“Nat?”
I was inside Victor Flowers’s mansion again, going from room to room, searching for musical instruments, a scavenger hunt, and through a closed door I heard a voice, and it was a voice I had never heard before. It was my father, afraid.
My father, who refused to be a criminal. My father, relentlessly honest even in the face of temptation and coercion. I had been clinging to that fact, that nugget of family history, as if it were itself a full credo, a complete thought, when in actuality, I now realized, there was an entire other half that I had always conveniently overlooked: My father was no criminal—and look where it got him.
My very honest, very dead father.
A New Jersey Transit train rumbled past in the opposite direction on tracks so close to the road that I felt the vibrations shake my whole body, and I was on Route 27 again in my shitty, busted car on a dark two-lane road at midnight, heading toward my empty Rahway apartment.
“Natalie?”
“What?” I said.
“So is this the part where you tell me you’re in?”
6
It was true, by the way, about the helicopter. I still remember my father talking about his boss’s aerial commute as if wealth had nothing to do with it. As if it were nothing more than a matter of shrewd time management.
“All that traffic on the Jersey Turnpike, at the tunnel. What a waste of time and money,” my father would say. “Victor Flowers arrives at his office in fourteen minutes.”
If you didn’t fear flying and had enough money maybe it made sense. My father would have known. He was a numbers guy, even if he didn’t look like one: six-foot-three and thick everywhere. He’d taken accounting courses at Union County and Fairleigh Dickinson, delivering those pianos to pay for it, and he wasn’t far from a degree when debt and lower back pain finally got the better of him. He dropped the coursework and took a job at the Flowers Corporation as a bookkeeper, hoping to work his way up. And he did—far enough, some half a dozen years later, for us to receive an invitation to the Memorial Day party that Mr. Flowers threw each year at his waterfront home in the Highlands.
I was excited to go. At eight years old I believed that all mansions held secret rooms and hidden treasure. And my mother loved the shore, though when Memorial Day came, she said she wasn’t feeling well. Too many hours on her feet, she said, doing inventory at the bookstore.
So it was just my father and me. Driving south on the parkway, he told me that Victor Flowers used to be a rock-and-roll singer before he went into business and made millions of dollars. And his foundation, Notes for Kids, donated musical instruments to schools that couldn’t afford them.
“Is he nice?” I asked.
My father chewed on his lip before answering. “Victor Flowers is an impressive man.” He must have realized his answer had little to do with my question, because he added, “He’s been good to our family.”
I let it drop and listened to the radio. I could tell my father had a lot on his mind, because he was muttering to himself. I thought about how I wouldn’t know anyone at this party, and wished my mother had come. But once we arrived and got out of the car, my anxiety was quelled by all the amazing smells: grilling meat, salty air, freshly cut grass, and everything in bloom.
We walked toward the driveway, where the break in a line of high hedges gave me a view of the home where Mr. Flowers lived.
“Whoa,” I said.
“Whoa is right,” my father replied. I deigned to let him take my hand, and together we followed a path around the side of the stone mansion to an immense yard where kids were running and playing games like Frisbee and soccer and Wiffle ball.
I was hungry for everything—for whatever was sizzling on the grills, and the green grass, and the bay shimmering in the sunlight beyond the high bluff, and the trees along the perimeter of the property that were ideal for climbing, and the laughter. Our Plainfield apartment was dark and heavy by comparison. My parents often talked about moving to a house with a yard. Soon, they told me. Which would have been fine. Even better would have been if our apartment could feel the way it used to. Lately, my parents either argued or avoided each other, and being at home felt like riding down a slide in cold weather and knowing that whatever you touched next would give you a shock.
Like today. Somehow I knew, not in my brain but in a deeper part where the guts were, that my mother wasn’t actually sick. She was only pretending.
A thin, smallish man came our way. My father said, “Honey, I’d like you to meet Mr. Flowers.”
Mr. Flowers was dressed like my father in khaki pants and a button-down shirt. His sleeves were rolled up to just below the elbows, and his forearms were tan. His hair was dark brown, almost black, and cut short, and his face was so smooth it appeared slippery. Mr. Flowers shook my hand and smiled and said it was a pleasure to meet me. His voice was as smooth as his face. I wanted to ask him to sing a song—I’d never met a professional singer before—but I knew I couldn’t.
Mr. Flowers said to my father, “I was hoping you and I could talk in private.”
My father’s slow nod looked resigned, as if he’d been expecting this request. He watched the scene around us for a moment before saying, “You’ll be okay here for a few minutes, won’t you, Nat? There’s plenty of kids.”
Of course there were, but I didn’t know any of them.
“Dad.”
“I promise I won’t keep him long,” Mr. Flowers said, and my father smiled
