Twelve Rooms with a View by Theresa Rebeck Page B

she would pat it, like she was comforting him, and he would nod and look at the floor. He had a bottle of beer in his left hand and was holding it behind him, like a teenager who doesn’t want his mom’s friend to know he’s got a beer. His thumb was hooked into the top to make sure the fizz didn’t go.
    They didn’t know I was listening, so they just kept talking. “Godrest her soul I miss her every day,” said the lady. Her voice was sort of odd and low, which was why if you couldn’t see her, she sounded like a man.
    “I miss her too,” he told her, quiet.
    “It would have killed her to see this, just killed her! Oh my god, when they were selling the furniture, all I could think was this would have just killed Sophie, the way Bill is letting everything go.”
    “Actually she hated most of that stuff,” Drinan noted.
    “So many beautiful pieces. Worth a fortune! And then the paintings, I thought I would just cry, when the paintings—”
    “She didn’t like them either.” With every answer, he sounded like he wanted to take a hit off that beer bottle, but she wasn’t giving him an opening.
    “Your inheritance, it was all your inheritance, gone—that’s what she wouldn’t have liked. Your father should be ashamed of himself.”
    “Yeah, well, he never was.”
    “God rest his soul, you got that right. And he never asked me if I wanted them. I thought, at least ask, I would have been happy to step in and keep them in the building. I would have done that for your mother, god rest her soul. I told him! But you couldn’t talk to him. Well, you know that.”
    “Yes.” He shifted on his feet, and for about fifteen seconds I got a better look at the woman, who had an intelligent face underneath that big messy head of hair. I wasn’t liking her much until I saw her face, then I wasn’t so sure, because she seemed sort of sensible, even though she was saying slightly dotty things and clearly was cranky that she didn’t get her hands on those paintings and all that furniture. She had on some kind of silk robe, sage green with a burnt-orange stripe, and the bit I could see hanging off her shoulder suggested it might be spectacularly beautiful if I could get a better look at it. Drinan shifted again, and I lost the sight line.
    “Well, thank you for your thoughts, Mrs. Westmoreland,” he started. The hand holding the beer was getting a little slippery, plus I could see from the way his shoulders were scrunching together that he was getting pretty desperate for that drink. Before he could take a stepbackward and turn to take a fast hit, she touched him on the sleeve and held him there. Ai yi yi, I thought, this is getting interesting.
    “But these people—who are these people?” she asked, all concerned. “Coming and going, acting like they own the place, Frank says one of them has moved in. I’m
horrified.”
I went back to not liking her. What on earth was she complaining about, she was “horrified” about me living in an apartment I had every legal right to live in? She was just an Upper West Side snob who had the hots for a dude half her age, I decided, on the basis of hardly any information at all.
    “It’s something to do with Dad’s will,” he told her. “He left everything to Olivia.”
    “You’re kidding!”
    “Look, it’s fine, it’s going to be fine.” You could hear that he was already kicking himself for telling her that much. And it did seem to be a terrific mistake.
    “He left everything to
Olivia
? He barely knew her!”
    “They were married two years,” he corrected her.
    “Did you know he was doing that? Did you agree to it?”
    “He didn’t actually ask us to agree,” Pete said. His voice sounded really uptight. “He told us. Doug tried to talk him out of it. He wanted to do something for her.”
    “But why?”
    “He was worried that she wouldn’t have anything if he died. That’s what he said.”
    “She didn’t deserve anything!”
    “Well, that’s what