I smoothed my hair and fixed the part, then walked across the lawn to get a better view of the bay far below. My mother would have gone crazy over this view, with the New York skyline across the water to the left and, straight ahead, the Atlantic Ocean going on and on. Not to England. That’s what everyone always said, but I knew from the globe in my bedroom that if you went straight across the ocean from here you’d end up in Morocco.
From behind me, I heard: “You’re Big Bird.”
I turned around to face a sandy-haired boy with sun-peeled shoulders. He wasn’t in my class, but I half recognized him from school. That’s where kids had started calling me that. My hair wasn’t yellow, it was brown, and long, but I was a head taller than most of the other kids. I hated being so tall, especially for a girl, and I could think of nothing worse than being compared to a huge, big-beaked bird—a boy bird—that acted like a three-year-old.
And the worst part? The name fit. I was exactly like a dumb big bird that could hardly balance on her own two legs.
The boy called out to some other kids. “Look”—he pointed at me—“it’s Big Bird!”
It was bad enough hearing it at school. For the name to follow me here, now, was unbearable. My eyes filling with tears, I hurried toward the house in my stupid dress shoes to lose myself in the crowd standing on the wooden deck. But everyone’s eyes felt heavy on me, so I let myself into the house.
I was standing in the largest kitchen I’d ever seen. I ignored some grown-ups holding tilted cups and laughing with each other and went deeper into the house until I was alone in a room with leather sofas and a black grand piano in the corner, its cover open. On a shelf attached to the wall lay an electric guitar that someone had written on in an illegible scrawl. On another shelf was a saxophone, and on other shelves I saw a clarinet, a trumpet, a trombone.
I wondered if any other instruments were hidden in the house, in other rooms. It started to feel like a treasure hunt, and I was ready to begin searching when I heard, through a door, a voice that sounded like my father’s when he was explaining something important to me.
I approached the closed door and listened. Definitely my father. He had told me to wait outside, but I knew he’d probably let me stay with him if I promised to sit still and keep quiet. My hand was reaching for the doorknob when I heard another voice.
“Oh, Dan, if you can’t even do to this one simple thing, then I don’t know what.”
And then came my father’s voice again: “You know I haven’t been comfortable with any of this. But this. It’s … I mean no disrespect.”
“You don’t, huh?”
“No. I’m just being honest. It’s—”
“It’s nothing. It’s accounting.”
“Victor, we both know what it is.”
“It’s what I say it is. Less than nothing.”
And then came the strangest part. I distinctly heard my father say: It’s laundry. It’s laundry, and I’m not doing it.
For years after, I believed the two of them had been arguing over who would do the laundry. After all, my father sometimes had that same argument with my mother. Even after I learned what money laundering was, it took me a while to paste that new information onto the old scene from my past and finally go: Ah.
“I’d be very careful, Dan,” Mr. Flowers was telling my father. “This is way above your pay grade.”
“It’s criminal activity,” my father said.
“Watch it,” Mr. Flowers said, and my eyes widened. My body stiffened. I knew from hearing my parents argue how easily a simple disagreement could explode into something larger.
My father started speaking slowly, softly, and I realized I was wrong about having heard him talk this way before. This was new. He was trying to keep his voice from shaking. This, I suddenly realized, was what my father sounded like scared.
“I gave you a career,” Mr. Flowers said. “Are you that ungrateful? Are you that naive?”
Mr. Flowers wasn’t shouting. His voice was like frozen water. I understood now why my father hadn’t answered my question in the car. Mr. Flowers wasn’t nice.
My father’s reply was so soft I could barely hear it. “I have a family,” he said. “I just can’t.”
I heard the unmistakable sound of a fist against a hard surface—a table, a desktop—but that was the extent of Mr. Flowers’s outburst; his voice stayed under control. “I can make you do it. I don’t have to ask.”
“I’m sorry,” my father said.
“I really wish you had any sense at all in that giant head of yours,” he said, apparently done with back-and-forth conversation. “But you don’t, do you? You’re just a big dumb ape. I need to get something from the other room.”
I heard footsteps coming and ducked around a corner just as Mr. Flowers came out of the room, shutting the door behind him. He turned and went the other way.
A moment later I heard, coming from inside the room, a sickening thud, followed by a grunt. Then it all repeated.
A man’s deep voice—not my father’s—said: “Get up.”
I hadn’t known anyone else was in the room with my father and didn’t wait around to find out who it was. I found my feet and, heart pounding, I ran back through the kitchen and outside again, where bright sunlight assaulted me. I cut a path between adults on the deck and kept running to the cool grass, where my legs gave out and I spent the next few minutes trying to catch my breath and slow the beating of my heart.
I waited, terrified that my father would never return to me. But soon Mr. Flowers and my father emerged from the house, along with a third
