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Chapter Four
Julia Fisher is finishingher second cup of coffee and trying to figure out an eight-letter word for “spend wastefully.” It’s the only word in today’s so-called quick crossword puzzle that she hasn’t been able to get, despite knowing the first letter is anSand the seventh letter anE.She’s concentrating so hard that, at first, she doesn’t realize that the knocking floating around the periphery of her conscious mind is intended for her. It is only when the knocking is joined by the persistent ringing of a bell that she understands someone is at her front door.
And who that someone is.
“Shit,” she says, although she’s been half expecting them. She takes a deep breath and slowly pushes herself out of her chair, taking a cursory glance up the stairs as she enters the tiny front hall. Arthritis-riddled fingers pat at the short, frosted blond curls she’s been sporting since college, then stretch reluctantly toward the doorknob before falling back to her side. Maybe if she doesn’t answer it, they’ll go away.
No such luck.
“Mom!” a man’s voice calls, accompanied by more knocking, more ringing.
Julia takes another deep breath and opens the door to Norman and his wife, Poppy.Who names a child Poppy?she thinks, staring into their anxious faces. “My goodness. What’s all the fuss?”
“What do you mean, ‘what’s all the fuss’?” her son repeats. “Do you have any idea how long we’ve been standing out here?”
“It can’t have been that long….”
“Long enough. We thought you might have fallen and couldn’t get up. Or something.”
Julia recognizes the “or something” for the euphemism it is. What Norman means isWe thought you might be dead. She stands back to let her son and his wife—hisfourthwife, if anyone’s keeping track anymore—enter. “I’m perfectly fine,” she tells them. “And you don’t have to worry about me falling. You bought me one of those necklace-alarm thingies I can push—”
“You have to wear it for it to actually work,” Norman interrupts, glancing at her bare neck.
“Picky, picky,” Julia says, hoping for a smile she doesn’t get. Has her son always been so humorless?
“It’s not funny,” he says, as if to confirm her suspicion. His eyes follow his wife’s high, round backside as she wiggles past Julia into the living room and plops down on the chintz sofa, a frown on her already turned-down mouth.
Julia lowers herself into one of two mismatched chairs opposite the sofa, waiting for her son to occupy the other. Instead he remains standing. How had she and Walter, her husband of more than half a century, managed to produce a son whose four marriages combined don’t add up to half that? Not that she doesn’t love her only child. She does. She just doesn’tlikehim very much. “You’re looking well,” she tells him, as if to counteract such thoughts.
Besides, it’s true. Norman and his young wife are indeed handsome specimens, both standing over six feet tall, and in wonderful shape, thanks to daily workouts and regular weekend golf games. She studies Norman’s deeply tanned face, finding it hard to believe her son is fifty-one years old. It’s even harder to believeshecould have a son that age since, aside from the standard assortment of aches and pains, she doesn’t feel much older than that herself.
Her glance shifts to Poppy—slim, blond, voluptuous, porcelain-skinned, undeniably beautiful Poppy, Norman’s wife of almost three years, whom he met at the gym in the building that is home to the hedge fund company he helped found, and for whom he promptly discarded wife number three.
Julia sighs. Not that she was particularly saddened by the loss of wife number three, whose lovely face she can barely recall. The fact is that Norman has always liked his women as stupid as they are beautiful.Unlined, uninformed, and unthreatening,she thinks, and sighs again.
“What’s the matter?” her son says now.
“Nothing’s the matter.”
“You sighed.”
“I did?”
“Twice.”
“Is your arthritis giving you problems?” Poppy asks, leaning forward on the sofa, her surgically enhanced breasts straining against the seams of her tight pink jersey.
“No more than usual.” Julia holds up her two misshapen index fingers, the tips of which curve almost comically toward each other. “They look like parentheses,” she says with a laugh. “Brackets,” she explains before Poppy can ask. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”
“A couple of things,” Norman says. He walks toward the window, stares out at the street. “Have you seen Mark?”
“Mark? No. Not since last week.” Mark is Norman’s twenty-year-old son, her only grandchild, courtesy of wife number two. She’d lasted almost a decade, the longest of any of Norman’s wives, probably because she turned a blind eye to his constant philandering. But two years ago, she’d remarried and relocated to New York, and Mark had opted to stay in Florida and move in with his father, an unexpected development that hasn’t exactly gone over big with the fourth Mrs. Fisher.
To be fair, Mark is quite the handful.
To hell with fairness,Julia decides. “Is something wrong?”
“We caught him smoking weed…marijuana,” Norman explains.
