The Imperfects Read online

  “So it’s not the Florentine?” Beck asks, disappointed.

  “IGS doesn’t identify diamonds. It only grades them,” Viktor explains.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “A grading report tells you about the characteristics of the diamond, not its provenance.”

  Beck follows Viktor into the dining room where two plates of food hide beneath porcelain lids. The brunches, his help with her grandmother’s diamond, these aren’t acts of generosity and gratitude alone. Despite his penthouse with a view of Rittenhouse Square, his curated library and bottles of expensive bubbly, Viktor is lonely. She vows to visit him more often.

  As Viktor seats himself at the head of the table, he says, “The characteristics are what enable you to identify a stone. Most diamonds aren’t perfect. They have feathers, like the heart-shaped one in your diamond, and other inclusions. Flaws that make them unique. That’s how you identify diamonds—through their imperfections. The grading report tells you what makes your diamond unique, not whether those unique characteristics are those of the Florentine.” Viktor lifts the lids from their plates to reveal almost perfect plates of eggs royale. “It’s the Florentine. You just have to prove it.”

  * * *

  When the Millers return from the cemetery, someone has covered all the mirrors. Esther, Deborah assumes, who is already in the dining room, spreading trays from Hymie’s across the table.

  It catches Deborah’s breath to see those platters of rugelach, corned beef, and lox. The knishes, laid out on one of her childhood plates, choke her up more than the burial at the cemetery. Little about the house has changed since Deborah was a child—not the ivy-trimmed plates, not the oak table Helen bought at a garage sale that was too big for the modest dining room. Only a newer television in the corner and rose carpeting on the stairs, which Helen had installed after Beck had slipped and needed stitches.

  Deborah looks around the familiar living room, calculating how long it’s been since she’s seen Helen. A swell of guilt rises as she realizes it’s been a month, that she often went longer than that without seeing her mother.

  A hand reaches toward Deborah’s. Fingers interlace hers, nails manicured and pink, a sizable diamond sliding down the ring finger. Ashley is the most attractive of her children. Or the highlighted hair, expensive clothing, and facials have made her so. She’s become the least Miller. Then again, Ashley is not a Miller anymore. She’s a Johnson, stripping herself not just of her maiden name but of the resentments that come with it. Ashley has no interest in fighting Deborah for the house. She has no intention of making Deborah feel worse. That’s not necessarily the same thing as forgiveness, though.

  Esther orders them to take off their shoes, and Jake leans over Ashley as she unzips her boots. “Who’s the boss lady?” he asks.

  “You don’t remember Esther?” Ashley whispers back. “Her mom was Helen’s best friend? She lives next door.” Jake remembers Nancy Bloom, from around the corner. He doesn’t remember Esther or her mother from next door. Jake dips his hands into the bowl of tepid water that Esther holds toward him. As he shakes off the droplets, he sees it as a shot, a close-up. The dining room, covered in platters of food, his mother and sister holding hands, the tension and sadness in the room, Beck’s palpable absence—it’s all so cinematic. Maybe Jake will write a film about this shiva, about Helen. A film to honor his grandmother’s passing, nothing like My Summer of Women. It sends a jolt of excitement through him, having an idea for a movie.

  The Millers squish together on the couch as Esther takes the chair beside them, smacking her lips as she eats a plate of rugelach. The dry heat from the buzzing radiator makes the room stuffy. The Millers don’t have an appetite, despite Esther asking them every few minutes if they are hungry. When she’s finished her plate, she announces that she will be at her house if they need anything.

  As she’s leaving, Deborah asks her, “What are we supposed to do now?”

  “Remember Helen.” Esther shuts the door behind her as she leaves.

  Jake stares at the platters of food in the dining room. “Do you think anyone else is coming?”

  “No,” Ashley says, an uncharacteristic heaviness to her voice.

  “Of course other people are coming,” Deborah protests. All of Helen’s old neighborhood friends are dead, even Esther’s mother, but people have always liked Helen.

  The Millers sit in silence, waiting for the other people to arrive, waiting for someone to begin to remember Helen. When no one does, Deborah announces that she’s hungry. She wonders how much thinner she’d be if she didn’t eat out of discomfort. She wonders if that thinness would make her as happy as the corned beef sandwich she assembles on her plate.

  “So much for veganism,” Ashley quips. She means this to be funny, but it’s not the right setting for sarcasm. “Sorry.”

  Deborah shrugs. “Helen never let food go to waste. I’m honoring her.” She settles into the armchair Esther has left vacant. Suddenly, she can’t eat. “Helen used to roast a chicken on Mondays. Then Tuesdays she’d make chicken salad with whatever scraps she could get off the carcass and on Wednesdays we’d have chicken soup. Not even the bones went to waste.”

  “We know,” Jake says. “We lived here, too.”

  Ashley shoots Jake a chiding look. Judging from the bruised expression on Deborah’s face, he may have gone too far. Unlike Ashley, he has no intention of apologizing.

  “I don’t understand why Beck isn’t here,” Jake says, fidgeting.

  “She had to do something for work.” Deborah rests the untouched sandwich on the table.

  “Her grandmother dies, and they can’t even give her the weekend off?” Ashley remembers all those weekends Ryan supposedly couldn’t get off, all those soccer tournaments and Disney movies he missed, the vacation to Los Angeles he had to cancel. He was at work, but not because his company demanded it. Ashley laughs in disbelief. Was she always this gullible or only once her husband started lying to her?

  Ashley’s face has always been expressive, like a mood ring darkening from blue to black at the first sign of distress. Jake monitors his sister and understands, as Ashley does, that Beck is not at work. Even though he has no idea where she is, he should have known that if the timing of Beck’s work task seemed too convenient, it’s because it was.

  Deborah can feel the shift in the room, the static air building entropy. Before it unleashes and they band together against Beck, Deborah finds the agreement Beck gave her.

  “We need to sign this,” she tells Ashley and Jake as she puts the document on the coffee table. “So Beck can settle the will.”

  “You mean so you can get the house,” Jake says.

  “She was my mother, Jake.” Deborah keeps her tone even. “I know you don’t understand our relationship, but—”

  “You’re right, I don’t. I don’t understand, after everything you did to us, to Helen, why she would leave our house to you. She must not have been in her right mind. In fact, how do we know you didn’t do something sneaky to trick her into leaving it to you?”

  “Jake, come on,” Ashley cautions.

  Deborah remains steadfast. “I don’t have to justify Helen’s decisions to you.”

  “Well, I’m not signing that.” Jake leans back and crosses his arms against his chest. He knows he’s acting like a child. His posture dares his sister and mother to call him out on it.

  Ashley and Deborah exchange looks, and Deborah is grateful that at least one of her children doesn’t hate her, at least not outright, anyway.

  “Why do you have to make this harder than it already is?” Deborah asks.

  Jake leans forward, his face cloaked in mock surprise. “I’m the one who makes things harder? You’re serious? That’s rich. Really, that’s—” Jake stops midsentence when he hears a knock, then turns to see the unlocked door creak open. A tall, clean-shaven ma
n in his thirties bows his head as he steps into the living room.

  “Is Beck here?” he asks. “I’m Tom.”

  They’ve all heard of Tom. Helen had told Jake and Deborah he was a stable fellow. Consistent, which Beck needed more in a partner than someone who was interesting or fun to be around. For her part, Beck had told Ashley that Tom was smart, intriguingly straitlaced. Beck didn’t know that someone so buttoned-up could be so right for her until, one day, Beck reported that she was wrong. Tom wasn’t right for her at all.

  “Did Beck invite you?” Ashley asks warily.

  “You’re a lawyer, right?” Jake lifts the agreement from the table and holds it toward him. “Maybe you can help us sort out some details from Helen’s will before we sign this?”

  “Jake,” Ashley starts, “we should wait until Beck gets back—” but Tom’s already walking toward the couch, arm outstretched to take the agreement from Jake.

  Five

  Beck startles when she walks into Helen’s house and finds her family huddled around the coffee table with Tom. Deborah cryptically peers over at her youngest daughter, while the expressions on the others’ faces are clearer: Ashley is furious, Jake betrayed, Tom disappointed. Tom? Why is he sitting with her family, communing like old friends planning a bank robbery?

  “I didn’t invite you,” Beck says by way of greeting to her ex-boyfriend. And then she sees it, opened on the computer resting between them. Helen’s will. They must have noticed the exception in Article IV. Instinctively, she clutches her purse as though one of them may try to snatch the diamond from her.

  Beck surveys her family, her siblings who do not look as elated as they should at the prospect of their inheritance. Then she remembers: they don’t know the diamond’s worth. They’re upset because Beck is keeping a secret.

  Tom stands. “I just wanted to pay my respects.”

  Beck thinks he’s going to leave so the Millers can engage in the fight that is imminent. Instead, he walks up to Beck, and she prays that he both will and will not touch her. His hand rests in the air an inch from her shoulder, a terrible compromise between her desires.

  “Can we talk?” He motions her toward the porch.

  Outside, it’s cold enough to see her breath and Beck exhales fast plumes as she tries to control her emotions. That terrible compromise continues, as Beck wants to scream at Tom—What the hell are you doing here?—and wants him to pull her to his chest, to stroke her hair as she clings to him.

  Before she can do anything, Tom holds his arms up in protest. “I wasn’t trying to butt in.”

  “Seriously, I never asked you to come.”

  “You didn’t have to. I know how close you were with Helen.”

  “We aren’t friends, Tom. If you haven’t noticed, I go out of my way to avoid you at work.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “Then why would you think I’d want you here?”

  “I still care about you. Even if it didn’t work out between us.”

  “You have a funny way of showing it, conspiring with my family.”

  “Beck.” He reaches for her. She shakes her head, and he digs his hands into the front pockets of his khaki pants. He isn’t wearing a jacket, and he shivers visibly. Beck knows he won’t admit that he’s cold, that he’ll stay outside as long as she wants him to. “They were screaming at each other. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “You could have left, minded your own business.”

  Tom gives her a funny look as though the suggestion is preposterous. “When I told them who I was they asked me to look at the Receipt, Release, Refunding, and Indemnification Agreement you gave them.” Of course Tom calls it by its full name. He’s always finding subtle ways to flaunt his expertise, only it’s never bothered her before. “I looked at the will to explain to your brother that he really didn’t have a case for contesting your mother’s ownership of the house.” Tom sways from foot to foot to keep warm. “Why didn’t you tell your family about the brooch?”

  Tom is a good lawyer, scrupulous, with loyalty to the law, not to her. He knows that a brooch listed as having a yellow diamond should be appraised before the assets are distributed. He knows her family could dispute the will, arguing that Helen didn’t understand the value of what she’d left to Beck, or worse, they could claim that Beck had undue influence.

  “Because it’s nothing,” she tells him. He looks skeptical. “You know why.” And he does. Tom knows all about Jake’s movie, about the credit cards Deborah took out in Beck’s name, the months when she had no idea if her mother was coming home, let alone still alive. He knows about Beck’s complicated feelings toward Ashley, who left the minute she could, only wishing to be closer to Beck once she had kids and decided that family was important.

  “You should have told them. As executor, it was your duty.”

  “You’re serious? My duty?” Beck stares at Tom until he looks away, uncomfortable, and she understands that they could never be together, not really. They are both governed by a steadfast sense of right and wrong, but Beck’s, however fallible, is her own, while Tom’s is based on the law, comprised of rules in place of morals to follow. “Just because I told you a few stories about my family doesn’t mean you know what’s going on here.” The anger radiates from her core, raising her body temperature despite the afternoon’s chill. She feels overwhelmed by all the things she wants to shout at him, the more pressing fight with her family waiting in the living room. So she just says, “Go,” pleased that she’s managed to stay calm, that she didn’t give him the satisfaction of discounting her as irrational.

  Tom looks at his watch. He once told Beck that he wears a watch so he can stare at it at opportune times.

  “I’ve got to get home and finish up some work before the week starts.” She wonders if he remembers that he’s revealed this move to her. “I’ll call you later?”

  Hands burrowed in his pockets, Tom heads down the pathway toward his parked car. He won’t call and she doesn’t want him to, only now she’s left to feel rejected when her phone doesn’t ring.

  Tom offers her a wave and a reconciliatory smile before pulling away from the curb. As Beck watches his car drive away, she realizes he feels guilty for breaking up with her.

  Beck can locate the precise moment in January when their relationship was over, even though it took Tom another month to move out. Lying in bed, with Beck’s cheek against his smooth chest, Tom had mentioned an upcoming business trip to Los Angeles.

  “Your brother lives there?” he’d asked, knowing that Jake did. “Do you want to come with me?”

  Tom considered family a necessity, like a house or a car or a comfortable pair of loafers. He called his parents every Sunday, saw his brother every few weeks. It didn’t matter that the only thing they had to talk about was the Eagles—you saw family regardless of whether you enjoyed spending time with them. In fact, one of the things he loved most about Beck was how much she treasured her time with Helen. One thing he couldn’t understand was the fact that she’d once been close to Jake, too, only they hadn’t spoken in half a decade.

  Beck made up some excuse about being busy with work, and he continued to stroke her hair, eventually asking, “What happened between you two?”

  Like a fool, she’d wanted him to understand. So she told him everything, starting with high school.

  The thing no one ever understands about Beck in high school is that she was happy. Sure, when she stopped to think about her father, a wave of hurt would rise; when she envisioned her mother at some ashram in Vermont, a burst of anger; when confronted with the image of her siblings recreating themselves at college, a torrent of jealousy. But she’d developed a tightknit group of friends at Lower Merion, closer and more loyal than she’d had at her previous school. She liked the goulash and roasted chicken Helen made for her. She was much happier, she emphasized to Tom, than anyone recognized.
Almost twenty years later, that fact remains important to her.

  So why did she do it? It wasn’t about the grades—that’s another detail she emphasizes. It was about Mr. O’Neal, her eleventh-grade English teacher. His smugness. His skeeviness. His completely unwarranted antipathy toward her. The worst part was, she’d been excited to enroll in his class. He assigned The Bluest Eye, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. He wore jeans instead of Dockers and would curse so long as it was out of enthusiasm.

  From the first day, he formed an instant dislike of Beck. Sure, she’d walked in with a nose ring and blue hair woven into buns, her pierced belly button exposed beneath her tank top, her first tattoo—the Venus symbol—already visible on her lower back. But she’d done all the summer reading and got a 10/10 on the pop quiz that first day. She always raised her hand, never spoke out of turn. Still, Mr. O’Neal would rarely call on her and, when he did, he would nod vacantly at her careful comments, always quick to move on to the next student, praising whatever Reid Taylor or Jon Rubens or one of the other jocks said, usually a regurgitation of Beck’s ideas in less precise terms. And worse, he gave her a C on everything she wrote.

  Beck had never gotten a C, had never been average at anything. When she tried to talk to Mr. O’Neal about her grades, she’d left his classroom in tears.

  “Maybe if you spent more time on your arguments and less time desecrating your body, you’d see a reflection in your grades.” Beck followed his eyes down her small bust to the charm dangling from her belly button. His gaze remained on her bare stomach until he sucked in his breath, shook his head, and walked away.

  She didn’t dare tell anyone what he said and started wearing bulky sweatshirts to all her classes. Still, the Cs continued, with comments in the margins like, Seriously? Are you kidding me? Is this for real? She knew her work was sound, understood in some abstract way that his comment about her body had been inappropriate, but he’d embarrassed her and made her doubt herself. Soon, that doubt spread into her other classes where she was afraid to speak, afraid to submit the assignments she’d completed, afraid to go to school at all.