Wreathed (24 page)

“Maybe we can talk about it inside? Sitting down? Instead of, you know, out here in the front lawn?”

“Uncle Sheldon, do you have
any
idea how much stress and pain and aggravation you’ve caused me the last few weeks?” Adam turned to look at me just then, and he saw the grim look on my face, and the tracks of the tears still warm on my cheeks. “Not to mention what you put Wendy and her mother through,” he added, the last few words trailing off.

“I am starting to realize that my strategy may not have been incredibly effective,” Sheldon said.

“That’s the understatement of the year,” I said.

“I’m sorry. I am,” Sheldon said. “Danny was supposed to tell you I was alive. If he hadn’t screwed up, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“This is crazy,” Adam said. “I don’t know what to do now. I mean, there’s not a rational way to handle this.”

“Well, then, let me explain,” I said. “We are going inside. Adam, you are going to explain to your uncle exactly how hurt and embarrassed you are by his deception. He is going to explain his entire stupid plan, in all its insane complexity. And then, I am going to schlep Sheldon up to see my mother, so that she can settle his hash properly. That, and one more thing.”

“Which is?” Adam asked.

I drew myself up to my full five feet eight inches and stood right in front of Adam and gave him the sternest lecture I could manage short of actually poking him in the chest with my finger. “You are going to apologize to me,” I told him. “You are going to make the most abject, the most heartfelt, and the most meaningful apology that any man has ever made to any woman in the history of the world. And it is going to be real and honest and sincere and if you don’t do it, you are never going to see me again.”

Adam responded with a slight sheepish cringe that indicated that he was beginning to realize just how much he had fouled up the last few minutes of his life.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you really do remind me of your mother,” Sheldon said.

“Inside. Both of you.
March.”

It was clear from the inside of the house that Adam was undertaking a serious renovation project. A large workbench sat in the dining room, complete with circular saw and a drop cloth to catch sawdust and little bits of crown molding scattered on the floor. What furniture there was looked basic and utilitarian, including two lower-end IKEA loveseats in the living room that bore the scars of being dragged in and out of a series of low-rent apartments. I sat in one, and Sheldon sat in the other, and Adam grabbed a chair from the kitchen and found a spot between us. None of us wanted to get closer to the others, because we had hurt each other so recently.

“I admit it. I did a stupid thing,” Sheldon said. “But I don’t get why you’re so angry with me. I thought you’d be glad to see I was alive, at least.”

“That’s because you haven’t been getting your credit card statements,” Adam said. “I paid all of your credit card bills, figuring I’d get reimbursed once the house was sold. I canceled the cards, but then all these new statements with these new charges started coming in. I thought it was identity theft, that someone had stolen your name and was buying all the inventory from every home improvement store in South Jersey. But it was you all the time. What the hell have you been up to?”

“I haven’t had anything else to do,” Sheldon said. “Being dead isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know. I’ve been working on the house, trying to make it as perfect as I could. I figured her mother would show up eventually, and if things didn’t work out with her, I could flip the house and pay for all the renovation costs. You should see it. It looks fantastic. Wendy here can tell you all about it.”

“Uncle Sheldon, for God’s sake,” Adam said. “I have fraud investigators from three different credit card companies chasing after you, did you know that? And on top of everything, you went and gave that house away to someone you hadn’t seen in fifty years. Do you have
any
idea what the last few weeks have been like for me?”

“They haven’t been all that great for me, either,” Sheldon said. “But I got a lot accomplished on the house. You’d be surprised what you can do when you have enough spare time. Are you going to put the crown molding in here, or just in the dining room?”

I could see the veins bulging in Adam’s neck. “You can’t kill him,” I said. “I understand. I have wanted to kill him ever since Cape May. But it’s not a good idea.”

“No jury would convict me,” Adam said.

“If you kill him, it brings the will back into play. And the codicil, for all I know. We’d be back to Square One.”

“And the financial stuff is just the tip of the iceberg,” Adam said. “Then there’s the chaos you unleashed on my personal life. Wendy’s, too. What is wrong with you?”

“It was a good idea,” Sheldon said. “It would have worked, if all of you had done what you were supposed to have done.”

“Instead, it did the exact opposite,” I said. “You scared the hell out of me, and caused poor Adam here weeks of grief. And you have also messed with my mother, and you have no idea what pain is still in store for you.”

“About that,” Sheldon said. “It’s already been a long day. Maybe we could put that trip off until tomorrow? You know, stay here tonight, and get a fresh start in the morning. We also need to think about dinner. There’s that Mexican place we went to that time.”

“You don’t get a vote,” I said.

Adam looked at me quizzically. “What happens if your mother kills him? Wouldn’t that trigger the codicil?”

I thought for a second. “If she’s convicted of murder, she wouldn’t be eligible to inherit, and the house would go back to the estate. But no jury would convict her. Maybe we should be careful.”

Adam nodded. “Or we could all kill him, like in
Murder on the Orient Express.
”

“Can we please not talk about how you want to murder me?” Sheldon asked. “I would greatly prefer a civilized discussion, if that’s not too much to ask. Perhaps over a nice dinner.”

“If you want a civilized discussion,” Adam said, “you can start by explaining why you initiated this insane, crack-brained scheme. That’s all I want right now. Tell me why you did this. Tell me why you thought this was a good idea. Tell me what you thought you would possibly get out of this other than upsetting me and Wendy and all the nice people at the senior-living complex.”

“I didn’t mean to upset anybody,” Sheldon said. “I didn’t mean to cause anybody any grief. What I did, I did because I loved Emily and wanted to be with her. That’s all.”

“Then why not call her?” I said. “Send her a letter. Be her Facebook friend. You didn’t have to go through this charade to get her attention.”

“You don’t understand,” Sheldon said. “It’s not your fault. You’re young. You have the rest of your life ahead of you, as they say. I am old, and I am lonely, and I am deathly afraid of spending the rest of my life alone. That’s something that’s hard for me to admit, even to myself. If I just went up to Emily and tried to contact her out of the blue, there was a good chance she wasn’t going to want anything to do with me. I had one chance with her and I needed to make the most of it.”

“How’d that work out for you?” I asked.

“It was a good plan. I knew she would come for the funeral. She would ignore every other thing I tried to do, but she’d promised to come to my funeral when I died. So all I had to do was die, and that was easy enough.”

Adam snorted at this, and managed to be adorable. I had to remind myself to be mad at him.

“Then all I had to do would be to come back to life, in just the right way. And I thought that if Emily saw me alive again, in the house where we’d spent our honeymoon, with it restored to be as beautiful as it was back then—well, it seemed romantic to me. It was a big risk to take, and it didn’t pay off the way it should have, but it seemed like a risk worth taking, to me. Especially since the alternative was just spending the rest of my life sitting around Victorian Cottages, growing old and moldy and sad and lonely.”

“I talked to those old women at Victorian Cottages,” Adam said. “There were at least three of them who would have snapped you right up, if you’d asked them.”

“But that’s not what I wanted,” Sheldon said. “I didn’t want to shack up with someone I hardly knew, just to have a fling. You have a lot of free time when you’re retired, you know, and I spent a lot of mine going over my life, trying to figure out how I got to where I am—all the choices that I made. And the one thing I really regretted was not trying harder to work things out with Emily. I wanted to fix that. I’m good at fixing things, you know, and this was the one thing I never managed to repair. And now, it looks like I broke some other stuff that I hadn’t intended to, and I’m sorry.”

“I’m glad to see you’re still alive, at least,” Adam said. “Next time, when you plan something this crazy, could you maybe ask me for help or something? If I had been in the loop on this, I could have maybe made it work for you.”

“I couldn’t tell you, Adam. You’re a reasonable guy. This was not a reasonable thing to do. You would have talked me out of trying the grand romantic gesture.”

“But that’s not what you were doing,” I said. “You were trying to trick my mother into spending time with you. If you cared anything at all about her, you wouldn’t have tried to win her over by deceit. And if you knew her at all, you should have known that she wouldn’t sit still for you to try to manipulate her. If it had worked out like you wanted, she would have squished you like a bug. She’s probably going to do that anyway.”

“Maybe she will,” Sheldon said. “But we loved each other, once. She might have been mad at first. But we always cared about each other, even when we were fighting, and I thought if I could just get her to fight with me, one more time, I might have a chance to win her over. I know how stupid it sounds now, but when I was planning it, it seemed like a real possibility. And even if it failed, at least I would have seen her again, even if it was just long enough for her to try and tear my head off. That would have been something.”

I got up off my loveseat and went over to Sheldon, who was hunched over, with his chin in his hands. I sat down next to him and patted his shoulder, largely because I didn’t know what else to do. He took a couple of deep, sighing breaths and then stood up.

“I’m going to go outside for a minute,” he said. “Adam, you don’t happen to have anything that needs doing out back, do you? I need to get some fresh air and clear my head.”

“I was just fixing a leak in the cistern,” Adam said. “I need to put the lid back on and clean up. You’re welcome to take a look at it.”

“I told you not to go with the plastic on that thing. Concrete wouldn’t have leaked on you like that.”

“Should have listened,” Adam said. “Live and learn.”

“It’s good to see you, Adam. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you what I was doing.”

“It’s all right, Uncle Sheldon. See you in a few.”

“And don’t wander off,” I said.

Chapter 29

“In case you were wondering,” I said, “now would be an excellent time for that abject apology. The sooner you grovel at my feet, the happier you will be in the long run.”

“I am not about to apologize to you,” he said. “You can’t come to my house and spout nonsense to me about my uncle being alive and think that I am just going to accept whatever you say unreservedly.”

“But it wasn’t nonsense. You see that now. I was
right.
”

“How was I supposed to know that? If anything, you owe
me
an apology for sandbagging me like that.”

“You cannot be serious,” I said.

“You could have just called and put Sheldon on the phone. That way, you wouldn’t have come across as a crazy person.”

“It doesn’t matter what I did or didn’t do,” I said. “You were
rude
. You were
dismissive.
You
hurt my feelings.
Maybe I should have called or done something else different, I don’t know. But the whole way up here, I was thinking about you and how much I wanted to be wrong about whether you knew he was alive or not. I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. And you weren’t willing to show me the same courtesy, even though
I was right
. And now
you
want to break up with
me
because you were
wrong
? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?”

“We are not breaking up,” he said. “We were never together. We are not in a relationship. We barely know each other. We’ve had two dates. We don’t live anywhere near each other. We don’t have much of anything in common. If you look at it analytically, dispassionately, we should both be able to walk away and still be happy about it.”

“Is that how you look at relationships?” I asked. “Analytically? Dispassionately?”

“It’s the sensible approach. We had what we had that night in Point Pleasant and it was nice. It was wonderful. But everything else has been frustrating and stressful. At a certain point with any investment, you have to think about cutting your losses.”

I looked at him just then, sitting on that battered old loveseat in that ridiculous dinosaur T-shirt, and it occurred to me that he didn’t look stressed. He didn’t look frustrated. He looked anxious and pale, and I could see the muscles in his jaw twitch.

“You don’t believe that,” I said.

“I don’t believe what?”

“You don’t believe everything is all about facts and analysis and looking at things dispassionately. You don’t believe in the sensible approach. Deep down, you’re a romantic.”

“You can’t just ignore facts,” he said, and there was a ghost of that infuriating, maddening grin on his face. “Facts are important. The sensible approach has a lot going for it.”

“But that’s not the most important thing, is it?”

“It can be. It depends. I’m not saying that romance isn’t important, but practical considerations have to be taken into account, too.”

“Here’s a practical consideration for you,” I said. “You sent me a giant stuffed giraffe.”