Fin & Lady: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the carpet with his finger. He remembered a day when she bought daffodils and tulips at the florist, and he held her hand, and the soft pale blue wool of her spring coat brushed his cheek.
    “You must never go down to the end of the town without consulting me,” he told her.
    “Your first literary allusion,” she said.
    When asked to recite the words to his father, Fin stared up at the figure towering above him. A cigar obscured his father’s face, the end a smoldering orange disk. He watched the fiery glow wax and wane, in and out, with the breath of his father. He watched the smoke, a slow, silver cloud.
    “Cat got your tongue again?” his father said. He hung up his hat and coat, leaving behind, in the front hall, the familiar wafting smell of tobacco and cold.
    “Did I live near here?” Fin asked Lady now. “When I was little?” But it was a huge city with hundreds of buildings just like this one. “No, that’s stupid. Forget it.”
    “Pretty close, though. Anyway, don’t worry, we won’t be here long.” She handed Fin the ice tray. His fingers stuck to it, to the lever, as he pulled and loosened the ice cubes. Lady threw some in a glass, then poured a clear liquid from a bottle. There was a tiger on the label. For a second, Fin thought it said “Fin,” but it said “Gin.” “My special water,” Lady said, grinning. “God, what a long day.”
    Fin was really hungry now. He had never had to prompt an adult to feed him before. That was what they did, whether you wanted to eat or not. They made you come to the table, they made you stay at the table, they made you eat what was on your plate at the table.
    “I should probably feed Gus,” he said, hoping she would get the point.
    She smiled at the large dog lying at his feet. “Gus.” Gus thumped his tail silently on the carpet. “Good grief! Dinner! You probably want dinner, too.”
    “Don’t you?” Fin asked.
    “I don’t eat,” she said, as if she were a vampire or something. “Good grief. I’d be as big as a house.”
    She opened a can of sardines and a can of tuna fish, which Gus and Fin shared while she recited the nursery rhyme about Jack Sprat and stubbed cigarettes out in the empty cans. There were crackers, too. And an apple.
    “Thank you,” Fin said. Be polite. His mother would want him to be polite. “We don’t want your wife to curse me,” she would say in her girlish, bell-like voice, and she would laugh and let him go out to play with dirty fingernails or an unmade bed. Now he felt tears coming, again. He pulled the damp handkerchief out of his pocket. It had been his father’s. His mother had given it to him.
    “Oh Lord,” Lady said. “What have we here? What have we here?”
    “I’ll stop. I promise. You don’t have to yank my arm again,” Fin said through his tears.
    She put her arm around him. “No, no. Cry away.”
    Which he did.
    “There, there,” Lady said awkwardly.
    Someone holding him close as his mother had done, someone who was not his mother; he pulled away, then threw his arms around her.
    “We’re both orphans now, I guess,” Lady said softly.
    Fin had not thought about being an orphan. He looked up. “You’re an orphan?” But he was thinking: I’m an orphan? “I met your mother,” he said. “She came to our house when I was little. Before we went to Europe.”
    Lady laughed. “I’ll bet she did, poor old girl. We didn’t get along that badly, you know? I mean, compared to Daddy, she was a saint. I miss her.”
    “I miss my mother.”
    She pulled him close, but he could tell she wasn’t really listening.
    “And after all the shit I put her through, she left me everything. I really thought she’d leave it all to the Whitney. She thought they’d never finish it, but there it is, and here we are.” She looked at Fin, expectantly.
    “Yeah,” he said. What was the Whitney? “So now you’re rich?”
    “You’re not supposed to ask people about money. It’s considered