The Imperfects Read online

  “I just—Georgina’s an old friend and I knew you two didn’t want to think about selling. I wasn’t even trying to sell it. I just wanted to have a plan in case we found ourselves in a situation where we had to sell quickly.”

  “Well, congratulations. It looks like we’re there, thanks to you.”

  “I was trying to help.”

  “You’re unbelievable.” Beck inches away from her sister. “What’s your cut even matter to you—$125,000? Isn’t that your shoe allowance for the year?” Ashley shoots Beck a cautionary look, which her sister ignores. “What, you need a new Mercedes, and Ryan won’t buy it for you, is that it? Or maybe you need a facelift to keep up with the other moms?”

  “Beck—” Deborah calls, but it’s too late. Beck looks up to see her mother and the kids frozen on the stairs. Tyler sprints upstairs. Lydia follows him.

  “Thanks a lot,” Ashley says before taking the carpeted stairs two at a time.

  Jake monitors Beck through the screen.

  “What, taking notes for your next script? Hope I performed well for you.”

  “Sometimes you’re such an asshole.” He hangs up.

  Beck turns to look at Deborah, who plops down on the couch beside her and drapes the comforter over her shoulders. “We’re all assholes sometimes,” Deborah says. “It’s called being family.”

  * * *

  After he hangs up, Jake still feels agitated. Normally, he would pack a bowl and smoke the agitation away. Today, Jake shuts his eyes and tries to meditate, which he’s read can be an effective alternative to a substance-induced calm. He counts his breaths in and out, but the irritation persists. How could Ashley have gone behind their backs, to Bartley’s no less? Why does she only ever care about money? And why does Beck always have to be so defensive, so mean? For the first time, Jake doesn’t regret making My Summer of Women.

  “Hey, babe,” Kristi says as she sits beside him on the couch. Kristi has taken to wearing sweats whenever possible—there’s something inexplicably sexy about those gray pants—so he’s surprised to see her dressed in jeans and a calico blouse. She reaches for his right hand. His knuckles are no longer swollen and have shifted from purple to yellow. “It’s healing nicely. Does it still hurt?”

  Jake clenches his fist. “Only when I do this.”

  “Then don’t do that.” Kristi laughs. Since Jake punched the man in the leather jacket, things with Kristi have shifted back to normal, and the way she laughs now, the ways she kisses him goodbye each morning, it feels so right that he almost believes he did get his hand stuck in the freezer. Then, after she leaves for work, he remembers has no reason to leave the house except to buy dinner from a grocery store that is not Trader Joe’s. If Kristi realizes that the premade foods are from Gelson’s, she doesn’t investigate.

  “So,” Kristi asks. “How’d it go with Beck and Ash? Are you going to sell the diamond to the Italians?”

  Since Jake told Kristi about the diamond, he’s filled her in on the Family Settlement Agreement, the story he’s piecing together about Helen’s journey to America. Confiding in Kristi is so much better than navigating this alone. She asks questions he doesn’t consider, about the families of the children who came over, the property listed on the ship’s manifest—whether it included the diamond—the family that Helen boarded with before she started her own. Kristi was the one who thought to look up the surviving fifty children and had convinced Jake to set up a visit with Mr. Frankel, to see if he remembers Helen.

  “Ash and I want to sell, but Beck is being a jerk.” While Jake is an enthusiastic curser, he can never swear in front of Kristi. Even calling his sister a jerk makes her flinch. He launches into the details of their phone call, how Ashley had visited Bartley’s, how Beck immediately went into beast mode. “I know it isn’t millions, but the money—it would be a big help.” Not a help, a necessity.

  “Is that what Helen would have wanted?”

  “She’d want to make our lives easier if she could.” Kristi raises her eyebrows, compelling Jake to be honest. “No, Helen would never submit to a threat,” he admits.

  “And you still don’t know why she never sold?” Kristi squeezes Jake’s arm. “Beck doesn’t do a good job of showing it, but she’s trying to respect Helen’s wishes. If she’s cruel sometimes, just remember she’s hurting.” Without meeting Beck, Kristi understands her better than Jake does. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Jake realizes he’s making his dumbstruck, puppy-love face at her. It happens involuntarily with Kristi. Often. “You just have this way of making everything seem so reasonable—even my sister.”

  “It is reasonable. Some people have a hard time asking for help. It’s important to understand things from someone else’s perspective.” Jake thinks of Kristi’s job as a veterinary technician, how she rationalizes her boss’s rudeness because he regularly has to administer death, and that kind of emotional trauma would weigh on anyone.

  “I’m being a dummy,” he says, a statement she never contradicts. “How was work?”

  “It was good. We were able to finance surgery for that dog, Curly. You should have seen the look on the little girl’s face when we told her the good news.” Instinctively, Kristi cradles her nonexistent belly.

  Kristi has to work one Saturday a month. Today was that day, Jake realizes. It’s odd that she’s home before noon.

  “They let you go early?” Jake notices the strain on Kristi’s face, and he reaches for one of her feet to caress it in the way she likes. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to have you home.”

  Kristi pulls her foot away. “You forgot.”

  “Forgot what?” As soon as he asks, he remembers. Week fourteen, their second prenatal visit. She’d put it on their joint calendar, which he never checks. He hops off the couch and trots down the hall. “I can be ready in five minutes.”

  “You have to remember these things, Jake.” The disappointment in her voice makes him weak. “I can’t do this alone.”

  He trades his ratty T-shirt for a button-down. It smells musty, but it will have to do.

  Jake returns to the living room and sits on the couch beside her.

  “You aren’t alone,” he says. “I just got distracted. All this stuff with my family, I’m letting it consume me. That’s why I want to sell. I want to be here. Present, with you and the baby.” He realizes he’s holding her hand as if he’s about to ask for it. “Marry me.”

  “What?” Her surprise is more extreme than he expects.

  “Marry me.”

  She pulls her hand from his. “Jake, it’s no big deal about the doctor’s appointment. You don’t have to propose to make up for it. I just don’t want you to forget again.”

  “I’m not trying to make up for anything. I’m proposing because I want to marry you.” Something inside him sours. “You don’t want to marry me.”

  She looks at him like he’s the idiot he generally is. “I do. But not like this. Not when we’re late for our checkup and you’ve got a ketchup stain on your shirt.” Jake looks down at a crusty red spot just below his right nipple. He starts to take off the shirt, but she stops him. “Come on, I don’t want to be late.”

  As they are locking up the apartment Kristi says to him, “Ask me again, for real. You don’t have to get a ring. Maybe some roses? Or balloons? Make it special. And, Jake? Ashley’s always generous with money. If she’s pushing to take the offer, there must be something going on. Some reason she needs it.”

  She’s right. Ashley always offers to help out. Jake feels a pang of guilt as he realizes he has no idea what’s going on with his sister.

  * * *

  Beck and Lydia wait in line at the Franklin Institute to enter the two-story replica of the human heart. Lydia knows all sorts of facts about the human body: the heart beats one hundred thousand times a day; 8 percent of your body weight is your blood.
She begged Beck to bring her, only now she crosses her arms tightly against her chest as though Beck has dragged her here.

  As they approach the red staircase into the model heart, Beck says, “I shouldn’t have said those things about your mom.”

  Lydia shrugs.

  “It’s no excuse, but you know how siblings are. We say things to each other that we don’t really mean.”

  Lydia looks at Beck with disbelief. “Tyler means everything he says to me.”

  “He doesn’t.”

  “He does. But he’s a moron, so I don’t care.” A steady beat surrounds them as they ascend the stairs.

  “Well, I’m a moron, too. And I didn’t mean anything I said about your mom.”

  Lydia nods, deciding whether or not to believe her. Beck has always had a particular fondness for Lydia, who is serious and pensive like Beck was as a child. In the five and a half months since Beck last saw her at Thanksgiving, Lydia has grown at least two inches and lost her baby fat. She has Ashley’s naturally dark hair, Ryan’s olive skin, and is well on her way to becoming a knockout.

  Soon enough, the tension in Lydia’s posture disappears, and she’s tugging Beck up the stairs, following the flow of blood into the heart.

  The halls are narrow and Beck feels claustrophobic as they pass the right atrium. While Lydia has forgiven her, Beck cannot forgive herself. Why does she go to that place of intense anger so quickly? It’s never an effective way of communicating. It’s cruel and makes her seem unreasonable. Plus, she knows Ashley has been uncharacteristically invested in finding out about Helen. It doesn’t make sense that she would want to sell, to give up so quickly.

  The synthesized heartbeat echoes around them, its tempo too fast for comfort. Lydia races ahead, squealing, “We’re in the right ventricle!”

  Beck dashes after her, remembering how her own father chased her through these very hallways. Every Saturday morning, he would take her to the Franklin Institute to see the heart, the Academy of Natural Science to see the dinosaurs, Reading Terminal where they would wait in line for buttery soft pretzels. These outings were their ritual, just the two of them, something she took for granted until they abruptly ended.

  Beck was twelve when her father disappeared, only a year older than Lydia is now. She’ll never forget the day the bus dropped her off and she’d skipped up the pathway to their Victorian home, knowing her father would be back from his work trip with a gift for her. When she walked into the kitchen, her mother was talking hurriedly on the phone. Her father’s briefcase wasn’t beside the table, and neither were his black luggage, his overcoat. When Deborah spotted Beck, she froze, and Beck’s first thought was, Dad is dead. “He will be, when I find him,” Deborah had said. By the time Jake got home from band practice, Ashley from field hockey, Deborah had told Beck details she wished she could unlearn about the various women Kenny met on his work trips. In the past he’d never lied to Deborah about where he went, just whom he met there. Only this time he wasn’t in Detroit for a quarterly meeting, like he’d told her. He’d been fired the month before. Their bank accounts had been drained. She’d called every airline. None of them had a record for Kenny Miller out of Philadelphia.

  Beck and Lydia scale the right ventricle up to the main pulmonary artery. The narrow pink halls make Beck feel faint. When she and her father had walked these same pink halls, did he know he was leaving?

  “Did you like it?” Beck manages to ask Lydia once they are outside the heart, back in the museum.

  “It was amazing,” Lydia says with childlike wonder. And as if she can read Beck’s mind, as if something about the heart makes girls think of their fathers, Lydia adds, “I wish my dad were here.”

  Why isn’t Ryan here? The Johnsons come to Philadelphia twice a year, staying at the Ritz on Broad Street, where they can walk to Old City to visit Independence Hall and Elfreth’s Alley. This is the first time the kids and Ashley have visited without Ryan, have opted to stay on Edgehill Road instead of a hotel.

  “I’m sure he does, too.” This isn’t the right thing to say, Beck realizes as soon as Lydia’s eyes fill with tears.

  “I think my dad’s in some sort of trouble.”

  “What makes you say that?” Beck scans the room for Ashley, who ventured to a separate part of the museum with Tyler and Deborah.

  “One night I couldn’t sleep, so I went into my parents’ room. They didn’t see me. They were in the bathroom and Dad kept saying, ‘I screwed up.’ They’ve been fighting a lot, but they always stop when they see me.”

  “Have you asked your mom about it?” Beck wonders whether their fighting has something to do with why Ashley wants to sell the diamond.

  “She just changes the subject. And she’s been acting really happy. Too happy.”

  Beck pulls Lydia in for a hug. It had taken her months to realize her father was never coming back. At first everyone had told her, “He’s just going through something. He’ll be back soon. Your father would never leave you.” Then her thirteenth birthday passed with no card, and she knew that if he didn’t remember to send a present, he wasn’t thinking about her at all. She wished that someone had been honest with her.

  “They’ll sort it out,” Beck promises, releasing her niece. “Your parents wouldn’t want you to worry.”

  The words don’t feel like a lie. Ryan is not Kenny.

  * * *

  Later that evening, after Lydia and Tyler are asleep, Beck opens a bottle of pinot noir. Deborah, sensing the tension between her daughters, tells Beck, “I’ll take mine upstairs.”

  Her uncharacteristic intuitiveness surprises Beck. Maybe it isn’t uncharacteristic. Maybe Beck has been too hard on her, on all of them.

  Ashley is lounging on the couch when Beck cautiously enters the living room. She sits up as Beck hands her a wineglass, which Beck interprets as an invitation to join her.

  Ashley takes a long glug. “I needed that.”

  “Ash...what I said earlier. It wasn’t right. I know you care about Helen. Really, I was just heated. You know how I get. I didn’t mean it.”

  “Is that an apology?”

  “I’m sorry.” Why is it so hard for Beck to say this, even when she is sorry, even when she knows that Ashley is going through something with Ryan? “I really am sorry.”

  Ashley continues drinking her wine, and Beck doesn’t force her to accept the apology. Eventually, Ashley leans back and rests her legs on Beck.

  “Are you worried about the Italians?” Ashley asks.

  “No. They won’t disappear, but they don’t have a case and they can’t force us to sell.”

  “What if they go public?”

  “It’s as much in their interest to keep this quiet as ours.” Beck takes a large sip of wine. “Lydia said something to me this afternoon. She heard you and Ryan fighting.” Ashley darts up, and Beck knows it’s true—Ryan is in trouble. “She’s worried.”

  Ashley buries her head in her hands, shoulders convulsing. Beck patiently strokes her sister’s silky blond hair, keeping an eye on the staircase in hopes no one will wander down.

  Eventually, Ashley’s breath steadies and she looks up, red-eyed, at her sister. “Ryan’s boss put him in charge of patent applications, and I guess they had more than their team could handle, so they had to farm out some of the work. For whatever reason, it was supposed to be split up between several lawyers, but Ryan channeled it all to his friend Gordon.”

  “His best man?”

  “You know he only got into law school because his last name was on one of the buildings. He couldn’t handle the work, so Ryan started doing it himself and pretending Gordon was doing it. I guess Gordon’s going through a divorce and is strapped, so Ryan didn’t want to fire him. Since Ry was doing all the work, it didn’t really seem fair that Gordon was being paid for Ryan’s work.” Ashley laughs cruelly. “Fair. That’s actually what R
yan said.”

  “Fair and legal aren’t always the same thing.” Beck guesses what’s coming—the crimes of fraud, tax evasion, and money laundering if they put the payments in a bank—but she lets her sister finish telling her what happened.

  “Gordon paid taxes on all the money before splitting it with Ryan. Well, not really splitting. Ryan took, like, 85 percent. I still don’t really understand why it was illegal.”

  Beck could explain to her sister that Ryan was essentially being paid double for his work since he was a full-time employee. Instead, she asks, “How’d they get caught?”

  “Some sort of routine internal investigation where they saw that all the work was going to one lawyer instead of multiple. Ryan hasn’t been able to reach Gordon in months. I assume Gordon must have said something to Ry’s company. The FBI showed up at our house last week. Ry’s meeting with a lawyer this weekend.” Ashley twists her engagement ring around her finger. Her diamond is clearer than the Florentine, a brilliant round that makes Ashley’s ring look like so many others. “The FBI gave Ryan some kind of letter.”

  “A target letter,” Beck says, and Ashley nods. Beck doesn’t blame Ryan for what he did. She’s witnessed enough mistakes—her own included—to know that people shouldn’t be judged for what they do as much as why they do it. And Beck doesn’t know why Ryan did it. They didn’t need money, so it must have been about something else. That’s what makes Beck feel for Ashley; her husband knew something was wrong and tried to fix it with money.

  The target letter is a courtesy or a scare tactic. Either way, it’s bad. Ryan needs to give back the money before he’s indicted. That might not save him from a jail sentence, depending on how much he’s stolen, but the law looks kinder on those who repent. While Beck has so much advice for Ashley, right now Ashley doesn’t need a lawyer. She needs her sister.