Not that Carter was allowed to divert his energies to the paltry distraction of who would be the next American president, since he was wholly absorbed in the more monumental matter of feeding Luella lunch. She’d been in restraints for two days in a row, and they weren’t running Guantánamo. To prevent muscle cramping and pressure sores, they alternated lashing her to the chair with a four-foot leash. This being a leash day made shoving protein down her throat more difficult. Jayne had begged him not to feed Luella cheese. If his stepmother got constipated, in lieu of hard-to-come-by enemas or laxative tablets, one of them would have to dig the shit from her anus with their fingers. But cheese was easier to force her to chew than chicken. With Jayne barricaded in her Quiet Room, Carter, a bit spitefully, chose the cheddar.
This time, however, Luella didn’t seem in the mood for her sélection de fromage, and after noshing the first chunk into a viscous paste she spewed it halfway across the kitchen, spraying Carter’s cheek in the process. Thereafter, she picked bits nimbly off her nightgown with dinner-party fastidiousness.
“You’re not worth your father’s little finger,” she said distinctly.
These moments of lucidity always threw him for a loop, and if the sentiment she’d expressed had been nicer it might have moved him to gentleness. Instead, on the next hunk, he clapped his hand around her mouth to keep the cheese in. Luella reached around and grabbed a fistful of his precious remaining tresses and pulled for all she was worth.
Okay, that was it. Wiping a saliva-smeared palm on a dishtowel, Carter marched from the room. She could starve for all he cared. “Jayne!” he shouted up the stairwell. “You’re going to have to watch Luella, because I’ve been tearing my hair. I’m going out for some air.”
Marginally becalmed by a well-earned constitutional, Carter returned about an hour later, planning on a couple of Advils for his aching knees. A singe smote his nostrils the moment he unlocked the door. Had Jayne burned a casserole? The formerly passionate recipe clipper rarely boiled an egg. A haze fogged the hallway, and Luella, last left leashed to a table leg, was too quiet.
He rushed into the kitchen to find the candle for port-sipping marital debriefings lit. Eyes gleaming, Luella was fluttering a flaming paper napkin into the open trashcan. The cheese wrapper on top caught fire. As Luella must have been sticking everything within reach into the candle and tossing incendiary projectiles every which way, Carter’s immediate extinguishing of the candle was starting a bit small. The curtains were on fire. The trashcan was on fire. A patch of linoleum was on fire, right around the table leg to which Luella was still attached. As smoke thickened rapidly, the choice was stark: try to save the house or the people in it. Well. All that liberal upbringing proved good for something.
“Did I leave them out?” Jayne wondered weakly. “I worry I left them out.”
“Whoever did, I should have noticed them,” Carter said. “But isn’t that our luck. Holds a fork by the tines, but still remembers how to strike a match.”
They were huddled across the street in the blankets Carter had grabbed to protect them from being scorched. New York’s finest had taken their time, though at this point he was amazed that there was a fire department. The blaze wasn’t contained. In the glow, Luella danced with pagan glee.
“You didn’t have to rescue her, you know,” Douglas said heavily.
“I, ah—had a single moment of hesitation,” Carter admitted. “It gave me the creeps.”
For the better part of the last year, Avery had taken refuge in toiclass="underline" scrubbing, dishwashing, mending, chopping, and laundry. She arranged neighborhood hand-me-down swaps of children’s clothes. To combat Bing’s give-away weight gain, she led him in sets of jumping jacks (she got the idea from Nollie), because pantry pilfering was a perfect formula for becoming a pariah. Swallowing her umbrage, she coached Goog on his Spanish. She only panicked when she ran out of tasks. Drudgery was therapeutic. Were she ever to start another practice, she’d have all her patients mop the office floor.
Besides, she had committed to this refurbished persona out of cold calculation. The alternative was to continue to cede the moral high ground to her sister, who would keep laying claim to competence, grit, efficiency, stoicism, selflessness, and her famous practicality, so that everyone would feel grateful to Florence, and Avery’s children would look up to Florence, and come to Florence with their problems, and her husband might wonder why he had chosen a weepy sniveler over this pillar of fortitude. Petulance, too, could not manifest provender or privacy if it couldn’t even manifest toilet paper. Spiked with an acute awareness of how unattractive the propensity looks to others, the experience of petulance was itself a small torture; it was a thin, sharp, needling emotion and ultimately a form of self-abuse. In sum, Avery could not control history. She could only control her disposition while history did its damnedest. Carrying on being a princess was lose-lose. To Avery’s delight, Florence sometimes seemed actively annoyed that her sister had become a saint—at points an even saintlier saint than the patron paragon of East Fifty-Fifth Street.
Thus it was in the midst of single-handedly cleaning up after yet another big communal dinner that Avery dried her hands hastily to answer the door. Through the peephole, her parents, Grand Man, and Luella were framed in curvature, faces sooted as if fresh from a coalmine, wrapped in blankets like squaws.
“What the fuck!” In her shock on opening the door, she forgot to watch her mouth around Grand Man.
Her father announced with a curious triumph, “Luella burned down the house.”
In short order, the news spread, and everyone but Savannah—out doing what her mother dared not contemplate—convened in the living room. Amidst many an aghast “Oh, my God!,” hurried inquiries about whether the four disaster victims were all right, and homilies about what really mattered was having escaped with their lives, Avery could detect a collective anxiety murmuring barely below the surface: this untoward turn of events brought this bursting abode’s population to fourteen—or, if you credited her father’s previous proclamations about how Luella alone was “the equivalent of twenty extra residents in their right minds,” to thirty-three.
They ceded seats to their new guests. Lowering himself onto the distinguished claret sofa with which he’d grown up, Grand Man shot a woeful look at the duct tape.
“Our brave troops, gold mining in Brooklyn,” Florence said cryptically. “Nollie? I was going to make everyone tea, but if you could spare it…”
“Fuck tea,” Nollie said, heading with Florence to the kitchen. “I have a new batch of killer hooch that’ll take your head off.”
“Did you manage to save anything?” Avery asked, rehearsing an array of childhood keepsakes in their attic.
“It’s missing a few pieces that were in the sink, I’m afraid,” Dad said, flapping his blanket back to reveal a scarred but regal wooden box in his lap. “But I did rescue the silver service.”
Grand Man burst into tears. “You didn’t tell me!” Avery had never seen him cry.
“I was saving it. I figured on a night like this,” Dad said, “I wouldn’t have many surprises of a happy sort to spring.” He removed one of the dinner knives, with a large scrolled M at the base, and the blade caught the light.