  “We’re almost finished,” he finally disclosed to her, not concealing his own relief. “We have just one more topic.”

  “I’m all ears,” Becca prompted.

  “You were asked to write short descriptions of your mother and father. Your answers are positively alarming.”

  For the first time, Edward interrupted. “I didn’t expect you would read those answers out loud.”

  “Well, Edward, there is no reason for you two to have secrets from each other—especially about parental issues. You will soon be parents. Together.” He looked through raised eyebrows at Becca, as if to say “unless I change my mind.” She took the cue and turned her impatient glance to the floor.

  “Ahem. Edward, we’ll start with you. You described your mother briefly. I’ll quote. You called her ‘sweet and needy, like jelly.’”

  Becca laughed out loud. “Yikes! What a description! That’s great! I never would have guessed it from you, Ed!”

  “What is needy about jelly?” Dr. Ben wondered.

  “Have you ever eaten jelly just plain?” Becca cut in.

  “No,” he admitted.

  “Of course you haven’t. You eat it on blintzes. Because it’s no use on its own. That’s what he meant. Right, Eddie?”

  He nodded, avoiding her eyes. He really didn’t mean for her to hear that answer.

  “Edward,” Dr. Ben cut in, “let’s talk about your father.”

  “I’d rather talk about blintzes.”

  “I’m sure.” He turned to read from the test paper.

  “Edward, you described your father as, and I’ll quote—‘a cross between an executioner and a Stalinist colonel in an occupying army.’”

  Edward nodded without emotion.

  Becca laughed. “That’s great! You have a real way with words!”

  Dr. Ben was not so amused. “Do you have brothers and sisters?” he asked.

  “Dad executed them on their eighteenth birthdays,” Edward said coldly.

  Nobody spoke.

  “Just kidding,” he said, breaking into a grin. His easy laughter relieved the tension. “No executions, no brothers, and no sisters.”

  “Do you have much contact with your parents?”

  “As much as they please.”

  Becca rolled her eyes. To Dr. Ben, she joked, “I bet he still wears short pants at Easter!”

  Dr. Ben sighed, ignoring her comment. These two were hopeless.

  “Let’s turn to you, Becca. You described your father more briefly.”

  Becca answered the question herself. “Two words. Sperm donor.”

  “Not a lot of contact with your dad, then.”

  “Less than none. And that’s too much.”

  “Okay,” he said, “so there you have it. And your mother. You said she is perfect. Do you care to elaborate?”

  “Could I make that any stronger?”

  “Right,” he said, making a note on his page. “So we see where your loyalties are, in the parental category.”

  Becca laughed out loud. “Doesn’t take much detective work,” she returned.

  “No,” he conceded, glaring at her. “I suppose it doesn’t.”

  Edward’s eyes went from one to the other as Dr. Ben and Becca sparred. The doctor didn’t have a chance in this contest. Their eyes met for a moment and she smiled.

  Dr. Ben checked his watch, then stood. “Time to head back to the courtroom.”

  Becca brightened. “Did we make it? Did we pass?”

  The therapist’s shoulders drooped with misgiving as he nodded yes. He hated to do this; it was so contrary to his clinical judgment, but Becca was right about the statute. The personality test was a chance to talk through some “issues,” but on a minimal level both of these oddballs were psychologically fit to serve as child guardians under New York law.

  “As a clinical matter,” he felt compelled to add, “I have never seen anyone named as a guardian whom I consider less fit to become a parent than you, Ms. Becca Reinhart.”

  Instinctivel
y, Edward rose to her defense. “I think you’re wrong. If you knew her…” What was he talking about, he asked himself. He had just met her! Still, there was an expansiveness and vitality that drew him to her—and that he hungered for in his own childhood. Edward thought Becca was a natural. Anyway, what did it matter? They made it!

  Becca cracked a ballpoint pen inside her purse with the huge effort it took her to keep quiet.

  “Nonetheless,” Dr. Ben continued, glad to feel his tension dissipate as he vocalized his anxieties, “you do meet the statutory minimums. How you plan to care for a four-year-old child between your phone calls”—he pointed to Becca—“and your social life,” he said, shaking his head at Edward, “is beyond me. But it is literally beyond me, because it is up to you two from here.” He left the room in an exasperated shuffle.

  When he was out of sight, Becca rushed toward Edward, raising her hand for a high-five.

  “We did it!” she said happily.

  He grinned, slapping her hand.

  “Nice job, Ed, you didn’t let him rattle you.”

  “I think you rattled him,” Edward said. “Let’s go get our little girl.”

  Edward waited for Becca to gather her things. He held the door as they left the examination room together.

  CHAPTER 10

  Home Sweet Home

  Not finding it wise to split the baby, Judge Jones had, for practical purposes, merged her caretakers. When Edward and Becca took Emily home, the child’s soft, trusting hands linked her baffled but well-intentioned guardians. Together they stepped from the cab in front of the Stearns’ Fifth Avenue apartment to begin an uncertain life. All Becca knew, as she stood facing the apartment building, with one hand on her phone and one hand on her child, was that instinct would have to guide her from here. Edward and Emily were as unfamiliar to her as a couple of kangaroos. Edward especially.

  He didn’t pay for the cab, she reflected, smiling—his mind seemed already to be elsewhere, as he scooped the radiant Emily in his arms and held the car door for Becca’s exit. She slid a ten through the window as she departed. She didn’t mention it to him, but she thought it odd. Was he absentminded, or just that accustomed to his private car?

  But they were in this together, to some foreseeable extent. It would not help Emily for her new parents to antagonize each other. They had to agree on her care. Becca took a deep breath, glad that he had put Emily down to walk, glad she had the girl’s hand to hold. She heard her Jimmy Choos pumps clicking along the sidewalk to the tune of Emily’s “Bah-Bah-Black Sheep.” Funny she picked that one, Becca thought. It described all of them nicely. Three black sheep.

  With the cheerful, flush-faced Emily skipping and singing between them, Becca and Edward proceeded to the Stearns’ penthouse apartment. Becca pressed her fingers against the cushioned buttons of her telephone; Edward’s free hand rested in the pocket of his wool gabardine trousers. For a minute, as they waited to speak to the doorman, they might have been three passengers at a train station, standing close but disconnected, each occupied with personal thoughts.

  The doorman, who was relatively new to the building, recognized Emily. Edward and Becca introduced themselves as her guardians.

  “Mr. and Mrs…” asked the doorman, waiting for their name.

  “Reinhart,” Becca blurted out. She turned toward Edward awkwardly. His laugh did not reassure her.

  “And Kirkland,” she said, pointing at Edward.

  “We’re not married,” he explained.

  “Just legal guardians,” Becca added quickly. “Together by accident.”

  Emily looked up with a sudden gasp. Her blue eyes were wide with worry as she gripped Becca’s hand in hers. Was Becca leaving her too? Was she dropping her off with the doorman? The child clung to Becca’s arm and spoke in a small voice.

  “What’s a guardian, Becca? Are you going away? Who had an accident?”

  Becca saw Emily’s worry, and her heart surged with warmth.

  “Did I say accident?” she stammered, leaned toward Emily. “Oops! It was an accident!”

  She lifted the child into her arms, tickling and poking her. Emily looked at her skeptically.

  “A guardian,” she said, thinking fast, “is like a fairy godmother. I’m specially picked just for you, Emily. By—by the fairies,” she added, thinking of her storybooks. “I’ll always take care of you. And so will Eddie,” she added quickly.

  Emily’s soft, thin little arms grasped Becca’s neck. It was like being wrapped in the wings of a bird. She lay her cheek against Emily’s hair and looked into the doorman’s eyes. Did he need to see anything else?

  “Send your names down so I can change them in the book,” he said, returning Edward’s handshake.

  Becca promised to send down the court summons, the only paper she could think of that had all their names spelled together. At Edward’s instigation they pretended to be lost, and Emily was proud to take over. She led them into the elevator and pushed the top button, all by herself. Then she practiced her numbers, saying each out loud to the rhythm of the beep when the button lit up at each floor. She could count higher than twenty, though, as a result of living at the penthouse level, she was under the impression that the number twenty-one was followed by the “number” P.

  While Emily counted, Edward leaned toward Becca. “Nice footwork with the guardian thing,” he said. “So am I the fairy godfather?” Edward asked with a laugh.

  Becca faced him with a smile. “Beats the witch or the frog.”

  She and Edward swung Emily over the crack between the elevator and the rich, gray-carpeted floor, and she sprinted to the door of the apartment. Becca unlocked the door, noting again that Kirkland didn’t budge. So she’d have to teach him how to open a door where there is no butler. Just great. But like so many other points in this guardianship, there were no other options. For a while, and depending on how they arranged things, this building was their home.

  She was a joint custodian: The awkward term made her laugh, as if she guarded spliffs of marijuana with a push broom in her hand. Judge Jones had concluded the proceedings by awarding Becca Reinhart and Edward Kirkland joint custody of Emily Stearns. She found the parental fitness of the two guardians to be the same, without specifying whether their scores were equally good or bad. She didn’t care how they arranged their schedules, but set a few standards to be followed for the care of the child. Even the minimum—and the judge made it clear that she was talking about a minimum—represented a huge change in the lives of both Becca and Edward. Someone was telling them where to sleep.

  As an initial matter, Judge Jones would not permit Emily to be moved from her apartment. The judge agreed with the child psychologists. A change of environment would needlessly unsettle the grieving child. She didn’t care how the guardians arranged their schedules, but obviously at least one of the two would sleep at the Stearns’ apartment, so Emily could rest with the confidence that Becca or Edward would be there when she awoke, even in the middle of the night.

  It was permissible for them to continue with hired help, during the day, if need be, the judge declared; but the way she said it, squinting with narrow eyes through her rectangular reading glasses at Becca, in particular, made her disapproval clear. At another point in the ruling she strongly advised against “contracting out” Emily’s care at this crucial moment for her healing heart. She would revisit that issue in three months at their status conference.

  The mention of fairy godparents had fired Emily’s imagination. “Let’s go read the princess stories,” Emily said, grabbing Becca’s hand to tug her to the playroom. There the fairy tales, in young children’s editions, were kept in a white bookcase.

  Becca looked helplessly back at Edward, who shrugged, walking to the morning room where he reclined in a soft armchair. “Call me if you need me,” he said, just quietly enough to make it possible that nobody heard him. Taking a deep breath, Edward folded his hands behind his head and closed his eyes, intending to give Bec
ca a few minutes alone with Emily before he took the child to her last afternoon lesson.

  Becca agreed not to peek while Emily changed into something “fancy,” and she took the moment to walk around the playroom. She was struck, noticing the effort someone had taken to put this all together, with a pang of regret at the loss of her friend Amy.

  Amy had made this room into everything a little girl could dream, and not out of any egoistical ambition to relive her own childhood either, Becca knew. By Amy’s description, her youth in the state department was a makeshift cocktail of anything convenient and available. Her parents were assigned to a different country every two years, and all their houses, even to this day, were rented. But here, in this tribute to a child’s imagination, she saw where Amy had channeled her love: The room was an onslaught of twinkling stars and dreams, almost desperate in its desire to please by dazzling.

  The walls, meant for coloring, met at the ceiling where there was a mural of abstract forms representing the moon, the sun, clouds, stars. The mural was painted in blue against which the objects of yellow and silver-gray shimmered across the floor, on which lay a green rug with a floral border. Small chairs were set around the table where the puzzle had been opened. At one edge of the rug stood a bright-yellow wooden boat, large enough to hold two adult passengers, where a princess might make her escape from the two-level castle that presided over the room from the corner.

  The overall effect of the room was a cross between Romper Room and a New Orleans bordello, which perfectly approximated the dreamy, confused perspective of girlhood.

  There was a tea table, nestled in another corner behind hand-painted silk screens, featuring a mini-buffet with small porcelains and a miniature Georgian silver tea set gathering dust on a tiny mahogany sideboard. The tea table was little-used, as was an accompanying dollhouse, so intricate it must have been built to emulate some great manor house to the very last light switch. These items felt out of place.

  Becca wondered if Arthur had provided the dollhouse. It would not have come from Amy’s nomadic parents. She wondered how it was that she had spent so much time with Amy and so little with Arthur. Edward seemed to know Arthur primarily from the club, and from their old school days together. She didn’t remember Amy ever talking about Edward. She wondered if Amy and Arthur had spent much time together at all.