Bleeding Hearts(34)

He had to do something soon, or his life was going to fall apart. That was the problem here. Nobody had the faintest idea what Jacqueline’s dying had done to him financially. Not even the children. The children just thought he was stingy. If he’d been stingy, he wouldn’t be in this mess. Maybe he needed a few sessions at Shopaholics Anonymous. He didn’t, of course. He wasn’t some silly woman with even less sense than character who didn’t know when to cut up her credit cards. He’d stopped shopping when he’d gotten worried enough.

He was sitting at the desk in the first floor study, looking at the phone he had just hung up. That had been Hannah, inviting him to a party she was giving this Friday night. She would have mentioned it when they went out to dinner, but his conversation had been so interesting, it had just put the party straight out of her head. Paul was sure there had been no party planned on the night he’d taken Hannah Krekorian to dinner. This was her way of making sure she saw him again. Paul thought it was a very good sign.

He left the study, made his way to the front hall, and climbed the stairs to the second floor. This house had thirty-five hundred square feet on each floor, but not many rooms, except at the top, where Alyssa and Nick had their apartment. The kitchen was in the basement. The living room, the study, and the library were on the first floor. The dining room and another reception room were on the second floor. Paul went into the dining room and looked around. Caroline was sitting at one end of the long table, eating shredded wheat and looking sour. She had her special small pitcher of skim milk and a glass of bloodred just-from-the-juicer juice beside her. James was sitting at the other end of the table, eating English muffins piled with butter and cream cheese and drinking coffee black. He looked happy as a clam. There was another difference between men and women, Paul thought. Men would never force themselves to eat things that made them feel sour. They’d eat what they wanted and take the consequences. Women were always saying they wanted to make their own standards instead of living up to the standards set by men, but you could no more get them off one of their ridiculous diets than you could turn Waikiki Beach into the diamond as big as the Ritz.

Paul got himself a cup of coffee from the sideboard and put it at a place midway down that side of the table. He got cream cheese and butter and bagels from the sideboard too, and sat down. Caroline glared at him.

“Of course you realize this is sabotage behavior,” she said frostily. “You both know how important it is to me to stick to this diet. You’re both afraid that if I change, things won’t be so pleasant for you. So you eat that stuff where I can see you, hoping to make me lose control.”

“I’d never try to make you lose control,” James said airily. “I don’t indulge myself in missions impossible. Did I hear you on the phone, Dad? Caroline says you’ve got a new paramour but she’s so young you don’t want anybody to know.”

“I think you ought to consider the entire etiology of eating disorders,” Paul said to Caroline. “You don’t need to lose weight. You’re thin as a rail. What are you doing on a diet?”

“I’m on a maintenance diet.”

“You’re in denial,” Paul said. “This is some kind of incipient anorexia nervosa. Your dieting is out of control.”

“Don’t tell me when I’m out of control,” Caroline snapped. “You don’t own my emotions. I own my emotions. You’ve got no right to tell me how I feel.”

“I’m not telling you how you feel. I’m just trying to point out—”

“You’re just trying to manipulate me, that’s all you’re doing. That’s all you’ve ever tried to do. You were a manipulative and withholding parent from the beginning, and you know it. You just hate knowing I know it. You just hate it that you can’t use it on me anymore.”

“Could we try not subjecting me to it anymore?” James said. “It’s Sunday morning. Maybe we ought to go to church.”

They both stared at him blankly.

“Well,” James said, “it would have to beat having another one of these arguments. These arguments are the pits. And they never get anywhere.”

“I have a right to express my anger.”

“I have a right not to listen to it.”

“That’s not true,” Caroline said quickly. “I have a right to express my anger and I have a right to be listened to.”

“I don’t know where you got that from—scratch it; yes, I do—but in case you haven’t heard, slavery has been illegal in this country since the Emancipation Proclamation. And slavery is the name for the condition where some people have an absolute right to some other people’s time. I do have a right not to listen to it. And now I would like to discuss something else.”