“Poor Fred … what a turkey he is. Don't worry about Ellie. She'll get it. Kids always do. My parents pulled the same shit on me. It took me a while, but I got it. They were determined to destroy each other, and both sides tried to use me as a hostage. Ugly stuff. You're not doing that. Ellie will see who is. Wait. Be patient. Be cool. Defend yourself against him. Talk to your lawyer. Don't give up the house. He owes you that much. Hang tough. Have to go to work early, and see what disasters came in over the weekend. I had a great time. You are a miracle in my life. Go have a banana split… just make sure you wipe your chin. Talk to you later. Love, Brad.”
He always made her smile. He always comforted her and now that he was back in her life, he was always there. Faith sat back and read his e-mail again, and felt calmer than she had in hours. And all she could do was thank God for him.
19
FAITH'S CONCERNS ABOUT THE HOUSE PROVED TO BE well founded, or somewhat at least. Although her attorney was slightly reassuring on that score. She heard from him the day after she'd called, as she walked in from school. She was doing well, but having to struggle to concentrate. She was so distracted that the papers she was writing weren't as coherent as she would have liked them to be, and her grades reflected it. But she was hanging in.
She answered the phone as she walked in the door. The attorney didn't have great news.
“You were right. He wants you to move out. He's giving you ninety days.” That meant the end of May.
“Oh my God. Can he do that?” Faith went pale.
“Only if you agree. And I don't think you should.” She was relieved to hear him say that at least. She had visions of everything she owned on the street. “He owes you half of it for community property, and if you want your money out of it, then you should sell the house. If he wants his half, he can force you out in time, and require you to sell. But he's going to have to make some kind of settlement with you, and if you want his share of the house as part of that, that's what we'll do. I think I can get that for you, Faith, if that's what you want. If not, I can't force him to let you stay and tie up his half indefinitely.”
“I want to keep the house,” she said in a strangled voice. All she really wanted was not to move, not to change anything, to hang on to whatever she could of a familiar life that had lasted for twenty-six years. She was fighting change as much as she was losing the house.
“We'll take him to court on it. I haven't had any kind of official notice from them about it yet. Let's wait and see what he does. He has to give you time, in any case. He can't force you out until this is resolved.”
But it didn't take him long. She had a letter from his attorney by the end of the week. It had been addressed to her lawyer, of course, but it said that Alex wanted her to move out, and put the house on the market as soon as possible. They had given her a few days of grace and wanted her out by the first of June. It was the cruelest thing she could think of, throwing her out of her house. The only thing worse had been bringing his girlfriend home to her bed, and lying to their kids.
Brad was reassuring her as often as they spoke, and she had left half a dozen messages for Ellie, but she wouldn't return the calls. It was an enormous relief when finally, in the first week of March, Zoe told her that Eloise was coming home.
“Why didn't she tell me? She hasn't returned any of my calls.”
It came as no surprise to Zoe. The two sisters had had a huge fight on the phone, with Zoe defending their mother, and Eloise defending their dad, each convinced that the other had been handed a raw deal and a pack of lies.
“You don't know what you're talking about!” Zoe had screamed at her in the middle of the night. It had been morning for Eloise. “He fucking walked out on her. I saw her that week. You should have seen the condition she was in!”
“She deserves to be. She's been asking him for a divorce behind our backs for a year. And now she's forcing him to sell the house.”
“It's all lies, don't you get that, you moron? That's who he is. He's kicking Mom out on her ass. He wants her out on the first of June.”
“The hell he does. He has no choice. He says she wants a lot of money from him. And that's disgusting too. Mom is a total bitch, and it's all her fault. You just don't want to see how evil she is.”
“You're blind,” Zoe accused her older sister. “You've been brainwashed by him.” In the end, they had hung up on each other, and Zoe had the unpleasant task of informing her mother that Eloise was planning to stay with Alex during the week she'd be in town. She was staying in the apartment he had sublet, and refused to stay at the house. She was only going to go there to pick up some things.
She arrived in New York on St. Patrick's Day, and had a week off. It was a full two days before she called her mother, who had been sitting in the house, waiting to hear from her, and feeling sick over it. All she could get at Alex's apartment, once Zoe gave her the number, was an answering machine. And Ellie had returned none of her calls. Faith was so desperate to hear from her that she hadn't even gone to school, but at least she was staying home, studying for exams.
She nearly burst into tears when she finally heard Ellie's voice. But the conversation was brief and to the point. Ellie said she was coming over to pick up some clothes, and she said that she hoped her mother wouldn't be there. For a nearly twenty-five-year-old woman, she sounded incredibly childish to Faith, and needlessly cruel. But she was being tutored well.
Faith was in her bedroom, when Eloise came home. It had taken her a month to move back into her own room. It wasn't practical to live in Zoe's room, and she had finally decided to swallow her pride and her revulsion at sleeping in her bed again. She was lying on it, when she saw Ellie walk down the hall. She had seen her mother too, and said not a word.
Faith walked to her bedroom doorway, and stood watching her. “Eloise, are you going to say hello?” she asked softly, with immeasurable pain in her eyes. Zoe would have killed her sister if she had seen her mother look like that. Eloise was made of sterner stuff, and had a cooler heart.
“I asked you not to be here,” she stood facing her mother from down the hall. It seemed incredible that she was unable to distance herself from her parents' divorce, and felt compelled to take sides the way she had. But her father had used her well.
“This is my home,” Faith said calmly, “and I wanted to see you. I don't want you pulled apart by this mess. If Daddy is determined to do this, we have to survive, all of us, and we're still a family, whether he and I are together or not.”
“What do you care? You're the one who blew our family all to hell, and not him. You're even selling this house, so don't talk to me about your ‘home.’ “
“I don't want to have to do that, but I can show you letters from his lawyers telling me that I have to get out. He's trying to evict me, El. And I'm trying to stay.”
“He only has to do that,” she said, sounding like a petulant child, “because you want so much money from him.”
“We haven't even talked about that yet. I don't know what I want. Right now, all I want is to stay in this house. I swear to you on all our lives that that's true.”
“You're a liar,” Eloise spat at her, disappeared into her room, and slammed the door, as Faith stood wondering how her own child could be so hateful to her, so distrustful and disrespectful and unkind. It didn't say much about the way she'd brought them up, or the feelings Eloise had for her. She wasn't a child, she was an adult, and she was using nuclear weapons to destroy her mother. Alex had given them to her, but she hadn't hesitated to use them. It broke Faith's heart to think about the damage she would do. Their family would never be the same again. This was Alex's final gift to them.