Three #2
When she wasn’t a little buzzy with booze, she was oddly insouciant about the whole dying thing.
It was quite the shock to be sure, and she hadn’t been prepared for her body to utterly betray her as it had.
But she’d always known something was going to get her in the end.
Very few people were lucky enough to simply drift away in their sleep.
She’d thought maybe COPD, given all the pot and Virginia Slims she’d smoked in the seventies.
Or a drunk driver, because people were crazy behind the wheel.
And, of course, cancer, since her mother had died of it when Frances was twelve and everyone who lived long enough seemed to get some form of it.
She wasn’t scared of death or what lay beyond.
She was annoyed. She didn’t need this right now.
She’d assumed there’d be loads more time.
She was, however, scared of sickness and pain.
And the cost of dying. They’d almost had to sell everything to pay for Nick’s ongoing ALS treatment and care.
She had Aaron to thank for not going under—he’d made some wise investments for them during those years.
She doubted cancer was any more affordable than ALS had been.
She didn’t want everything she had to be wasted on her treatment.
She wanted to leave something to her son and his family.
And she would not allow herself to become a financial burden to him.
So the question is, Frances, what do you want?
Good question, Frances.
She had another slug of margarita, then picked up a picture of Aaron taken at his sixth birthday party.
Nick was in the background looking handsome and wearing a silly hat.
She was holding a cake, looking young and fit.
Dammit, when had she gotten so bloody old?
Another photo of Aaron’s college graduation.
And one taken in Hawaii, of her, Nick, Aaron and his friend Jake.
What a moron that kid had turned out to be.
She picked up another photo of her and Nick on New Year’s Eve.
She had a party blower, he had on glasses that said 1990.
It felt like that picture was taken only yesterday.
Life picked up speed as you got older, and these last years had been spent on a bullet train.
She missed that man so much. Time had flown by with him, and now she was running out of it.
She sorted through more pictures and ran across one of her when she was a young girl, with both parents.
The photo was black and white—she couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old.
She stood in the middle of them, her dress a light color, ankle socks and Mary Janes, gloves and a hat.
Easter, perhaps? Her mother was in a silky dress and her hair, which Frances remembered looked and felt like corn silk, was arranged in an artful twist on her head.
Her father, strong and handsome, stood with a cigar in his mouth.
She didn’t remember the occasion, but she remembered the setting—the expansive stone terrace at their Southampton home overlooking the ocean.
They spent their spring and summer there, Dad going into the city as necessary.
She put that photo aside and picked up one of her and their longtime housekeeper, Mrs. Becker.
Frances was wearing black, sitting on the arm of a couch, her arms folded across her middle, unsmiling.
Her long brown hair covered most of her face.
The home in the photo was a modest one, and Frances recalled that it had belonged to Mrs. Becker’s daughter.
The photo was taken the day of her mother’s funeral.
Frances was twelve. No wonder she looked like an angry skeleton.
From that point on the pictures of her childhood almost ceased to exist. As the only child of William Delafield, who had been, as best as Frances could recall, a banking mogul (something that afforded them an apartment in Manhattan and the house in Southampton), she’d been left in Mrs. Becker’s care more often than not.
There were a few more pictures of Frances at various events, such as her father’s wedding to his second wife.
Someone had curled Frances’s hair and dressed her in a pinafore at the age of thirteen.
Frances couldn’t remember wife number two’s name now.
She was younger and blonder than Frances’s mother and, most notably, at least to Frances at that age, her boobs were huge.
But she hadn’t lasted long. When Frances asked her father why they’d split, he’d said, “Because I’ve already got one kid and I don’t need another one. ”
Frances had not been offended. She’d agreed with him.
The third Mrs. Delafield lost her position when she spent too much of her father’s money at Bergdorf Goodman. “I was nothing but a bank to her. Won’t anyone ever love me for me?” he’d asked plaintively.
“I love you, Dad,” Frances had said.
“You know what I mean,” he’d said.
By the time the fourth and final Mrs. Delafield came along, her father was tired.
He met Freya Karlsson in Paris when Frances was seventeen and brought her home to meet his daughter and Mrs. Becker.
Freya was Swedish and pretty. She had a twenty-something son, Nils, tall and Nordic, who had also come.
Frances had taken an immediate dislike to Nils.
He was disparaging of Americans, implied she was a rube, and was condescending to her father.
The trio didn’t stay long as she recalled, departing for Gothenburg.
Frances was left behind with Mrs. Becker.
At the beginning of the summer, she was summoned to her father’s wedding and then promptly returned to Southampton when it was over. Her father stayed in Sweden.
Frances had the run of the place to herself after that, with only Mrs. Becker standing between her and complete debauchery.
She laughed out loud now, thinking of her teenaged self.
She’d thrown so many parties, had sampled so many drugs.
It was the seventies after all, and she’d had unlimited resources.
She drained the last of her margarita and picked up another photo.
The warmth of fond recognition filled her.
It was one of the first pictures taken of her, Irene, Joan, and Edie.
They were at the house in Southampton, on the terrace, sprawled on the stone wall that separated the pool area from the walk to the beach.
It was the summer they’d all first met. There she was, her hair long ironed straight just that morning.
Her halter top was too loose on her athletic frame, her bell-bottom jeans faded to perfection.
Irene was next to her, small and sturdy, wearing overalls with only a bandanna tied around her chest underneath.
Irene’s jet-black pixie cut and glasses were deceiving—she was a firecracker and smart like no one Frances had ever known.
Next to her was Joan, tall and slender like a model, her Grateful Dead T-shirt knotted under her breasts, her midriff bare above her long Mexican skirt.
In those days, she’d worn her hair in an Afro like Diana Ross did, but that day, she had on an overly large sun hat.
And then there was Edith, or Edie as they called her, her arm loose around Joan’s waist. She had on a bikini top that barely covered her breasts; jeans cut off so short there was hardly anything left to the imagination.
She had curly blond hair and sultry green eyes.
They were so young, so loose-limbed, so pretty.
Frances had met Edie first. She’d come to one of the parties Frances threw that summer.
Her parties got dangerously big, honestly.
People she’d never seen in her life were showing up, having heard from a friend of a friend.
Edith came with a group like that. She was beautiful, with eyes that would draw you right in.
But she was dressed in the wrong clothes.
“You’re not seriously wearing plaid to a beach party, are you? ” Frances had asked.
Edie had looked down at her clothes. “It’s all I’ve got.”
“Come on,” Frances had said, and grabbed Edie’s hand, pulling her to her room.
She’d rifled through her closet, tossing tops and bottoms to Edie, even a couple of sundresses, until she found something that Edie liked.
Frances learned that she was aging out of foster care and leaving, literally, with the clothes on her back.
Frances told her she was aging out of her father’s orbit and had plenty of clothes to share.
Their friendship was born that night.
Edie introduced Frances to Joan and Irene.
Joan was the youngest child of eight, a Catholic, and a lesbian.
She was not welcome at home by her father.
Irene was just Irene, caustic at times, entirely imperturbable, scary smart.
No one really knew anything about her family, other than she was a Korean American.
But Edie was Frances’s ride or die. And when Frances’s father died in Sweden a couple of years later, it was Edie she turned to.
Frances didn’t know how to bring his body home, how to have him buried.
How to settle an estate. Edie had come right away, and was immediately on the phone, working things out.
When they finally did get him home and Frances buried him, she discovered that her father had changed his will at the last moment and left everything to Freya and Nils.
Everything. Frances had been left with a gutted trust fund that wasn’t even enough to get her through college.
The U.S. properties would be sold, the proceeds going to his widow.
It was the Swedes who’d done this to her, and specifically Nils. He’d manipulated her ill father, taking advantage of the distance between him and Frances, and making promises to a man on his deathbed he didn’t intend to keep.
“Because you’re a woman,” Edie said angrily. “He thinks he is superior.”