Winter Street (8 page)

H
e’s not entirely sober, and the room still reeks of smoke when George knocks, but this does not derail Kelley from his mission. As soon as the door opens, Kelley punches George in the mouth as hard as he can. The punch lands squarely, with the solid, satisfying noise of flesh on flesh.

When was the last time Kelley
hit
someone? He comes up with a party at the Alpha Chi Rho house at Gettysburg his junior year; a brawl broke out over the honor of someone’s date, who, it was later disclosed, wasn’t very honorable at all. Punching another man in the face, especially sucker punching someone who isn’t expecting it, isn’t exactly honorable either, but to Kelley it feels good, just, and right.

George’s head snaps back, and blood gushes everywhere. George moans and spits out a tooth. Kelley feels delighted, as if a stream of quarters were flying from his slot machine.

George makes no move to retaliate. “I guess I deserved that.”

“Oh God, yes,” Kelley says. “At least that.”

George pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket and wipes up the spittle and blood. His eyes are out of focus, which pleases Kelley further; he really walloped the guy.

Twelve years!
Kelley thinks.

“Can I come in and talk to you, please?” George asks.

Kelley steps out of the way, ushering George in and closing the door behind him.

If it’s awkward to have this conversation in the bedroom that Kelley and Mitzi shared for so many years, neither man acknowledges it. Kelley sits on the edge of the bed while George stands before him. Kelley is dizzy and has the beginnings of a hangover; all he wants is a drink to take the edge off his drinking binge.

“Do you have a flask?” Kelley asks George.

“Actually,” George says, “I do.” He pulls a leather flask—monogrammed, no less—out of the pocket of his parka and hands it to Kelley.

Kelley accepts it with glee and something that feels like love. For a fleeting instant, he understands what Mitzi sees in George. He takes a swig—Johnnie Walker Black. Brilliant! Kelley hands the flask to George, who takes a slug, and then George hands it back to Kelley. George is a good and generous man.

“I came to say I’m sorry,” George says.

“Sorry doesn’t begin to address it,” Kelley says. He takes another drink, savoring the burn down his throat. “You’ve been sleeping with my wife for twelve years. Is that true? Is that
true,
George?”

“Saying ‘twelve years’ makes it sound worse than it is,” George says. He dabs his handkerchief at his swollen lip. “It was a few times every year at Christmas. It was a holiday thing.”

“It was a
holiday thing?
” Kelley says. Did George really
just say that sleeping with Kelley’s wife was a
holiday thing
—like caroling or baking gingerbread?

“It just happened,” George says. “Do you remember twelve years ago, when the snowstorm hit and Bart was at a friend’s house, and you and the olders and your ex-wife got stranded at the Bar all night? That was the year my marriage had started falling apart. Mitzi and I were here at the inn, alone, and it was late, and we started talking…” George trails off and gestures for the flask, and Kelley hands it to him. “You know how things like that sometimes happen, Kelley. Come on. That was the year you turned fifty. You were miserable, and so was Mitzi. You were at the Bar all night with your ex-wife, for God’s sake.”

“Wait,” Kelley says. “Wait a minute.” He vaguely remembers the year George is talking about, but it’s like an episode of a sitcom that has gone off the air.

The year he turned fifty… it was a bad year; he remembers that much. Bart would have been seven, in second grade, Mrs. Usbiff—the year Bart nearly got held back; she put his desk out in the hallway. Ava was seventeen, a senior in high school; she didn’t get in to Juilliard or Curtis. That had been a disaster, and Margaret blamed Kelley because he was the one who had taken Ava out of New York City and away from her piano teacher, Mr. Masahiro. Ava could have stayed in the city with Margaret, but she would have been dropped off and picked up from piano lessons by Raoul and fed her meals by Lotus. Kelley hadn’t thought that was any way to raise a child.

Kevin had dropped out of the Culinary Institute that year as well, thanks to the nefarious Norah Vale. And the inn had a bad leak that precipitated the replacement of the entire roof, to the tune of forty-five grand.

It had not been a good year. Kelley and Mitzi engaged in low-level ground fire, a baseline of incessant bickering and sarcasm. He remembers a string of three nights when Mitzi had stayed with her friend Kai the Massage Therapist out in Pocomo. Mitzi had been angry that Margaret was coming to visit for the holidays, but Margaret had insisted because it was Ava’s last year of high school and she wanted to be with her kids—and because of the traditions Kelley and Mitzi had started, the kids wanted to be at the inn.

The three older kids had been excited to see Margaret. All of the Quinns, including Mitzi, had gone for dinner at the Brotherhood, where it had started really snowing, which everyone loved because it was two days before Christmas. Kevin had encouraged them all to go to the Bar for a nightcap, and everyone was game except for Mitzi. Mitzi had dropped Bart off at his friend Michael’s house, and then she went home. George had probably been sitting by the fire, drinking a tumbler of Johnnie Walker Black, and Mitzi—feeling left out, abandoned, and angry—would naturally have joined him.

“Are you suggesting that if I hadn’t gone to the Bar that night…?” Kelley says.

“With Margaret and your older kids,” George says. He
shifts his weight, and Kelley realizes it’s rude to continue to make the man stand, so he scoots over and pats the edge of the bed, indicating that George should sit. George looks relieved to take a load off. “Well, you know, Mitzi has always been threatened by Margaret.”

“Who hasn’t?” Kelley says. “She’s Margaret Quinn.”

“I mean, by your relationship with Margaret,” George says. “And, to some extent, by your relationship with the olders. I think she felt they were your ‘real’ family, and she and Bart were… latecomers to the party.”

“Oh,” Kelley says. He has heard Mitzi articulate a version of this argument in the past, but he always dismissed her words as insecure and ridiculous. He had been married to Mitzi for twenty-one years, and he was married to Margaret for only nineteen. Still, Margaret came first. She is, by Kelley’s own nomenclature, the original Margaret, and they had three kids and a really cool brownstone and an enviable life in Manhattan before they self-destructed. Kelley and Margaret grew into adults and then professionals and then parents together. There was a way in which Margaret wasn’t replaceable, although Kelley had never expressed this sentiment, even to himself, and certainly never to Mitzi.

“I gave Mitzi everything she wanted,” Kelley says. “I quit my job for her, I left New York for her, I moved to Nantucket for her. I bought this inn—this inn specifically, because she had stayed here—and I restored it to her exact specifications, George, which, by the way, nearly bankrupted me.”

George nods sympathetically, as if he is well acquainted with seeing his personal fortune slowly go down the drain. Kelley realizes he doesn’t know what George does for a living. Is that
possible
after so many years? But the only occupation Kelley can come up with for George is professional Santa Claus. Surely that’s not all he does?

“What’s your line of work, George?” Kelley asks. “If you’ve told me before, I’ve forgotten.”

“I’m a milliner,” George says. “I make hats. Fine hats, for women. I have a shop in Lenox, and a website, which has tripled my business. Two years ago, Oprah picked my straw boater as one of her Favorite Things, and even now, demand far exceeds supply. My problem, quite honestly, is that I’d like to work less rather than more, but I don’t see that happening for quite a while.”

“You’re a
milliner,
” Kelley says. He finds this funny and quaint. He would have predicted that George was a salesman for a drug company or a liquor distributor.

“I learned from my father, who learned from his father,” George says. “But the skill set dies with me, since I never had children.”

Now that George is with Mitzi, he will have some kind of relationship with Bart as well. Kelley tries to imagine Bart learning the skill set of a milliner, and the mere thought puts a smile on Kelley’s face for the first time since he opened the door to room 10 the day before.

“I’ve never known Mitzi to wear hats,” Kelley says.

“She hates hats,” George says.

They sit with that statement in silence. Kelley takes a drink from the flask. George dabs his bloodied handkerchief at his swollen lip. Just outside the door, Kelley can hear the strains of “Angels We Have Heard on High.” Ava must have altered the inn’s playlist since Mitzi’s departure. Mitzi prefers nonreligious carols; she is a big fan of “Silver Bells” and Andy Williams singing “Sleigh Ride.” But Ava thinks religious carols have more musical integrity. Now that Mitzi is gone, she can have her way.

Gloooooooooooooria!

“Thank you for seeing me,” George says. “I feel better.”

“I don’t,” Kelley says. This is a lie. He does feel better, but he isn’t quite ready for the conversation to be over. “Do you think Mitzi leaving me has anything to do with Bart?”

“Of course,” George says. “Her son has flown from the nest. It calls all kinds of other things into question, such as, how much does she like the nest? And, what is she doing in the nest? And, you know, she didn’t want him to go. She saw in her crystals that harm would come to him. Surely she told you that?”

“She told me that,” Kelley says. “Surely
you
don’t believe in…
crystals?
”

“No,” George says. “Not really.”

Kelley takes “not really” to mean “not at all.” He says, “You weren’t born on February twenty-ninth, too, were you?”

“June first,” George says. He clears his throat. “The point
is, Kelley, that
Mitzi
believes in the crystals. She felt like you made Bart go to war anyway.”

“Bart wanted to go,” Kelley says.

“Mitzi feels like you forced the issue.”

“Untrue,” Kelley says. On this, he will stand firm. He did have a come-to-Jesus with Bart after his last run-in with the Nantucket Police. Kelley told his son that he had to do something, go somewhere, try to make something of his life. He could go to Colorado and ski, he could work his way through Europe bartending, he could go to Cape Cod Community College. But he could not stay on Nantucket and sponge off Kelley and Mitzi and continue to get in trouble with the law and desecrate the family name. Bart came up with the Marines himself.

George shrugs like it’s not his place to get involved, and he’s right about that.

“What are you and Mitzi going to
do?
” Kelley asks. “Are you going to open an inn in Lenox?”

George laughs, then winces in pain. “No way. I’d rather eat glass. And Mitzi is all done with innkeeping. She’s been sick of it for a while.”

“She
has?
” Kelley says. This is news to him. Mitzi has been as gung ho about the inn this year as ever, and as disconsolate about the steady decline in guests. Because Kelley and Mitzi became so involved in their guests’ lives—they once visited the Pipers at their home in Long Beach, California, and they’ve been invited to countless weddings
of the guests that became engaged at the inn—it’s hard not to take the vacancies as a personal affront.

“She wants to get trained and certified as a life coach,” George says.

Kelley barks out laughter. A
life coach?
That’s even funnier than picturing Bart as a milliner! Mitzi
needs
a life coach! She needs someone to set her straight: running off with George the Santa Claus is a terrible mistake. She should sit tight and stay with Kelley. They can sell the inn; they are going to
have
to sell the inn if they want to survive financially, and then they can figure out a next step.

The thought of Mitzi becoming trained and certified as a life coach is absurd. She might say that Kelley is belittling her hopes and dreams; she might say he doesn’t believe in her now and, furthermore, never has. Kelley would point to the four-thousand-dollar claw-foot bathtub as antique-porcelain proof that he has believed in her and pursued her every desire all these years.

But,
Kelley thinks.

But wouldn’t Mitzi be right, in a way?

Isn’t it true that he never took Mitzi’s career aspirations, her intellect, her
personhood,
as seriously as he took Margaret’s?

Admit it.
Yes.

It’s true. A part of him always thought Mitzi lacked gravitas.
Mitzi is ditzy.
In the most private, hidden corridors of his mind, Kelley might have thought Mitzi a bit silly. It’s the
gold-lamé-jumpsuit-and-disco-ball persona that transmogrified into her crystal-reading-and-herbal-tea-blends-innkeeper persona that he indulges rather than reveres. He indulges her because, decades earlier, when he started dating Mitzi, his primary emotion was gratitude that Mitzi wanted him, Kelley Quinn, and not an exclusive interview with Yasser Arafat.

“Did Mitzi ever tell you how she and I met?” Kelley asks George. “It’s an interesting story.”

“I’d like to hear it,” George says, and Kelley thinks,
Wow, George is a pretty evolved man if he doesn’t mind listening to this.

“Are you sure you have time?” Kelley says. “I’m not keeping you from anything?” He wants to ask George where Mitzi is… but he figures that will kill his mood and the conversation, regardless of the answer.

“Not at all,” George says. “Fire away.”

And so, Kelley tells the story of how he first saw Mitzi in Greenwich Village, standing outside the brownstone of Kelley’s brother, Avery, who was dying of AIDS.

“I noticed Mitzi because she was beautiful,” Kelley says.

“Stunning, I’m sure,” George says.

“But I talked to her because she was wearing a T-shirt from the Straight Wharf on Nantucket. You know the Straight Wharf logo, the bluefish?”